“Well said.”
Thank you. There are two ways to lose the war on terror. You could kowtow to them or treat everyone as the enemy. The extremes on both sides are doing their utmost to ensure this happens.
“Apparently the theory is that if we nuke Mecca, the Muslims will wilt and give up. Anyone who believes that belongs in an insane asylum.”
Yeah, just look at 9/11! Americans immediately adopted Islam and Pres. Bush surrendered his Presidency to Rep. Keith Ellison...
Ooops.
“At best, it would accomplish nothing. At worst, it would turn all one billion Muslims against us - and many live right here in the USA.”
FReepers keep citing that Quranic passage about if Mecca disappears, Islam is a lie. Well, what if you nuke it and it didn’t disappear? What will be the next step, genious? Islam is not a lie and you just convinced 1 billion people to join Bin Laden.
Considering what DBrow (customary ping) said about the Qaa’ba being formed by a meteorite, its survival despite a thermonuclear strike, scientifically, is not so far-fetched.
“Has anyone noticed than no other Republican is going along with this? However, I wish some of them would jump up and say, “SHUT UP, TOM!”
That’s probably why Karl Rove told him to “Never darken the WH’s door again.”
That’s not quite what I was getting at, pardon me for bad writing.
The stone in the silver receptacle in the K’aaba is stated to be a meteorite itself, but analysis shows it to be a piece of the fused crater of a strike. Somebody picked it up and put it in the K’aaba, I don’t remember when, but it was revered as a “stone from the sky” (they were a bit ahead of Thomas Jefferson, weren’t they?).
It won’t survive a Big One at all. Pika-DON! and it’s gone.
The point I was making is that since they already have a piece of fused sand in their reliquary, making a big disk of fused glass where the old one was revered may be an event easily integrated into their legends.
Just for fun:
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0284287.htm
Capt. Kirk, if unwilling to use the phasers, would have beamed the whole thing into the sun. Although much more difficult and expensive in casualties without Scotty's transporter, the end result IS technically possible today and probably would be theologically confusing. However, the rock was stolen once in the past and resided in Bahrain for 20+ years before being returned. Islam survived that. So we should be careful when contemplating what our logic says should be a decapitation attack on a religion. Their logic might not work the same way.