*   Making sense: Just in from Radarsite:

“Not All Muslims are the Same”

“Not all Nazis are the Same. Not all Communists are the Same. Not all Cannibals are the Same. Not all murderers are the same.

*  Excuse me, but why should we give a s#*t???”

* Sophistry= subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation

All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics.

A dog is not the same animal as a cat just because both species are comprised of different breeds. An extreme Christian believes that the Garden of Eden really existed; an extreme Muslim flies planes into buildings – there’s a big difference.

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Responding to my post When is Too Many Muslims? a readercommented, “Islam is not a single monolithic entity. Even within Islam, there are multiple understandings. Hence, to portray Muslims in absolute terms is very inaccurate.”

         * The Clash Of Non-Civilizations

There are over four thousand species of cockroach and although it would be inaccurate to portray cockroaches in absolute terms I doubt that anyone would care exactly which particular species was infesting their home.

For these same reasons I bundle Shiites, Sunnis, and Wahhabis as simply Muslims even though they view themselves differently. Certainly when they are not killing or torturing Jews or Christians they keep themselves busy killing or torturing other Muslims. Indeed, a few hundred years ago Wahhabis killed and tortured many Muslims, enslaved their women and children and usurped their possessions.

It may be interesting to differentiate the various Islamic sects: Shiites of Iran fund terror operations in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; Wahhabisof Saudi Arabia fund terror operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Chechnya, and Bosnia [source: United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary]; and Osama Bin Laden, a Sunni, funds terror operations everywhere. So while there are certainly differences among them, does it really matter that I lump them altogether? Does anyone really care precisely which sub-sect of a barbaric political system blows up a busload of women and children?

Not all criminals are the same, but when they commit a crime we throw them into the same prison: murderers, rapists, armed robbers, etc. Is it right or accurate to lump them altogether as if their crimes were all equally evil? The answer is who cares?

When it comes to how members of Islam treat infidels and even other Muslims, it doesn’t make any difference. I know that most Muslims do not commit crimes just as most Nazis, the great Majority of them, did not kill or hurt a single Jew in the last century, yet we still condemn all Nazis as evil. Not because they hurt anyone, but because they allowed it to happen. There were almost 70 million Germans prior to World War II. I doubt 1% of them actually killed a Jew, so what were the other 99% doing when more than 11 million souls lost their lives to Nazi persecution?

Unless 99% of Muslims disavow their religion, the cause of Muslim barbarities, they will all be considered enemies of civilization; the fat and the tall, the thin and the short, the Sunnis, the Shiites, whatever – it doesn’t make any difference.

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Fitzgerald: Basic Jihad

If Muslims are taught traditional Islam, they are inculcated with certain beliefs, and these beliefs include the following:

1) All Muslims must participate, directly or indirectly (depending on the circumstances) in the “struggle” or Jihad to push back the boundaries of Dar al-Islam, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then to the dominance, of Islam — everywhere. The world belongs to Allah, and to his people. That world is the whole world, and not merely “that part of the world where Muslims in 2008 dominate but nowhere else” or “that part of the world where Muslims dominate in 2008, and all other areas that they once dominated — including the lands now known as Spain, Israel, Sicily, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Rumania, much of Hungary, much of southern and central Russia, almost all of India.” No, it means the whole world.

2) Muslims are taught that between Muslims, and non-Muslims, Believers and Infidels, there must exist a permanent state of war, though not always of open warfare (when that would not be to the Muslim advantage).

3) Muslims are taught that the traditional means of conducting warfare on behalf of the Faith of Islam — combat or qitaal — has as one of its modern avatars what the Infidels have no trouble calling “terrorism,” but which many Muslims think is simply another form of qitaal, one justified by the present military superiority of Infidels. Thus, for example, while a very few Muslim spokesmen have, in a very tepid way, ostentatiously claimed that “terrorism” is anti-Muslim, inspection of these remarks shows that the definition of “innocents” used in these pro-forma, public-relations efforts is narrow enough to exclude, for example, every single Israeli man, woman, and child, and a great many of those whom we normally call civilians among other Infidel populations as well.

4) Muslims are taught to owe their loyalty — their sole loyalty — to Islam, and to fellow members of the Umma, the Community of Believers. It is impossible for a Believer to owe loyalty — true loyalty — to an Infidel nation-state, with legal and political principles and institutions that flatly contradict the Shari’a. To the extent that a Muslim is a bad or lapsed Muslim, he may not take his duties as a Muslim seriously. He may start to think of himself, even, as merely a “cultural” Muslim — which may be a way of saying “I’m-a-Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only” Muslim, which in turn, may simply be someone’s way of getting at the fact that he is, in truth, an apostate, but for various reasons — fear, or filial piety being the two most common — he can’t come out and say it. Unfortunately, those “cultural” Muslims sometimes — unwittingly — prolong the confusion of unwary Infidels, by making the latter think that these non-Muslim Muslims can be taken to be the real thing. Attitudes, conclusions, and even policies of Infidel governments have been based on the wrong, because unrepresentative, representatives of the dangerous Total Belief-System of Islam.

5) The “regional jihads” — say that in Kashmir, or against India, or Israel, or the governments of Thailand and the Philippines — are not separate from, much less different from, the “global jihad.” Rather, they should be seen as merely the local manifestations of the duty, the impulse, of Jihad. In the end, everyone beavering away to win this or that region for Islam, or to beat down non-Muslims who may not be as submissive as they should be in a well-run Muslim state, or who may need to be driven out in greater numbers from a Muslim land for the benefit, presumably, of the local Muslims, is part of one enormous Jihad, the universal or worldwide one.

The Turkestan Front Muslims who have been setting off bombs in China, the Muslims within India setting off bombs there, the members of Laskar-e-Jihad or for that matter Pakistan’s I.S.I., who helped drive out the Kashmiri Pandits (nearly 400,000 of them) into India, or Lashkar Jihad whipping up sentiment against Infidels in Indonesia, or Ansar al-Islam, or Jund al-Islam, or Hizballah, or Hamas, or a hundred or a thousand groups, including those that recruit deep within the countries of Western Europe, from those Muslims who are born and raised in, but are not of, Western Europe — all of these should be seen as not assuagable local groups, but groups hell-bent on this or that local target. And the sum of all those local or lesser jihads is the Great and Universal Jihad against Unbelievers, and for Islam, and Believers, everywhere.

Posted by Hugh at September 6, 2008 10:17 AM