Reader Jim H. emails –
I was reading your site tonight and had a thought regarding the Islamic convention that just wrapped in Toronto.
All we’ve heard here for the last 2 days is about the chaos at Pearson Airport, something like 15% of flights to the US cancelled, incredible delays etc. I’m given to understand the problems are not as severe in other parts of the country or in the US. And then I began to wonder if the presence of 8000 politically active Muslims in the city might have more to do with the extensive searches and cancelled US flights than some guy whose underwear caught fire.
Not the sort of angle our local media is likely to suggest. But if you were an edgy head of Homeland Security and knew 8000 people who don’t like you very much were camped that close to the border, you might be putting some pressure on your opposite number here to tighten things up.
Yes, I suspect so.
Related.
hardboiled – I’ve heard some people say that Islamic extremism is going through its final death throes – much like the theocratic Catholic church did in the 1500s during the time of the inquisition, when the latter realized it was losing its power over the populus to science and humanism. (My terms are all wrong, but I hope the idea comes across).
This is why I want to hear more from Muslim leaders – are these extremists vilified for throwing “Hail Marys” as Islam wanes, or is this call to arms tacitly embraced? (Parenthetically the Christmas bomber’s Muslim friends stated that they all thought Al Qaeda were “a bunch of nutters”, but they say their friend thought differently)
PS – your last statement is a bit unkind and unwarranted. Invective doesn’t work in my books. Cheers.
Louise, yep, am familiar with these words
hardboiled @4:23 – The Crusades were a bloody tit for tat, and began because the Turks invaded Anatolia. The Inquisition was very nasty but has been hugely overblown (yes, I can back that up).
But I believe batb said “The new Dark Ages”. So your pointing out that the Dark Ages were barbaric just makes her point for her, doesn’t it?
harboiled: “Guess you never heard of the inquisition or the crusades huh?”
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And I’ll bet my bottom dollar everything you’ve heard about them is distorted, cherry picked or outright wrong.
As of the time of my posting this comment, The Religion of Peace has documented 14,596 terror attacks since 9/11. These have happened all over the globe. That’s attacks, harboiled, not the death toll. The death toll is very much higher.
It doesn’t include the injured and maimed, either. Nor does it include foiled attempts such as the attempt by a Nigerian jihadist to blow up a Northwest flight 253 on Christmas Day.
How’s that compare to any 8 year period of the crusades or the inquisition?
Since all people are the same in your pretty little fairy-tale world, perhaps we should be fighting back with equal ferocity.
And by the way, since you brought up a couple of historical events, I have to ask you, have you ever heard of more recent movements, such as the Enlightenment and things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Trifling, compared to the evil crusaders, I know. But I just thought I’d check to see if you’ve been able to keep up with times.
…perhaps we should be fighting back with equal ferocity…using the same methods.
dp@1:13
Fair enough. Local squabble, but for sure you need to be cognizant of that. However, if I found myself in a sitaution with jihadi’s I wouldnt worry about my back with Sikh’s around.
I would worry about a “moderate muslim” using his club card to get out though. Happened in Mumbai, not that I necessarily blame the husband and wife who did it. But at least they were able to bear witness to how ignorant, literally, the mumbai terrorists were. Pakistani back country ignorant…literally not knowing how to operate a tap in the bathroom to get water.
Make Islam an illegal organization in the west. Quarantine all non residents returning from Islamic countries for a month, and interrogate residents when they return from Islamic countries.
Shut down all western Mosques and have former young Muslims still living in the west prove their allegiance by a pledge of allegiance and mandatory domestic and foreign national aid service in a distinctive non military unit.
We would have our sky’s back.
I am happy that Black Mamba and Louise had an appropriate answer to hardboiled. To a leftist such as hardboiled, truth is only that which advances their Marxist agenda.
Black Mamba, not to put to fine a point on it but by the time the Turks (Muslims)invaded Anatolia around 1000 AD, they had over the previous 350 years conquered Christianized countries of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Jordan. Read “The Middle East” by Bernard Lewis and “Islam in the World” by Malise Ruthven.
Ken (Kulak) @ 6:57 has it right. The real, or at least the original, motivation for the Crusades was to reclaim the heartland and birthplace of Christendom from its Islamic usurpers, an act that had taken place some three and a half centuries earlier. The invasion of Anatolia was the last straw, so to speak. This Islamic conquest is an earlier form of the dreaded “imperialism” that is apparently okay with lefties.
Ken – no doubt. The point is that the myth we’re fed is of a peaceful, sophisticated, culturally and scientifically advanced Islamic world attacked by invading hordes of unwashed, retarded Christian barbarians who had no relationship to or prior claim on the territory they were raping. And that is false in all respects.
There are never really any “good guys” in history, but from this distance, we don’t need to apologize for the Crusades. If the Muslim world is still hung up on them, it probably means that it hasn’t moved on in almost a millenium. Which isn’t exactly healthy.
Black Mamba: “…the myth we’re fed is of a peaceful, sophisticated, culturally and scientifically advanced Islamic world attacked by invading hordes of unwashed, retarded Christian barbarians who had no relationship to or prior claim on the territory they were raping.”
Right, hardboiled?
The best weapons we have against the Muslim extremists are the lawyers from Scientology. If only we could find a way to get them to start fighting each other they would soon wear each other down to nothing.
A pox on both their houses so to speak.
gord – the man who said: “a plague on both your houses” was bleeding to death as he spoke. Try not to be too on the nose – you might scare us.
Kudos to Black Mamba, Louise, and Ken K. for the justified back-at-ya to hardboiled.
The Spanish Inquisition compared to the jihad of the Middle Ages and our new Dark-Age-jihad (thanks for those stats, Louise) was a picnic.
But, leftards have the Christian/Catholic Church in their cross hairs and no amount of historical fact is likely to change their misrepresentations of history — or the present.
And, hardboiled, I’m no toon.
BTW, I believe that all people are equal before G*d but not that all cultures are equal. If all cultures were equally fine and good and just, how come we’re not seeing immigration from the West to the oppressive regimes in the Middle East or Africa?
How come all of the traffic is from those countries to Western democracies founded on Judeo-Christian values? And, how come, now that the West has become multicultural, the host culture has been shoved into the basement? As a Christian, I sure as heck don’t feel “equal” in this so-called Mosaic.
‘Wonder why that is? ‘Wonder how that happened? ‘Wonder how come the CHRCs largely target only white Christian males?
Of course, I don’t expect any reliable or factual answers from you.
This explains everything!
(BTW batb is not (as far as we know) a “toon” – see supra for “toons”.
I wonder how this will affect the Lieberals, CTVtass and CBCpravda’s push to bring back the worst spawn of the first family of Canadian terrorism. that puke Omar Khadr, they describe him as sad and lonely too.