I think Muslims should make much more of an effort to obey local laws

And what if they don't? I think you're kidding yourself. The ony viable solution is to stop the immigration. You can't force anyone to do anything. Europe and the US needs to protect its culture and stop these migrations.

Sorry

Ace - Try to stop thinking of Islamism as a religion. It is like a cancer. The main body of moderate Islam allows this cancer to run wild, does nothing to fight it and brings the terrorists with it when the "moderate" Islamic peoples invade the host nation.

It is like getting an organ transplant but the transplanted organ has a cancerous area in it.

Your blog is excellent, keep up the good work!!!

The rise of the undemocratic (and often antidemocratic) NGOs in Europe is the biggest untold story of the last 20 years.

Democracy with separated powers works better than even the most enlightened autocracy for a reason: human nature. Europe's fate is increasingly controlled by socialist bureaucrats.

I wish the French Muslims would at least consistantly follow Sharia, so us outsiders could guess their actions. This bride seems to have been stoned to death for NOT commiting adultery. This - and the reports of random gang "molestations" - shows that these neighborhoods have slipped into an anarchic violence culture loosely based on Islamic law, but mostly based on whatever Muslim teenagers feel like doing that day.

Why wont the filter let me use the word
r a p e?

Ace, love your blog but this is one time I really disagree with the queasiness in your tummy. With Islam you cannot have it both ways. You may be tolerant enough to let them practice their religion and culture but they certainly will not reciprocate. I, too, fear the spread of radical Islam, and just not the radical kind. The religion of Islam and the culture of it will never truly blend with the religions and cultures of the west. And, not sorry to say, I wouldn't mind sricter immagration laws and a more forceful assimilation policy.
Thx for listening aand keep up the great blog.
dnf

Islam is as anti democracy and pluralism as was prereformation Christianity, probably more so as prereformation Christianity valued the individual.
What most fail to understand about the Iraq war is that it's a long-shot gamble attempt to jump start the Islamic Reformation at bayonet point.
I believe the odds of complete success range somewhere between fat chance and slim chance, yet I believe that small chance is worth the lives and treasure spent in the attempt, given the alternative, an eventual total and genocidal clash of civilisations.
It's a grim prospect. One of two things will happen in this century, we either change the dynamics of Islam or they kill millions of us and we kill tens or even hundreds of millions of them.
I would love to say that I'm sanguine about the chances of this forced Islamic Reformation succeeding, I am not. Still, given the alternative, we've got to try, if only so that, after the bloodbath, we can meet our Maker and say we tried.

I think it is going pretty well. Muslims are doing wonderful work correcting Euroweenies of the follies of post-modernism, multi-culturalism, toleration of evil as a virtue simply because toleration itself is what is important, deconstructionism, and moral equivalence.

It's even going nicely in America, where despite ACE's hopes, we don't care to wait around for a mass murder to be committed by Islamists. We tried the law enforcement approach before, and it didn't work. It hurts the far Democratic Left, the ACLU, and various libertarian whackos the most - as most Americans don't believe Muslim unlawful enemy combatants and their 5th Column here are entitled to a range of precious civil liberties as they plot to kill us.

In the past, when forces of civilization confronted murderous death cult religions - we didn't seek to understand them. We laid down the law and killed the most dangerous. The Assassins, the Thugees, the Aztecs. We knew coexistence with such religions was intolerable.

It will only take a few more years of Muslims spilling infidel blood to complete the rout of the Left.

"Frankly, there's some of this sort of talk in America, too. Secularists and leftists openly wonder how they can get religious Americans to give up their troublesome and regressive beliefs, and are always looking for new ways to use our institutions to compel just that."

This porition of the post is totally factually unsupported. It is typical of the knee-jerk propaganda from the right today. More to the poiint it is nonsense. Simply nonsense. The right-wing has always been - and continues to be - anti-religious, and much more willing to use the machinery of government to enforce their position.

Of course there are anecdotes. But there simply has never been a truly secularist force in this country with any realy power. For instance, although the Bush campaign and the GOP more generally were very open about the fact that churches were used to mobilize voters to go to the polls for Bush, I did not and do not see any move on the left to eliminate the tax breaks churches enjoy for supposedly being non-political.

No leftist is asking that the Pledge of Allegiance say that we are specifically not a nation under god, only that school children should not be coerced into saying that we are a nation under god when the child in question believes otherwise. In other words, don't coerce any child into saying we are not a nation under god, and do not coerce any child into saying we are.

It is the neutrality of the foregoing position that most troubles right-wingers. Whereas a rational person would see the omission of any mention of god in a public school as a sign of respect for all faiths and beliefs, the right-winger believes that such silence is code for disrespect. It is an irrational, paranoid position, but one often associated with religious zealotry. Heck, just look at the Middle East.

Over the last 25 years, and maybe more, the most important United States Supreme Court case that restricted the free exercise of religion was Employment Division v. Smith, a case from 1990. It was authored by Scalia - that darling of the right.

Name one case, just one, in which a purportedly liberal Sumpreme Court justice voted for the side that was attempting to restrict the free exercise of religion. Just one. (A hint before you look: there ain't one.)

And if you want to begin to talk about using the institutions of government to compel belief, perhaps the best example today is the Bush administration's attempt to effectively invalidate Oregon's assisted suicide law. A law that empowers terminally ill individuals to make end of life decisions according to their own beliefs, not the government's, should be a cause that true conservatives champion. Instead, they seek to destroy it.

mkultra -

Disingenuous.

Religion is under attack by the ACLU, which is mostly red diaper Jews, with a healthy smattering of tweedy liberal academics, and old money Democrat establishment secular humanists in membership. "People United for the Separation of Church and State"? - bedwetting liberal Democrats. "People for the American Way"? - mostly quasi-traitor hate-America sorts.

