Do Muslims around the world back Islamic radicalism and terrorism? We've been hearing a positive answer to this question for seven years now from a slew of right-wing pundits who seem to be making a very good living as Muslim-bashers. These pundits are big on anecdotes but small on data. Fortunately we are now in a position to answer them with the facts supplied in John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed's important book Who Speaks for Islam? If you haven't read this book, you cannot consider yourself properly informed on the topic.

Esposito and Mogahed cite Gallup data that shows that only 7 percent of Muslims consider the 9/11 attacks to be justified. The authors don't think that even 7 percent of the world's Muslims are ready to sign up for jihad. Yet any group of Muslims who approves of 9/11 is a group that I think we should worry about. These are the political backers of Bin Laden and his cohorts. Undoubtedly Al Qaeda hopes to recruit from this pool. We should be monitoring this group closely.

But let's at the same time recognize that this cohort is a tiny minority. Images of Palestinian activists celebrating 9/11 or radical Imams leading chants of "Death to America" are not representative of Muslim opinion. There are right-wing pundits who have been trying to foment a clash of civilizations by proclaiming typical Muslims to be radicals, but next time you hear this ask for convincing evidence to back up such allegations. Most likely you will get unrepresentative anecdotes.

The larger concern for Esposito and Mogahed is Muslims who reject terrorism of the 9/11 type but nevertheless hate the United States. This hatred, however, is not mainly derived from American support for Israel or America's alleged imperialist history. Nor is it because, as President Bush once put it, "they hate us for our freedom." Rather, Esposito and Mogahed trace Muslim anti-Americanism to the belief that the West in general, and America in particular, are conducting a "war with Islam." And when Muslims are asked why they think this, they point to three things.

First, they cite America's support for secular Muslim despots. Second, they point the finger at what they view to be anti-religious and immoral values disseminated through American popular culture abroad. Finally, they seize upon the statements of inflammatory Americans who say, as Lawrence Auster recently did, "The problem is not 'radical' Islam but Islam itself, from which it follows that we must seek to weaken and contain Islam." My former colleague at the Hoover Institution, Victor Davis Hanson, seems to share Auster's view.

One wishes that self-styled Islamic experts like Auster (an attorney previously known for his efforts to reduce immigration in America) and Victor Davis Hanson (actually an expert on classical antiquity with excellent books on topics like the Peloponnesian War) would stop trying to launch the United States on a crazy secular crusade to undermine or transform the religious beliefs of Muslims, a group numbering well over a billion people. These pundits' analysis would be greatly improved if they learned to distinguish among Muslims.

No, guys: they don't all look alike and they don't all think alike. There are Islamic radicals who are our sworn enemies, and there are other Muslims who are being alienated from the United States because they want to rule themselves, they want to affirm traditional Islamic values in their countries, and also because they are disgusted with the anti-Muslim sentiments exhibited by people like Auster and Hanson.

John McCain has been making a lot of outrageous claims lately, but when he said he knew how to capture Osama bin Laden, that really pissed me off. Then what's stopping you big guy? Or are you holding the country hostage by not letting us know unless we elect you president?

If you don't believe he could say something that outrageous or stupid, watch below:




One of our viewers, Mike Neva, made a very good point. McCain has accused Obama of putting politics above winning the war in Iraq. If John McCain really knows how to capture Osama bin Laden and won't tell the US government unless he is elected, isn't he putting politics above winning the war on terror?

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Last night in Orange County I had one of my liveliest debates with atheist Christopher Hitchens and the Jewish radio host Dennis Prager. The debate--a sort of Christian-Atheist-Jew slugfest--was held at the Bat Yahm synagogue in Newport Beach. There was a sellout crowd of 1,500, with about 400 turned away.

The debate was unusual in that it involved not two but three different perspectives. Hitchens was particularly harsh in his exchanges with Prager, at one point accusing Prager of covering up for anti-Semitism. My exchanges with Hitchens were consistently sharp but also mutually respectful, and later Hitchens told me that I am one of the most formidable debaters that he has ever faced. I predict this debate will generate huge interest when it is posted on the web. After the debate Hitchens joined my wife and me at the bar where we downed two bottles of Pinot Noir and solved many of the world's problems.

Since our debate focused on God as understood from a Christian, Jewish and atheist perspective, missing from the event was a Muslim perspective. This is a pity, because one staple item of atheist rhetoric is the equation of Islamic extremism with Christianity. In my cross-examination I pressed Hitchens on this issue, and will let viewers watch our exchange for themselves and make up their own minds.

We find the equation between "Islamic fundamentalism" and "Christian fundamentalism" not only among the new atheists but also in the popular culture. Several weeks ago Christiane Amanpour of CNN did her special on "God's Warriors." The premise: The Abrahamic religions all lead to extremism. So Amanpour did three segments, one on Islamic extremism, one on Jewish extremism and one on Christian extremism.

