The fact that all terrorists are Muslims doesn't really say anything about Muslims as a whole. I agree that there are issues in the Islamic world, to put it as nicely as I can, but I don't see how they're different from what we saw in the Christian world 400 years ago. As I've said repeatedly, Islam is 400 years younger than Christianity.
I've made that same point about the age of islam versus Christianity. The only problem is that nuclear weapons didn't exist 400 yeas ago, and neither did advanced explosives. It is exceedingly dangerous to the world to have people like this among us because a relative few can do tremendous damage. I also respectfully disagree with you that the fact that virtually all terrorists are muslims says nothing about muslims as a whole. I think it says a lot about muslims.
But they don't hate you no matter how you treat them. That's the thing. Of course some will, but do you deny that treating peaceful Muslims badly will make them more likely to hate you?
Gabu, I have to partially disagree with you here. I think a good number of muslims do hate us regardless of what we have or haven't done to them. One thing that helps terrorism flourish in muslim communities, whether they are located in Riyadh, Jakarta, or London, is the broad undercurrent of hatefulness that exists generally in muslim communities. In Pakistan, 51% of the people approve of the Sept. 11th attacks, as an example. In this type of environment, irrational hatred is normal and accepted. If muslims keep this up, that hatred will eventually be returned, in spades.
There's an old saying, "never make a nice guy mad." When a nice guy gets mad, he can be more vicious and ferocious than anyone imagined. The Japanese found this out, and the Germans found this out. In addition to all our regular strategic bombing in World War II that targeted civilians with the goal of killing as many as possible and dehousing them in order to break morale, we happily incinerated 350,000 people with incendiary bombs in 3 days in Dresden, and another 200,000 or so in two atomic bomb droppings in Japan. Whether they realize it or not, these people are playing with fire by supporting such irrational hatred, and if they push us far enough, they will find out that we have far more effective means of killing than they do.
This talk about the Muslim world reminds me of what many said about Germany during the Hitler era. How many Germans then were actually Nazis? Probably not that many. Yet German opinion created an atmosphere where Nazism was allowed to flourish. Germans didn't really want World War II, but they want along with Hitler, and were tremendously effective militarily in decimating the populations and bringing untold misery to so many countries around them. How many would actually have worked in a death camp? Probably not many.
But the point is that the vast silent majority created an atmosphere that was complicit and, at least, tacitly approving of the holding of highly irrational hatred and the commission of vile atrocities. When I look at the muslim world today, I feel I am looking at Germany in 1939. There are so many eerie similarities.
Many people don't remember this, but Hitler also played the victim, as many muslims do today. They demand that people ignore the obvious, and try to benefit from politically correct reluctance to recognize truths that are not politically palatable, even as they spew out unreasoning hatred toward Jews and others. Even the irrational hatred of Jews makes them similar to Nazis.
In sum, I think we need to stop kidding ourselves. Muslim communities, whether in London, Islamabad, Manila, or New York, are generally hotbeds of hatred that are very good breeding grounds for terrorism. The common link in all of it is islam. There is no denying it.
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