Islam spawned Nazis. Islam people blame Pakistani ex pm Butto for getting killed because she dared to stand out of a car.

Islam people massacre Christian schoolchildren in Beslan and then refuse to allow a monument because they think that 70% of the victims were Muslim. They place glasses of water in front of dehydrated hostages telling them they will shoot their parents if they even reach for the water.

“I swear to Allah we desire death more than you desire life. We have come here to die and you will die with us.” That’s some fucked up shit.

Every man, woman and child that remotely believes in Islam must be wiped off this planet. Hey, if they want to die anyway, let’s do the whole word a favour already.

On every one of these criteria, the systems developed by what would be called Western civilization are clearly superior. It is important for those of us who enjoy the benefits of that civilization, especially women who are half of the population, to say loudly and clearly that we will not submit to an inferior civilization. We will not deny or give up our hard won superior civilization. It is our responsibility to protect and pass on this civilization to our children, grand children and great grand children. Can we bear to think that they will look back on us and say that we lived the good life but were too selfish and self-absorbed to care about what happened later?

Containment, a muscular arms control policy, and a united, aggressive national approach to the energy crisis would allow us to bypass radical Islam till it burns itself out with the population curve in the Middle East, in a generation or so. But the world never is that simple.

And it’s not a ‘culture’, it’s an ideology. A badly flawed one.

The worst is that it’s trying to convert people to this badly flawed ideology.

Joshua, that’s exactly the point I’ve made in other comments, actually. The oil issue isn’t over until the oil is gone. In around 80 years.

Wherever Islam meets the rest, there is jihad. You can swiftly die from an axe to the head, or you can die slowly of cancer. Either way its gonna be painful, and your gonna be dead. Anyway, Hitler just started out with a little puztch.

It’s probably not so silly to those living under the tyrannies of the Middle East. Or to the Israelis for that matter. Or to many of us who haven’t forgotten 9/11 or Bali or Madrid or London or the murder of a Jordanian wedding party or the slaughter of Russian school children or the daily car-bomb murders of innocent Iraqis.

The comparrison isn’t to Stalin or Hitler, but to their ideologies of oppression and murder. Certainly there are differences as both communism and nazism existed within the confines of an identifiable state while radical Islam is more amorphous in nature and thus harder to combat.

I do hope you’re right that we are in the death throes of radical Islam rather than the beginning of something worse. But I don’t think we should view the threat as one that will spontaneously go away.

Weaning ourselves from oil is a necessary step but I doubt it will provide a solution all by itself. After all, oil is not the reason radical Muslims in Europe have rioted in Paris, have bombed London, have threatened and murdered opponents in the Netherlands and have sent the Danish cartoonists into hiding. Oil is not the cause of or the answer to all our problems with radical Islam. But it’s certainly a factor.

Khruschchev, in other words? Come to think of it, that analogy is quite fitting. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can’t seem to shut up about how Iran will bury Israel.

Another problem is the lingering uncertainty, despite President Bush’s insistence that radical Muslims have “hijacked” the religion from mainstream Muslims, as to which of these camps represents Islam’s true nature - or even whether they are merely two sides (one violent, the other not) of the same troublesome coin. It also doesn’t help that many Westerners tend to confuse moderate Islam with reform-minded Islam, which is friendly to Western values and customs but is well outside the mainstream of Islamic thought. What we call “moderate Islam” is actually a lot closer ideologically to radical Islam than to the reformist Islam many of us think we’re supporting.

I am told there is something of the same spirit today in places like Iran.

But the Soviet Bloc had mellowed a great deal by the time I got there. What was possible under the conservative gerontocracy of Brezhnev — including me travelling relatively freely in East Berlin and Potsdam as an American youth — never would have been possible under Stalin.

When I look at Iran, I often see it as suspended somewhere between Stalin and Brezhnev. If it remains the former — and we really ought to think about not forcing it to do so — hard power is the unpleasant best option. But if it’s more Brezhnev time, we can be more patient and let the magic of freedom and success erode the totalitarians.

As for the rest of the Islamic world, I’m afraid it hasn’t even got to the point of Stalin yet. Its revolutions still are brewing. This clash or war or call-it-what-you-will not only will outlast my lifetime, it will consume my son’s as well.

I agree that it’s difficult. But East Germans were indoctrinated in a hatred of us as well–of course, they were part of a state and not also tought the glories of martyrdom, but I think there is validity in the comparrison. How we lure people away from radical Islam is up for debate. It won’t be easy.

Juan,

I use “we” in the broader sense–I’m not taking personal credit. As for radical Islam being inferior, I mean it’s inferior to democratic culture. But if you truly believe that U.S. policy is a greater threat than radical Islam, I don’t think we’re going to agree on a lot.

But does one “turn the other cheek” when faced with genocide, torture, or other gross atrocities? No, of course not, because it’s a question of society and civilization as a whole being put in jeopardy. Why, then, should we step aside as unalienable human liberties are slaughtered at the altar of religious tolerance? Because that’s really what’s going on. We’re putting the basic foundations of our democratic society up on the chopping block to appease the demands by the individual conscience for tolerance.

That is simply not acceptable.

To the original point…

The difficulty with removing radical Islam lies in the fact that it is drilled into the heads of boys throughout the middle east at a very young age.
They grow up believing that the US and Israel are evil. How do you keep that from being taught in the schools of the middle east? You’ll
never win the hearts and minds of 20something year old men, when their minds have already been warped. They’ll never accept anything other than fighting us.

First, are you sure “we” defeated fascism? I’m sure I didn’t. but, maybe you. If you were part of WW II, that is.

Communism?, Ha! Do you refer to the stalinist-burocratic state that ruled Sovet Union?

Again, were you a CIA agent doing destabilization work?

Second, perhaps it is possible to order cultures according to some simple measure (like: which cares most about child health, etc), but the moment you begin to take into account most and most of interesting features, the moment your linear order cease to be so, and it turns into a mess.

Worst, you don’t even bother to make explicit the criteria according to which you ranked radical islam as “inferior” (inferior to what?).

Are you sure we all would agree with you?

For example, maybe it is important to you to have a continous supply of cheap oil in order to drive your SUV several miles a day from your house to your work.

Guess what? I don’t give a damm about it. In fact, I strongly oppose such habits. And most of the world, Id’ guess.

Finally, I just want to point the fact that there are lots of things far worst that radical islam. US exterior policy, for example. Radical factions of every policital and religious spectrum, for example.