Striking to the viewer, however, was the strained attempt to equate the three. Islamic extremism featured the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombing, the London bombing, the Madrid bombing, and the list goes on. What about Christian extremism? Well, there was Christiane Amanpour in desperate search for the Christian Bin Laden, the Christian Al Qaeda, the Christian Hamas, the Christian Hezbollah, the Christian state currently run along the lines of post-Khomeini Iran.

Poor Christiane came up empty handed. So she was forced to locate marginal groups which would be repudiated by 99.9 percent of Christians and try to pass them off as the Christian equivalent of the Islamic radicals. I was especially interested to find out that there is an old guy in the hills of Montana who wants to blow up the world in the name of Jesus. Too bad he's broke and doesn't have any teeth. Still, one day he hopes to get a job and carry out his nefarious plans. I suppose this is the closest thing to a Christian Bin Laden. We are all supposed to be very afraid of this man!

One of the new atheists very cleverly termed 9/11 a "faith based initiative." But the witticism conceals an intellectual sleight-of-hand. Bush merely wants the government to be able to support faith-based charities on the same basis as it supports secular charities. What happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seven years ago can hardly be placed in the same intellectual category.

Of late some of the new atheists are backing off from their fraudulent analogy between Islamic extremism and Christianity. This is a powerful blow to the new atheism, because so much of its relevance came from its ability to surf on the wave of current events and interpret modern terrorism as the expression of a generic religious impulse. In reality Bin Laden is more accurately compared to an atheist despot like Pol Pot. I realize the analogy is not entirely fair--to Bin Laden! After all, Bin Laden's death toll (several thousand killed over a dozen years) doesn't come closer to Pol Pot's 2 million killed in the space of three years.

Besides, Pol Pot was a Little League atheist compared to Mao and Stalin, whose death toll was in the tens of millions. When it comes to mass murder in the modern era, Islamic radicalism simply cannot keep up with atheism.

Just a couple of days ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the release of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson (Kathleen Soliah). (Olson disappeared in 1975 after two L.A. police cars were bombed. She married a doctor and became a housewife until finally being caught and prosecuted for attempted murder and second-degree murder. By then she had three children.)

Then, today, it was reported in the L.A. Times that just as she was about to return home with her husband she was rearrested and told she still had one more year to serve. They'd miscalculated, they said. (Note: blowing up L.A. patrol cars and then going on the lam for two decades does not endear one to the California penal system.)

When I proposed in my book The Enemy at Home (newly out in paperback) that America should ally with traditional Muslims to defeat the radical Muslims, some conservatives reacted with amazement. Where, these savants inquired, are the traditional Muslims? Clearly the exposure of some on the right to the Muslim world was limited to the viewing of clips of Bin Laden videos on the Fox News Channel.

Then last October a group of 138 Muslim scholars from diverse schools of thought wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict urging "mutual understanding" between Christianity and Islam. Titled "A Common Word Between Us and You," the letter notes that Muslims and Christians can find shared ground based on the dual commandments to love God and love our neighbor.

"As Muslims," the letter goes, "we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them--so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them, and drive them out of their homes." The letter was carefully worded so that it did not confuse clashes of interests with a war against the Muslim religion. In effect, the Muslim leaders were saying that their religious quarrel is only with atheists and other enemies of Islam.

Liberal Christians reacted to the letter with their usual abasement. Certainly some relief was in order, because Muslims who seek common cause with the West, or at least with the Christian West, are far preferable to those who seek to destroy us. Even so, why are liberal Christians so quick to prostrate themselves? "We want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in the war on terror) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbor...We ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world."

The Vatican, accustomed to dealing with Muslim diplomatic initiatives for centuries, responded with much greater caution. While welcoming the initiative to dialog, the Vatican's Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran stressed that genuine common ground requires reciprocity. So if Muslims want to have full rights of worship in Western countries, they should grant those same rights to Christians in Muslim countries. If Muslims have the freedom to build mosques in London and Chicago, Christians should be able to build churches in Islamabad and Amman.

One group of ignoramuses wants to wage an ideological war against Islam. Another group of sycophants wants to curry favor among Muslims, just so long as they abstain from bombing us. In between these two there is a sensible option: to negotiate respectfully but firmly with traditional Muslims, building on shared values but also insisting that justice and goodwill must come from both sides of the street.

Someone killed one of the top Hezbollah leaders yesterday. They blew him up in a car bomb. No one has claimed responsibility and of course Hezbollah blamed it on the "Zionist Israelis." The man who was killed was apparently responsible for masterminding the bombing of the Marines barrack in Beirut that killed 241 US Marines. He also organized the kidnapping of Americans in Lebanon, the hijacking of a TWA flight and the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people.

