Do your serach on Rabbai Ben-Chaim, Schneerson etc. and you’ll know what message of hatred that they preach. They hate all non-Jews.

So why are we not reformng Judaism. After all, If the Israeli people believd that Christians and muslims have the same rights as Jews, there would never be a Palestinian problem — or Iraq problem or Iran problem

This is what the Talmud, the holiest book of Judaism, says about Christians.

The Talmud recommends persecution of Christians. Christians are heretics (Abodah Zarah 16b), apostates (Shabbethai 116). Christians may be legally thrown into a pit to die (AZ, 26b). Christians deserve death for observing the Sabbath (even though they observe the Noahide laws) (Sanh. 58b) and studying the Old Testament (Sanh. 59a). Christianity is an unforgivable sin, seducing Jews to idolatry (AZ 17a). The testimony of a Christian is unworthy to be admitted to a Jewish court (Shulshan Aruk, Hoshen Mishpat 34,31). Jews are forbidden to return a lost article to a Christian (HM 266,2). Matthew, Luke, Nicodemus, and Thaddeus were executed as heretics ( Jewish Encyclopedia, “Jesus,” page 171). Jews should rejoice, dress in white, and eat, drink, and be merry at the death of a Christian. They should hate a Christian with utmost hatred and consider him an enemy (Semahot ch. 2, p. 35).

It’s a two way street here. For everybody to play nice everybody has to play nice.

But there is a level at which people who are so focused in all their passions on That Man in the White House have to see past Bush and look into the eyes of Bin Laden and his type, and realize that the prooblem between us and them was there before 2000 and will be there after 2008 and what are you going to think about it and what are you going to do about it?

Hating Bush is just so much easier and more comfortable, isn’t it?

To the other side, direct all the fascist, fundamentalist, terrorist supporters and suicide bombers; those who preach jihad and wish to ressurect the caliphate impose shari’a law on all of us, the Zarquawis, Bin ladens, Amedinajads, Ibrahim Hoopers, and their militias, ect…

Then begin to drop bombs.

Man DOES live on bread alone, and when poor people act violently, it is only out of frustration because they are not distributed enough bread by the capitalist Jews that hoarde it. Am I right? If we stop “oppressing” poor, brown people, they will naturally abandon their “opiate of the masses” and become proper, secular liberals like yourself, correct?

I agree with you. The gospels of Jesus are just like the Koran and Hadiths. Didn’t Jesus lead an army to ethnically cleanse the land of Jews just as Mohammad did? I seem to recall that story about how Jesus ordered his army to behead 800 Jewish men because of a rumor that they betrayed his trust. Also, evangelical Christians are more dangerous than evangelical Muslims. I would rather have my child’s hand cut off for stealing candy, or have her clitorus removed, or have her married off at the age of nine, than to have her be taught abstinence only sex-ed in school.

Look at how all those Jews in Israel throw stones at women guilty of adultery, just as it says in the Torah. All of the laws of leviticus are enforced in Israel, just as the Koranic laws were enforced by the Taliban.

When all 4 schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, and all 7 grand Ayatollas of the Shia’t proclaim that the Koran is the immutable, uninterpretable devine monologue spoken to Mohammad vocally in Arabic, they are all lying right? All religions are similarly peaceful and misunderstood, including the Branch-Davidians and the Imperial Shinto cult of WWII japan.

Nothing to see here, move along…

Because there are no fire and brimstone parts of the Bible. I mean aside from the parts actually about fire and brimstone.

What I see is is an almost complete lack of any reporting of anything even remotely positive in Iraq. This reflects the great hangover of the 60’s and 70’s – it’s only cool to constantly find fault and criticize everything about our government and country. It’s as bad having to listen to those old Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin songs for the 100,000th time. Can’t we ever finally grow up and get past all that worn out stuff? Or does that represent the zenith of our society and it’s only downhill now? I certainly hope not.

I understand how the guy in the movie Groundhog Day felt. Just hoping to wake up one morning and it’s finally a new day.

If ye go not forth [and fight], He will afflict you with a painful doom, and will choose instead of you a folk other than you. (Koran 9:39)

Beyond the money used to legitimise authoritarian regimes, their position on the Arabian peninsula, and especially the Saudi role as home to the “Two Holy Places”, gives them extra credibility in their claims to Islamic purity.

You need to stop with your ethnocentric conceit that only the West can cause anything and that the “wogs” can’t spontaneously generate their own motives and movements. Salafists and Wahabists have been endemic to Arabia for generations. The combination of modern technology, authoritarian governments, and oodles of money is pretty much guaranteed to spread the ideology. Irrespective of any action on the part of the West or the US, we would be facing a similar problem, as the oil would have been developed under whatever hegemon and the governments would be atrocious under any prospective leftist version of what history ought to have been.

The only way that we could have prevented the spread of Salafism would have been to reinforce British control of its colonies. The greatest crime of the West since WWII has been decolonisation, with competent, responsible (if unrepresentative) governments replaced by failed or failing states and vicious autocracies. Current policies are the only way to improve the situation, by reinstating direct hegemony and mandating responsible, representative constitutional democracies that will not be allowed to fail.

Sure. But that’s why I tried to emphasize “opportunity” a bit. In my view, one of the good things to come out of the Iraq brouhaha is that it gave democracy promotion a rhetorical lift (if not necessarily an actual lift). A candidate who can tap into that without reeking of hypocrisy may be able to get some good accomplished in this world.

The key is going to shift that promotion of democracy (which, as we are seeing, can result in a population voting for a religious tyranny) towards promotion of civil and human rights. That’s not a hard shift to accomplish.

I think part of why we (or at least I) don’t want to concede the point is the question of whether our actual policies really are any different. I don’t doubt that many sincerely believe them to be, but I remain skeptical, with plenty of evidence on my side, I think.

Or maybe it’s because far preceding recent years there has been a reflexive instinct to see the West/U.S. as automatically the more-bad guy, thus giving whatever thug, zealot or megalomaniac more of the benefit of the doubt.

Sure. But from what did that “reflective instinct” arise, if not from the U.S.’s longstanding realpolitik in the region? Our torture and detainment policies are right in line with that realpolitik of the past, and not with the larger, more inspiring vision of spreading democracy and all that.

This is where leftists and rightists on the war meet, clunk into each other, and keep on walking. Leftists like myself don’t usually want to concede that our current policies, as bad as they sometimes are, actually are an improvement – and more importantly, an opportunity – compared to what we’ve done in the past. Rightists see that, but at the same time they want to pretend that past never happened.

As for the rest of the Muslim masses, evidently he figures that if you can’t make them like you enough to fight alongside you, the next best thing is to make them fear you enough not to dare stand against you.

By whom?

The answer to ‘who is worse?’ is immatererial as long as the conversation even has traction. Sean’s examples are a perfect illustration of the things that even allow a comparison to take place. One might say that the facts are best presented as we are ‘better than X’ as opposed to the half-emptyish ‘not-as-bad-as’, but the fact that relativism is even involved, that we cannot be accurately and overwhelming be described as ‘good’ is the root problem.

Beheadings and car bombs are clearly worse than a spot of torture, but you have to think about it for a second, don’t you? Now imagine that you were less inclined to think favorably of us.