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The hypocrisy, dishonesty, and double-standards behind every perceived "affront" to "Muslims everywhere" cannot be pointed out enough. This needs to be repeated, calmly, reasonably, and intelligently, until everyone gets it.

My only problem here is the lip service to "the supremacy of the nation-state" that "gives (!) rights back to its citizens," Rousseau, and the "social contract." Such collectivist thinking is very inappropriate in a discourse examining groupthink (Islam) against individual rights (the West). It gives too much ground to the Islamists that seek to deny these rights in the name of their poor, delicate, sensitive group that collectively goes ballistic at the slightest provocation.

Finally, it should be pointed out that if a billion people can be brought to their knees by nothing more than 12 cartoons, what business do they have demanding that everyone else be brought down to their level, rather than raise themselves to ours?

You Wrote: "Finally, it should be pointed out that if a billion people can be brought to their knees by nothing more than 12 cartoons, what business do they have demanding that everyone else be brought down to their level, rather than raise themselves to ours?"

- Excellent point.

I reject Rousseau as well. The French were blessed with great Enlightenment thinkers, but it was the socialists (Danton and others) that took the revolution and turned it into an anti-clerical/anti-Captilist free for all. I think some one said that the difference between the French and America experience is that America’s founders believed that all men were CREATED equal, but the French believed that all men should be MADE equal.

You are right to say that what were are fighting is a form of Collectivism. What tradional collectivists fail to realize is that the Islamic form is not compatable with their own. They don't seek to find common ground with it anymore than the National Socialists ever sought to find common ground with the Bolshevists.