Knowing all this, we asked a very simple question on the show today:




You can see all of our answers by watching the whole show on our website. We all ultimately reached the same conclusion.

So, what would you do if you had to personally press the button that made this happen?

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I posted about HR 1955 back in December, it raised a couple eyebrows here on Newsbloggers as well as elsewhere on the web, including my old friends at Brasscheck TV. Who have put together the video below in an effort to speculate about the intentions of such a Bill.

- Hat Tip to Eric! You're the man cool guy.

This week, we went to an uptown Manhattan movie theater to see Sweeney Todd. But even though it was pretty great, we didn't get to enjoy it so much, because we spent two hours wondering if we'd left our babysitter back in Brooklyn enough contact numbers. Did we, for example, mention our relatives upstate? In the Midwest? In Norway?

Why were we wondering such a thing while we should have been enjoying Sasha Baron Cohen's tight pants? Because every trailer was for a movie in which New York City gets destroyed. And not in a friendly way. In a BLAMMO! kind of way. In a how-awesome-was-THAT kind of way.

Tuesday night I was on the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel to discuss whether religious profiling is sometimes necessary. The Los Angeles police department has initiated a new program that focuses attention on the Muslim community. The usual suspects (Council on American Islamic Relations, ACLU, Los Angeles Times editorial page) are up in arms. CAIR sent a representative on television to make the case that Muslims are no more likely to be terrorists than any other group.

This is part of the "equal opportunity" nonsense that we've been hearing for several years now.

Interesting words from the guy Colbert calls "the brown haired guy on Fox and Friends that isn't Steve Doocy."

You may double-take after watching this clip and when American news stations make such statements it makes the rest of the world uneasy.

Irancoverage.com says his statements are "criminal" - I am not up to date on the law, but maybe somebody reading this knows why these words are "criminal."

Here is a rough transcript of what Brian Kilmeade said.

One thing could we do, could we start arming the anti government groups inside Iran, could their cars start blowing up inside Iran, like our humvees are blowing up, maybe inside Tahran so they wont be doing it inside Baghdad?

After "weather problems"

These militant groups are as upset about the direction of the Iranian government almost as much as the United States is, we are not doing enough to arm them to support them and let them create havoc inside Iran.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Colombian drug lords have been secretly building submarines capable of traveling hundreds of miles and carrying up to five tons of cocaine.

More than a dozen such ships have been seized in the last two years. At first we were sort of impressed that druggies could be so industrious. Then we read the rest of the article, which made us not so much impressed as terrified.

In the last 60 Minutes, the top Pentagon official in charge of attacking "high value targets" in Iraq, Marc Garlasco, admitted that the number of civilians the US is willing to kill to try to get a bad guy is 29. If there are 29 civilians or less in an area where there is a high value target, we will launch the bomb. If there are 30 or more, permission has to come from the Secretary of Defense or the President.

We explain in further detail below:



The question is at what point does our killing of civilians cross the line? Why are terrorists the bad guys when they kill civilians and we are the good guys when we do the same?

I know that there are important differences. The terrorists are targeting the civilians, where as we are trying to avoid them (though not trying very hard apparently). The flip side is I am sure that our enemies would use F-16s and B-2 bombers against our military targets if they could. One of the reasons they use suicide bombs is because they don't have many other options. That clearly does not excuse it in any way. But it does explain it.

But sinking to their level also does not excuse our actions, either. I am not unrealistic or a peacenik who is always against any war (in fact, this Iraq War is the first US war I've ever been against in my lifetime). I get that sometimes civilians die in war -- and that's an excellent reason why we should be careful before we start a war, unlike what we did in Iraq. But is there a limit to how callous we are about civilian casualties?

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Wired has a pretty amazing article out now about a suburban mother of three named Shannen Rossmiller, possibly one of the most successful counter-terrorists on the planet.

As a hobby after 9/11, she started trolling terrorist chat rooms for "actionable intelligence," and managed to tip the FBI off about would-be attackers. Posing as a recruiter, she wrings top-secret information out of her targets by making them fill out oaths of allegiance.

We fear this video by the Onion, "Country Music Stars Challenge Al-Qaeda With Patriotic New Song "Bomb New York," is sort of terrifyingly accurate about how much of the country feels about NYC. We're especially amused/freaked out by the fan in this satirical newscast saying, "I do think if everyone in New York was killed, it would bring the country together."

September 11 is filled with remembrances, speculation, and analysis.

This blog post is from July, but it contains an interesting (if ultimately, as it admits, trivial) look at one particular aspect of worldwide violence -- the logos used by terrorist and revolutionary organization. It's not a perfect project by any means: the blog's author forgot some major groups and included some groups that aren't terrorist organizations -- and that's reflected in the passionate, sometimes violent comments.

Still, it's an interesting project: to taxonomize the flags, logos, and identity art of groups that are excluded from traditional political discourse.