Especially since the Sikhs and Russians stopped doing it.

If the journalists "work harder", will fewer Muslim groups plot to blow up airplanes and train stations?

And is it scare mongering if you're honestly and sincerely scared? Remember those "Jesus, Protect Me From Your Followers" bumper stickers that were--heck, still are--popular with folks who think right-wing Christians are scary? Well, I find radical Islam to be pretty scary.

Why, I bet I'd have to turn to the Google if I was determined to make a decent long list. You basically can't think of more than a dozen examples from living memory, which is nothing, am I right?

You have plundered many nations
Divided many lands
You have terrorized their peoples
You've ruled with an iron hand
And you've brought this reign of terror to my land.

(Wolfe Tones - Joe McDonnel - but experienced in a pub in Ireland while playing the fiddle - with a pub full of people singing along - well - you understand pretty quick that CNN has nothing to do with any of this).

q'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!

I watched the dvd of that one too. Bloody hell, those limeys would not stop shooting!
Also:Is America's defenses so good that any terrorist who wanted to couldn't blow up a car or bus or Sounder train if they wanted to? Just asking.

Just like all those wars past when people were wondering why Japanese and Vietnamese(?not sure) were committing suicide just to make sure some of us got killed too. Any culture that says suicide is an ok thing has got to be either very committed or very scary insane.

very religious = very insane

go back to the pitbulls for fuck's sake

And to the extent that motivation matters, neither the IRA nor the Protestant paramilitaries were particularly motivated by religion per se.

@ 15 - McVeigh wasn't Christian.

So you're saying it isn't that Islamic terrorists kill innocent people. That's fine; Christian terrorists did that for years and it was all good. What makes Islam so awful is their willingness to travel long distances to kill innocent people?

And McVeigh was a devout Catholic. He once wrote a letter calling himself was agnostic, but he asked for a priest at his execution, and most importantly, was raised in the church.

When Muslim terrorists strike, when girl children are killed by Daddy for "honor", etc....all is silence. The only voices raised are in support for murderers.

Until the sane, moderate Muslims speak out, loudly and strongly, I will be scared. Cultural relativism is fine until you'd rather be polite than speak out against cultures that are undeniably wrong. It's moral cowardice to never take a stand.

At least radical Muslims take care of themselves, eventually.

You mean speaking out the way Benazir Bhutto did? I guess from where you sit, it all seems so easy.

Here's the part I don't get: Dan Savage, you supported the War in Iraq at least at first. This naive, Christopher Hitchens-parroting "clash of civilizations" atheism seems to be the driving force behind it.

I get that you don't like supersition-driven bigotry. Who does?

So what's the agenda? Is the idea that the US somehow has the power to convert all these primitive supersitious foreigners either by force, or by some other means? If so, good luck with that!

Meanwhile, we Seattle liberals will continue to support a more diplomatic approach to foreign policy.

Where exactly are you looking for moderate Muslim reactions to terrorist acts? I could give you tons.

You're not gonna get it from Fox, nbc, abc, cnn, etc...

The problem with terrorists isn't their religion; it's their actions, their choices.  And the issue driving terrorist mass production is the culture.

Isn't the religion a part of the part of the culture?  Yes, of course, but just one part.

Isn't religion in general completely fucked up?  Yes.

Isn't Islam more fucked up than most?  Probably.

Don't majority Muslim cultures produce more terrorists than anyone else?  Yeah, but correlation does not imply causation.

All that misses the point.  Demonizing the religion will only help convince moderates that the radicals are right about how the rest of the world is out to get them.  No good will come of it.

Yes, and bigotry is bred from fear.

Dan, you've come perilously close to crossing the line with this post. You need to start choosing your words more carefully.

The ratio of people killed by State Terror (e.g., the bombardments of Afghanistan and Iraq) to the number of people killed by retail terror (e.g., blowing up a subway train) is 100,000 to 1.

You pay your fucking Federal Income Taxes, Dan? Fifty percent of them are used to conduct terror operations. You're funding terror networks with every single paycheck.

But, gee, those are only just negroes buried under our bombs. So it's all good, yeah? Pass the fucking ammo, right?

I belong to a gay friendly, anti-war, anti-Bush peacenik congregation on Capitol Hill. Fred Phelps has picketed my church on numerous occasions because, among other things, we hold wedding ceremonies for same sex couples, house the office of the Religious Coalition for Equality, have openly gay pastors and lay leaders and (the specific reason we were included on Westboro's shit list according to their website, godhatesfags.com) we had a memorial service for two of our members, a same sex couple, who were killed in a plane crash. The religious right hates us probably more than they hate atheists because they think we should join their silly crusades and we tell them (figuratively speaking, of course) to go fuck themselves.

The mainstream media barely acknowledges we exist since we're generally too boring. We won't make the news unless we say or do something completely outrageous, which goes against our nature. Consequently, nonreligious people don't even know we exist or only exist in numbers too small to matter. And religious moderates and liberals tend to keep a low profile since we don't think those who don't believe what we do will burn for eternity in some subterranean blast furnace. So how would you suggest ordinary religious people, Christian, Muslim, whatever, handle their extremists? If you have concrete and constructive suggestions, please let us know.

I'm sure there are a great deal of Christians who disagree with the Westboro Baptist Church. But only because many of them prefer to mask their hatred with a veneer of tolerance or smiles. Many of them go to churches that hold most of the same intolerant views, and almost none of those people, whether they agree with those views or not, are willing to change their church's policies in order to collectively rebuff the extremists.