http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/06/new_study_political_islam_corr.html

I was incorrect in my assertion that about 64% (2/3rds) of Muslims in America concurred with the use of force and jihadi tactics to advance the cause of Islam.

The article talks about the views of Muslims in 14 major Muslim countries.

I apologize for the error.

Your reaction is understandable. The idea of “destroying Islam as a system” is shocking to our Western sensibilities. However, what do you do when you are attacked? How far do you go?

There are about 8 million Muslims in the US today. Can you imagine what could happen if they all got the jihadi syndrome? The blood on the streets would be almost unimaginable.

There was an article on American Thinker about a study done on the perceptions of Muslims in America. If I recall correctly, about 64% (2/3rds) of Muslims concurred with the use of force and jihadi tactics to advance the cause of Islam.

Islam is showing itself to be a depraved “religion” – an evil cult. It is a death cult. These people kill the unarmed, women, children, animals…. They even use children as decoys in trucks to avoid detection and then blow the kids up with the trucks.

My fear is all of this is closer than you think.

There will be many hard choices to be made in the future. Some will challenge our core beliefs – including freedom of religion and democracy.

As dclydew asks, “Where do we draw the line, security at any cost, or security as far as our basic principles will allow?”

I would what is the cost of each alternative.

I always think of what Israel is going through when these discussions arise.

Meanwhile, I wish you all a safe July 4 and I pray that America will continue to be the beacon of light in dark world as it has so often in it’s short history.

Our way of life, here in the States, has been defined through our behavior as a nation of people. Even while the CIA may have been plotting who knows what in our name, the People had a level of faith in ‘the way of life’, the concepts of freedom, tolerance, etc.

Perhaps a war in Iraq, if it works, isn’t bad. Some compromise of our values, some problems with ethics… but overall it’s not an extensive change to who we as a nation are (even if we include things like GitMo which does, at least, tiptoe around the edges of what Americans believe in). However, if this continues… if more attacks happen and these attacks are carried out by individuals that appear to be normal, sane, productive members of society… how far can we stretch our values before we fundamentally break who we are as a nation?

Obviously, interment camps could return, but are we ready to put people into camps based solely on their religion? The Supreme Court and Justices on the Court have weighed in on Lincoln’s suspension of HC and on the WWII Japanese American camps. In both cases, they determined that these actions were unconstitutional. Yet, if a subset of a subculture within our society continues to attack us, how far do we go?

If attacks continue, could we end up at war with an entire subculture? If so, will it fundamentally change who we as Americans are? Rome went through something similar, but in the end, it seems to have destroyed their democracy as much as protected their citizens. Where do we draw the line, security at any cost, or security as far as our basic principles will allow?

Right now, we debate GitMo and ‘torture’ but these are dealing with specific individuals who appear likely to be involved. If we must face off against millions of Muslims, can we retain our identity while shoveling women and children into a work camp?

I don’t know the answers, but I do think that we have to repair our internal ruptures before we could hope to face such a challenge.

Hold it!

Please, lets not get carried away!

Ann Coulter got canned from the National Review for less stark but similar comments following 9/11.

The people who have caught this virus are so sick that I don’t think they even care whether their victims are Islamic or not. The sickness is the thing, as in this report of an al Qaeda massacre in an Iraqi village – They shoot donkeys, don’t they?

Also, the Bush/USA strategy is to do something never done before, something completely magnificent: bring the Middle East into the modern world. The tactics have had to change, and now (according to Yon, etc) are coming to fruition… and we have been in Iraq for FIVE years! A blink of an eye in human history.

You see, we are not worried about Zimbabwe, are we? And Darfur makes a nice little harmless hobby for such as George Clooney. And we have never had much to say about France and the Rwandan Genocide..

Why? Think about that question, as you put gas in your car.

The smart people (who mostly are in the Armed Forces, not a good harbinger for American long term) think this “war” will last for at least a generation. So, I guess we just can’t get bored and take up some other hobby, and ‘get out of Iraq’, and thus bring peace and love to our world, can we???

A big part of the problem is the U.K. letting these folks in to work for the NHS. A 25 yr-old graduate of the medschool in Baghdad?? A 26 yr-old MidEasterner described by the Independent(U.K.) as “a brilliant neurologist”?? Here, there are no 26 year-old neurologists, because they are all still in training at that age.

We in the US are doing the same thing, importing docs, because we aren’t producing enough ourselves, and many of the now >50% of domestic med students are women, a large fraction of whom will practice part-time for mothering reasons.

There is no reason to think, Roger, that Iraqi and other non-Western medical establishments recognize Hippocrates and the moral guides that compose the Oath, as in “First, do no harm”. Projecting our cultural and moral values onto them is simply delusional in the extreme, but that’s the good old Multicultural for you–purely delusional.

First, I have to agree with Roger that Islam is a mental illness and not a religion. The more I learn about Islam and Mohammed, the more I find Islam to be a questioned. It seems to me that Mohammed borrowed freely from other religions – namely Judaism and Christianity. My sense is that he was really interested in establishing himself politically and used Islam and his role as the prophet to accomplish it. Much of Islam is about this world and dominating it. Google Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Har to start. “Virtues” like lying are okay to advance Islam (http://www.answering-islam.de/Main/Index/L/lying.html). The subjugation of others by force is very political and of this world and unlike the other major world religions. Unlike other historic “holy” men, Mohammed was very interested in sex, lots of wives and in particular young wives – some that can only be described as girls (~9 to 13). He was a pedophile with outsized political ambitions who used religion as an elixer on followers. Note that the fear of death is used to keep “believers” from leaving the faith (and even today, most Islamic countries have laws where conversion away from Islam is punishable by death – once again, Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Har). Islam celebrates death. Now that is disease. Of course, I have more to learn.

The second part of the thread appears to be along the lines of are we more or less safe by going into Iraq. This is a historical “if” and therefore a moot question. I believe that we (i.e. Western Civilization) will be under attack for a long time. Iraq is the primary front against the infidels according to Osama. The fight is strategic because a loss sows the seed of the Caliphate the Islamists crave. It is also strategic from an economic perspective – oil. This is not something that will pass soon. Islamic violence is coming of age because they have the means to attack the infidel West, which is something that Islam has historically lacked except for during the Ottoman Empire.

As Anthony LA points out, a little more clear talk from our leaders would go a long way to getting the general public to understand the nature of the enemy and what they would do to us. Clearly, many do not understand it or don’t want to understand it.

I don’t think any amount of evidence would lead you to believe otherwise.