[Darheel]

It is too wordy to slice up the Islamic world into political pieces when the Koran tells them all what to do: kill or convert the Infidel(us) who is an animal. The rest is all worthless blather Liberals including my professors discuss as though it matters, IMHO. I also think it is dangerous to try to define their culture in political terms which are foreign to them. Instead we need to understand the motives of a 'religion' based on the destruction of the West. The word Jihad means the same to a Paki as it does to a Afghan; just ask your local 7-11 clerk if these bums were martyrs, you'll be shocked the lengths they'll go to defend them.

[JasonC]

Do you think everyone in Chicago believes everything written in the old testament? They don't, you know. Neither does everyone in Egypt or Pakistan (let alone Indonesia or Nigeria) believe everything written in the Koran. If they've even read it. If they can even read.

The political opinions I laid out are not any imposition of outside categories, they are the things the people of the region fight with each other about, all the time. Do you think all the Algerian soldiers fighting a civil war against Islamic fundamentalists in their own country agree with the guys they are shooting? Whether you delude yourself that far or not, they don't.

Understanding the politics even of your own country with any accuracy and nuance can be trying to the impatient. Thus the popularity of the common American sentiment that all politicians are the same and it doesn't make any difference anyway. I trust everyone at Free Republic knows better than that about politics -here-. Well, there are real differences elsewhere, too. Your lack of interest in them does not mean they do not exist.

On a practical level, I quite agree that anyone who defends Tuesday's attack, or is pleased by it, shares the guilt of the perpetrators - politically speaking. That hardly embraces the whole of Islam, however, and who thinks otherwise is kidding himself. Remember, when we speak of the whole of Islam we are talking about 1 billion people from west Africa to New Guinea, and from Madagascar to the Urals. Not just Sudan and Afghanistan, and a quarter to a half of the population of the countries in between. Which is all you will find cheering this outrage.