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Now, if someone came along and said -

First the bible, and it's instruction to depopulate Canaan ...and then there is the way that most Christians conduct themselves....really peaceful...but able to change into a radical Nazi warrior if the mood hits right...mob mentality?...I don't know...cultural influence and pressure will turn a lot of so called 'peaceful' Christians into goosestepping Nazis in my opinion.

Would you take that seriously? Would it deserve to be taken seriously? All you have to know is a little bit about human nature to know it is ludicruous.

But does the silliness of the parallel line above mean there never were any Nazis on the soil of historic Christendom? No. Does it mean that ideology wasn't extremely dangerous, and worth resisting, and resisting by force because nothing else would serve? Again, no.

There is a real problem in the Islamic world today. They have an international political faction with followings in many countries, that is a truly nasty ideology, and in its impotence that faction resorts to external terrorism, in order to score internal points for audacity and defiance. This is very dangerous because it means there is nothing outsiders can do that would end the attacks, except to root out and defeat that ideology.

It is an unappeaseable hostility - that part of your perception is quite accurate. It just isn't the only, or even the majority, view, in most Islamic countries today. Any more than the extreme and truly dangerous ideologies of the 20th century in Europe were equivalent to the whole civilization of Christendom.

You've done a great service here with your analysis of the real political differences within what too many Americans see as a monolithic Islamic world.

I do not expect any State in the Islamic world to overtly support our efforts to punish bin Laden and his lieutenants and thugs. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we will receive covert assistance. Bin Laden is a loose cannon even for that region. It appears he has been running a terroristic protection racket against "moderate" regimes, and I think most of the political and religious leaders in that sphere would be pleased as punch if he were gone. He's like Albert Anastasia during his "Murder Incorporated" spree ... a liability to even the most fervent believers in the "cause".

The audacity of this week's evil attack must have shocked the leaders of every Islamic state around the world. No matter which of the four groups you highlighted they belong in. I imagine initial reaction of the Taliban leaders to the attacks was something the Afghani equivalent of "oh sh*t! Here it comes."

JasonC, thanks for a very thorough discussion of the matter. As you have pointed out, the Islamic world is not monolithic, and the history is long and complicated. An earlier poster on some other thread said that it was all the result of Western intervention in Muslim territories in the last 200 years, which is nonsense. Muslims have been fighting, not only the West, but among themselves, practically since the beginning. One thing that has not been mentioned, for example, is that after several centuries of Moorish rule in Spain, the ruling Moorish group was ousted by another, more radical Islamic group from another part of the Middle East, which put an end to the very celebrated culture of Moorish Spain although continuing the Islamic captivity of that land.

Could one make this point about Christianity? Of course, but there are significant differences. One is the fact that Christianity does have a central authority, which can trace its lineage to Peter. Even while this is rejected by some Christians, it does (and always did) function as a locus for some governing authority and also imposes a certain uniformity. Islam, to my knowledge, does not have this. Judaism does not have it, either, but on the other hand, Judaism is not a prosletysing religion. Either you're born into it or you're not. But Islam is a prosletysing religion which lacks a central doctrinal authority and any type of central control or even point of appeal.

The other is that in Christianity, the relationship between the Church and the State has been a matter of discussion since very early on. It has also been the cause of many wars and bloody disputes in which kings and the Church constantly attempted to define (and then exceed) the limits of their power. However, it has been a subject of discussion and the matter has been more or less worked out; again, to my knowledge, this is not so in the case of Islam.

One thing that has not been mentioned anywhere is the strange alliance that has cropped up in some places between varieties of Islamic fundamentalism and a very hard-line type of Marxism. I have always felt the fact that many of the most radical Marxist terrorist groups are known to have trained in the Middle East and have Middle Eastern connections is something that we, in our delight at the collapse of the Soviet Union, completely overlooked. In general, I feel that the only way the West can be said to be responsible for any of this is that we have been blissfully ignoring all of the warning flags that have long been fluttering in various parts of the globe. Perhaps knowledgeable contributions such as that of JasonC will give us some indication of how to respond to this new (but very old) reality.