An Honest Conversation About Islam

Here’s part of the text of the essay I wrote for Red State titled It’s Long Past Time to Have an Honest Conversation about Islam:

No other religion or cultural group reacts with such uniform and savage violence to even mild criticism. No group demands the right to insult, demean and destroy other cultures without consequence the way the Muslim world does. Let’s pretend for a minute that the Islam apologists are right and that this current madness was all caused by a YouTube video. Why would we accept that kind of behavior from Muslims?

Arab Muslim television and media routinely depict Jews drinking the blood of children and stealing their organs. Have Jews taken to the streets worldwide to besiege the embassies of Muslim countries and murder their diplomats?

In 2002 Muslims fleeing IDF forces shot their way into the Church of the Nativity, where Christians believe Jesus Christ was actually born. The Muslims urinated and defecated in the church, used Christian holy books as toilet paper and stole sacramental equipment. I don’t recall seeing Christians go on bloody rampages after the desecration of one of their most holy shrines.

When the Taliban destroyed cliff-side statues of the Buddha that were over 1,700 years old I didn’t see Buddhists murdering Muslims in retaliation.

Hindus and Sikhs are often the targets of Muslim violence yet there are no worldwide Hindu or Sikh riots where embassies are burned and their personnel slaughtered. But we accept and have come to expect this behavior from Muslims.

No other religion creates as much chaos and anarchy as Islam. And that chaos is not limited to Muslim countries, but we see it in Europe and increasingly here in America where Christians were recently stoned by a Muslim mob in Dearborn, MI. The idea that a tiny minority of extremists is committing all the Muslim violence in the world may be comforting, but it simply isn’t true. There is something within Islam itself that encourages this barbarity in significant portions of any Muslim population.

Every mainstream school of thought in Islam teaches anti-Semitism, misogyny, racism and Arab Imperialism. There are no voices in the Islamic world that promote Liberty or the Republican ideals that all Americans believe in. Modernist Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser are isolated and marginalized not only in the Islamic world, but in the West where politicians have been co-opted by Jihadist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. Until that changes there will never be peaceful co-existence between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Read the rest.

WWIII Watch: Syrian Jets Pound “Rebels” in Lebanon

Some escalation that means will we soon see a much wider conflict including more civil war in Lebanon as Iranian backed Hezbollah joins the fray to counter the “Syrian rebels” who are clearly operating from Lebanese territory:

BEIRUT—Syrian warplanes fired missiles into Lebanese territory on Monday, heightening the potential for Syria’s neighbors to be pulled into its 18-month-old conflict.

Such spillover has rocked the delicate political balance in Lebanon, where rival sectarian political forces have thrown their support behind opposing sides in Syria’s civil war.

“As conditions deteriorate, we see dangerous implications for Syria’s neighbors,” Robert Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the U.N. Security Council on Monday.

Hours after the strike, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Shiite political party and militant group Hezbollah, made a rare public appearance before tens of thousands of protesters in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Hezbollah had called for demonstrations to protest a video mocking the Prophet Muhammad, but the gathering also served as a show of political force by the movement, which remains a supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah’s Sunni and Christian rivals in Lebanon have largely backed Syria’s rebel fighters.

The Lebanese government’s quiet response to the Syrian missile strikes underscored just how deep and fraught those divisions remain.

[…]

The turnout in support of Hezbollah dwarfed the crowds that came out on Sunday for Mass in downtown Beirut with Pope Benedict XVI, who wrapped up his three-day trip to Lebanon with a public plea for peace, reconciliation and interreligious harmony.

It was widely assumed that Hezbollah held off on joining the outpouring of anger across the region in response to the video until after the pope left, so as not to jeopardize the historic trip. The Shiite group has a powerful presence within the Lebanese government and walks a delicate road between hard-line militancy and the more pragmatic demands of governance and coexistence in the fractured country.

At Monday’s rally, protesters marched through the streets chanting “Death to America” and “America is the great Satan.”

I personally don’t see how America isn’t going to be a main target of multiple groups once this world war kicks off.

Did China Murder a Japanese Ambassador?

As China makes moves to militarily seize Japanese territory and the Chi-Coms organize domestic protests to whip their population up into a frenzy for the coming war a Japanese ambassador to China has died of an unspecified” illness.

From Bloomberg:

Japan’s new ambassador to China died this morning following an unspecified illness, the Foreign Ministry said today, five days after his appointment amid an intensifying territorial dispute between the two countries.

Incoming envoy Shinichi Nishimiya, 60, was hospitalized on Sept. 13, the ministry said at the time. Nishimiya collapsed and lost consciousness near his Tokyo home, Kyodo News reported, without saying where it got the information.

Tensions between Asia’s two largest economies have risen over rights to uninhabited islands in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese. The Japanese government nationalized the islands last week and China dispatched six government vessels to nearby waters.

Japan announced on Sept. 11 that Nishimiya would replace Uichiro Niwa, the first private-sector appointee to become ambassador to China. Niwa’s car was blocked and the Japanese flag attached to it ripped off by assailants in Beijing last month.

Japan’s foreign minister and defense chief returned to Tokyo yesterday, cutting short a visit to Australia as anti- Japanese protests flared up across China.

Sounds suspicious to me. I’m betting China is waiting for things to blow up in the Middle East so they can start making moves on our allies in Asia.

h/t Once Upon the Time in the West