wrote:
SNIP

So what did the world do?
Maintained pressure on the participants until they reached an understanding.
If you're arguing that no one magically made the problem disappear,
then I agree. Then again, people of your political bent tend to believe
in magic whereas I do not. I never believed the current issues with Islam
have some simple solution, merely that it's reasonable to hold the Islamic
leaders - both secular and religious - accountable for what they do.

I don't recall the world putting ANY pressure on the participants.
Did the Britidh government disarm the Protestant militias? No.
Did the Pope excomunicate the IRA leaders? No.

The Brits tried to, but this was difficult because: a) The combatants
in question wore plainclothes and hid in civilian homes and b) The
Drooling Equivocators in the West tended to portray the IRA as
"Freedom Fighters" when they were, in fact, evil scoundrels ...
not unlike the excused today's Left makes for Islamic excesses.

SNIP



Do you read any newpapers or watch any television stations or listen
to any radio from predominantly Muslim nations? I do not, therefor
I do not know if what you say is true or not. If you do not, then
neither do you.
But I do. I try to get to Middle Eastern news (via the web) at
least a couple times a week. The silence about the excesses of
the radicals is thunderous.

You too can join the fun:

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/index.htm
http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage
http://www.debka.com/
http://www.jpost.com
http://www.tehrantimes.com/
http://www.memri.org/

Those are all ENglish language websites. Surely you are not
suggesting that they are representative of journalism in
predominantly Muslim countries.

So I conclude that you do NOT read any newpapers
or watch any television stations or listen
to any radio from predominantly Muslim nations.
I do not, therefor I do not know if what you say is
true or not.

But it is becoming clearer that you do not know if
it is true or not.

Let's deconstruct your logic above to expose it for the foolishness
it is. From your comments above it follows that:

1) Anything other than the native tongue is not "representative"
of the worldview of the speaker in question.

2) We cannot reliably know things translated from and by the people
of a given region who *intended* for us to read/hear/see these
things in *our* native tongue.

3) In fact, this problem is so bad, that even when reading a
breadth of perspectives translated into English - perspectives
ranging from hardcore Islamist to hardcore Zionist to something
in between - we *still* can't know anything ... because they're
not being read in their native tongues. (P.S and big hint, MEMRI,
in particular was specifically created to make speeches and writings
in Arabic available in English by means of high-quality translations.)

Therefo

4) You are hereby prohibited from expressing any opinion about France,
Italy, Norway, Russia, China, et al unless you are a native speaker
reader of their respective languages. So, unless you have mastery
of many languages as a minimum cost of entry, you have no place
ever discussing geopolitics again.

5) (And here's the real genius of your argument): I argued that there
was a "deafening silence" when reading the arguments of the Arab
world to the English speaking world. Your conclusion is that the
English translations are not "reliable" and that we "don't know"
whether there is widespread pressure by Islamic "moderates" upon their
radical brethren. So, (using your impeccable logic), we're left
with two possibilities:

i) The "moderate" Islamists are *not* putting pressure on their
radical brethern in any large way.

ii) The "moderate" Islamists *are* putting pressure on their
radical brethren but they are also purposely keeping
it a secret from their English speaking readership by
intentionally not letting us know about it.

Your argument is absurd on its face.

All this leads one to speculate just *why* you cling to such obvious and
patently ridiculous lines of thought. The truth is that you and your ilk
never found a Western Democracy perfect enough to support with any real
enthusiasm, but you jump right in with sympathy and big lefty tears for
every tin pot dictator, despot, murderer, and lunatic that spews forth
from the various sewers around the world. After all we need to
"understand" their reasons for doing as they do, since clearly "Good"
and "Evil" are anachronisms you threw out at the same time you were busy
denying the importance and role of religious faith. Your ilk (and
probably you as well) were busy being very quiet when Hussein was
savaging his own people and his sons busily pushing people into
industrial shredders just to be able to hear them scream a bit longer.
On these kinds of horrors our fine Left has not much to say, but when it
comes to Bush and Blair ... oh wait, let's have you speak for yourself:


Plainly, this administration wants conflict.

Right. Sadaam & Son's butcher the innocent by the thousands, but it's
*Bush's* fault there is conflict in the region. It's the democratic West
that sacrifices blood and treasure to try and make the world just
slightly better and *we're* the problem, not the Hussein family, not the
beheading Islamic butchers of Al Queda, not the slave traders of
Mauretania, not vile savages of the Darfur, and certainly not the
various intellectual elites that advise us on our required degree of
Multicultural Tolerance (tm). It's *us*, the West that is always at
fault because were just not perfect enough for you and the rest of the
self-anointed elites.

In actual fact, the truth about you and your fellow travelers is much
simpler than this. In the words of David Pryce-Jones, you regularly
commit "Treasons Of The Heart". You would do well to read this:


http://www.newcriterion.com/archives...-of-the-heart/

It's worth the few dollars it costs. You would do well to read this
precisely because maybe, just maybe, you'll look into a moral mirror and
realize how foul, corruptive, and ultimately evil your ideas are.




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Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/