Having read your posts, I don't find that odd; I rather expected it, with all respect.
What I'd really find valuable, would be knowing one or a few Muslims well enough to get their honest take on this stuff. But the chance of that happening seems vanishingly remote ....
Not so remote if you were willing to make some temporary changes to embark on an adventure. Come rent an apartment in Glendale, California, and live there for a few months. Walk the streets of the city (it's mostly a pretty nice place), patronize the local stores, observe your neighbors, a huge percentage of whom will be Middle Easterners, and while many will be Christians, others will be Muslims. You will know right away which is which. The Christians are respectful, friendly, and hospitable.
Stand in line at a liquor/produce store that is eight or nine people long, and watch as a sullen young Middle Eastern man who is Muslim brazenly cuts in front of the elderly woman in front of you. He stays there until I and a few others get "uncivil" in our attitudes and force him to the back of the line.
Watch two ME Muslim men with a little boy of about six in a mall store, where the little boy picks up and blows on a half dozen toy horns with no attempt of the men to stop him; when the storekeeper (an Anglo woman, clearly American) tells the men that their little boy is acting out of line and getting his germs all over the horns, the Muslim men, immigrants to MY America, the America my father fought for and might have died for, NEVER look her in the eye. Women are beneath that (as I learned as a resident of Glendale for five years). Instead the two men look away, brush off her complaints as so much bullsh*t, and rudely ignore her (great example they're setting for the little boy).
Walk down a sidewalk on an overpass over the freeway, the overpass being on a busy street; you are a lone woman walking one direction dressed as if you're out for exercise, and coming the other way are two men dressed in business attire, deep in converstation. As an woman raised in a civil Judeo-Christian society, you assume that, as the sidewalk is not wide enough to accommodate three abreast, one of the gentleman will very briefly pause in his stride and step aside to let you pass, and that will be that.
But if they're Muslims, they will make no eye contact, nor make any moves to accommodate you. If if means forcing you out onto the busy street (as it did in my case), tough luck.
Yes, you should know some Muslims. Go move into a neighborhood they've taken over.
And again, tell me which is more civil: burning a mere symbol, paper, as a warning now, or to engage in bloodshed later because your enemy mistook your civility of NOT burning mere paper for cowardice?
Good post. When I was in college, there was this one particular vile nasty muslim Middle Easterner who told me all american women were a not so nice word. He was creepy. He just got in my space KWIM? I just ignored him and found a new place on campus to study. I’m sure he found some dumb twit who fell for the “charm” and $$$$. He was probably kin to Sheikh Khaled Mohammed from his looks. :::SHUDDERS::::
Then there was the Muslim owner of a convenient store who stuffed the flag in a trash can after 9/11 that got the ever loving crap beat out of him by one of the rednecks who frequented the store. The flag was proudly displayed after that.
I have some friends who are Pakistani Christians and some of the stuff they told me they had to deal with was just unbelievable. They had to flee for their lives.
Waitaminnit. Uh-oh. Now I'm questioning myself as to why I was (am) for Oriana Fallaci and against Terry Jones. Does that make sense? I ask myself.
Hmm. Maybe because Jones is an ally of the cretinous Fred Phelps, which is to say, vicious, anti-American, snake-mean and turkey-stupid? Why does Jones think the worldwide media are throwing this thing on the front-pages from Gibraltar to Jakarta? Because it hurts Islam?
Flipping back to thoughts of Fallaci.
I just decided to reprint this article here, since I see it disappeared from the Associated Press archives (!) (!) although it's still in the Washington Times archives:
Oriana Fallaci had described the pontiff as an ally in her campaign to rally Christians in Europe against what she saw as a Muslim crusade against the West. As she battled breast cancer last year, she had a private audience with Benedict, who was elected only a few months earlier, at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
In one of her final interviews, Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal: "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true."
Benedict was surprised by the gift of the books, which dated back as far as the 17th century and included volumes about the formation of modern-day Italy, American history, philosophy and theology, said Monsignor Rino Fisichella, rector of the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome.
Make of it what you will.