The omission of any expression of religion in the schools is a "sign of respect" for all faiths? LOL! So lets eliminate MLK Day as a sign of respect for blacks!

Your image remake of liberal Democrats is going to be tough. You're the ones attacking the troops over the gay agenda being frustrated, you're the ones using the courts to subvert popular will, you're the ones going after the Boy Scouts while defending the pedophiles. You're the ones trying to tear down every manifestation of mainstream culture. Pretending otherwise now, claiming that Democrats and especially liberals are the "preserving family values and support of religion" folks is comical.

The average American knows who is on their side, and not going after their values and beliefs. It isn't your kind.

Well, Mkurta, I suppose all the times I thought I saw Kerry giving speeches from a church pulpit was light reflecting off swamp gas or something? Both sides try to mobilize the churchgoers, the same as they go to other venues to speak to other demographics. Nothing more or less than that.

Maybe the reason "right wingers" think leftists are hostile to religion is because so often they insult and demonize religious, peaceful people. If I recall correctly, it wasn't that long ago that I was hearing that certain unkind things about people voting their consciences and values rather than their pocketbooks (incidentally, whenever I hear whining about people voting against their wallet I wonder why the left wants the population to sell out)

But to get back to the point, The Reformation isn't what made Christianity more tolerant. The Calvinists were the first ones to execute Anabaptists on charges of heresy/blasphemy, after all and everyone else followed suit. What made Christianity tolerant was the decades of horrific religious warfare until the continent was too exhausted to continue. Personally, I don't think jihad will become a dead issue until the United States proves unequivocably that it is a dead issue. The fact is that with any war, even a religious one, if you kill enough people, the enemy will stop fighting. Frankly, as far as fanatical devotion goes these guys are pikers compared to the Japanese. Remember at Guadalcanal there were 26,000 Japanese casualities and only 3 were captured. At the end of that war the Japanese knew beyond a doubt the old way was dead and they had to get with the new program.

The problem with modern Islam, as opposed to Western Religions, is that it is not only a faith, but a also a form of government and on top of that an ideology.
In the Christian tradition there is the seperation of faith and state "Give Ceaser what is Ceasar's" in Islam from its inception all aspects of life are to be controlled by faith, the whole world is to submit to Allah.
The best model for understanding Islam is not a religion like Christianity (which for periods of time did exercise temporal power), but a political movement like Communism or Nazism, where the state is viewed to be the totality.
This presents a problem for Americans who believe in the freedom of religion. Because up until now no religion (in the American experience)had a political component diametrically opposed to the American system. How can Americans rectify the freedom to worship as one sees fit with the political threat posed by Islam? If you ban Islam (which would be the logical response), ACLU types will use that as the wedge to ban all religions. Yet if you allow it to continue it will eventually come into open conflict with American values, as the freedoms America embodies are in conflict with the submission required by Islam.

Iblis - The Reconquista against the Islamoids, then conquistadors wiping out the Aztec death cult did not result in the Spanish Crown going after Catholicism next.

IN America, we told the Mormons that we would not accept them as State-worthy until they changed their religion and banned polygamy and religion-sanctioned discrimination against non-Mormons. That went pretty well. Same with us locking up pot-dealing Rastafarians for pot dealing despite ACLU pleas that that would cause a wave of spreading religious discrimination.

THe ACLU could argue slippery slope if we forced Muslims here to foreswear certain aspects of Islam or leave our country - but history doesn't show such actions ever result in a slippery slope anymore than ACLU protests that executing Nazi saboteurs or relocating enemy Jap nationals here set America's civil liberties on a path to destruction.

In fact, since much of the ACLU is the red diaper baby spawn of Jewish radical/communists, tweedy hate-America academics, and old money liberal gentiles at war with most traditional American values and culture, I personally wouldn't mind if we told the ACLU to shape up or ship out with the unreformable Jihadis we send on a slow boat back to the 3rd World.

Cedaford, the Spanish didn't go after Catholicism because they were Catholic. For the Spanish, religion was used to buttress the strength of the state. Recall that the inquistion was started by secular authorities, not the church.
So it is not an apt comparison with the US, whose governement seeks to be religously neutral and on paper is supposed to treat all equally. Unlike Spain which had an official religion.

I too wouldn't mind shipping the ACLU and fundamentalist Muslims on the slow boat back to jihadland my question was how can you do it, while protecting innocent religions?

I would say Iblis, that a religion that threatens your ways, your people - and flouts laws and constitution your culture is based on should be not tolerated. Besides the Spaniards, the British were none too reticent in cleaning house. Besides wiping out the religious cult of the Thugees, they also eliminated suttee - Hindi wife-burning at funerals. When early British officials were told it was a Hindi ancient religious custom that should be tolerated, the Brits said sorry, they could respect that, but for the fact it was their traditional custom to hang those who threw women on funeral pyres.

America doesn't really have a problem with other religious groups besides Muslims - they respect our laws, blend into common society more and more - even the Mormons - and don't seek to kill other Americans or view our Constitution as a document that must eventually be destroyed in favor of religious Sharia. While you get the few oddball cults, like the Rastafarians or Jim Jones Temple, we jail those making claims of religious freedom to sell drugs - or hope & wait for them to drink the Kool-Aid.

Yeah, but the damn bleeding hearts will never let us hang anybody. Let alone put their heads on pikes. Nobody understands the value of sending a message anymore.

You are on to something. Free speech and expression is the safety valve of a diverse nation. Political correctness, no matter who it targets, only shuts off the safety valve.

I think you meant "hijab." Habib is a term of affection, meaning basically "beloved."

poker me up