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May I ask you a question? While I realize that the Pope of your religion supports Islam, have you ever looked at what Islam teaches regarding Jesus Christ?

They say that Jesus Christ is not the Son of God come in the flesh.

That creates a problem for your argument that they worship the same God as Christians.

1 John 2:22 Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.

1 John 4:3 And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

2 John 1:7 ¶For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

It isn't hate to expose what a huge group of people believe. It's common sense.

"May I ask you a question? While I realize that the Pope of your religion supports Islam, have you ever looked at what Islam teaches regarding Jesus Christ?"

A point of clarification here. Catholic teaching on Islam is that there is a great deal of common ground between Christianity and Islam than say ... Christianity and Wicca or Christianity and Hinduism. I don't think that this is exactly quite that hard to acknowledge.

Regarding the identity of the deity that Muslims worship, I would point out that contemporary Jews also do not acknowledge that Jesus Christ is God, yet most Freepers don't see this as proof of Jewish apostacy, claim that Jews do not worship the Yahweh Godhead, or abrogation of Jewish claims to the Holy Land.

I, however, am not defending Islamic Christology, which have rather strong objections to. However, the verses you cited strike me as referring to the Gnostic sects formed by Simon Magus (the Gnostics believed that Jesus was a spiritual rather than physical being and hence could not have flesh) or to opponents of Christianity within Judaism who denied that Jesus is the Messiah. This is my interpretation of these verses, and while I doubt that you'll agree with it, I am simply putting it out there to point out that your method of interpreting a text is not the only one, which is one of the my big points about these verses from the Qur'an that are so frequently posted around here.

"It isn't hate to expose what a huge group of people believe. It's common sense."

Indeed. However, the problem that the "Islam is Evil" advocates run into is the same one that black racists like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton run into every day that a black guy isn't beaten, lynched, or otherwise harmed by whites. If all or even a sufficiently large number of Muslims subscribed to the interpretations of the Qur'an that you posted, my own opinion is that a large part of Detroit would have been engulfed in street-to-street fighting immediately following 9/11. The DC sniper (who may indeed be part of al-Fuqra, let's not rule anything out here) would have been just the tip of the iceberg compared to the potential amount of violence that America's Muslim population could unleash against the US.

It's the same standard by which the liberal stereotype of gunowners as white supremacist, anti-government, homicidal time bombs fails. The vast majority of gunowners are peaceful, patriotic, law-abiding citizens who choose to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms. The idea of cracking down on those gunowners who are nuts doesn't preclude the fact that the vast majority of gunowners are no closer to Conspiracy Theorist Psycho Shooter #347 than the average Muslim appears to be any closer to al-Qaeda or its global jihad.

If all or even a majority of gunowners held to kind of white supremacist, anti-government beliefs that liberals like to tar and feather them with, the amount of damage that they could do would be nothing short of horrifying. But there seem to be a rather profound lack of anti-government or racist shootings, hence I think evidence at hand does not justify the liberal conclusion. The whole idea that all or most Muslims are either tacit supporters of or actual terrorists fails by the same standards. And I think that most attempts to tar and feather Islam with such a definition only serves to provide one of the easiest recruiting to tools to al-Qaeda.

The United States honestly does not want to get caught up in a global holy war. I realize that some Freepers are itching for the day when President Bush announces a crusade against Islam, but I think that these people have already surrendered themselves to all of the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric. This is not entirely their fault, as I view the moderate factions of Islam as not having made enough effort after 9/11 to publicize their views, effectively ceding the playing field to Wahhabi puppets like CAIR or the AMC.

I scanned over your quotes from the Qur'an, and let me just make following observations:

- Here again, what these verses mean varies a great deal from sect to sect. Some, like the Wahhabis, view them as referring to the contemporary age, with the infidels being modern day non-Muslims. Others, such as the Hanafis (the Turkish sect of Islam), see them as referring to the ancient polytheist tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and see no more reason to carry out such threats than a Christian feels a need to go out and kill those who engage false witness after reading the account of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11.

- I'm not going to condone Mohammed's actions against the Bani Quraiza or Bani al-Nadir tribes. However, it might be noted that a Muslim could make similar claims about the life of say ... King David, who is described in the Bible as a man after God's own heart. I don't plan to justify Mohammed or his actions, I'm simply arguing that I don't believe that all of his followers are out on some mass campaign to destroy Western civilization.

Continuing onwards, it strikes me that your records of Islamic terrorism can generally be classified as being part of three major groups: Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and Palestinian groups of some stripe or another.

However, the question is not whether they felt that they had some type of theological justification behind their actions. While in many cases this is true, I don't think you can really classify the Palestinian terrorists' desire for an independent state as being an Islamic cause. The current Palestinian Authority certainly isn't under the sha'riah and up until the beginning of the current Intifada when Arafat decided to reinvent himself as a religious as well as political leader, religion really didn't factor much into the Palestinian cause (this is the primary complaint of Hamas and Islamic Jihad against Arafat). The Palestinian terrorists of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were all secular and in some cases (PFLP) even communist nationalists.

The same goes for the examples of Libyan terrorism that you sanctioned. During the 1980s, Qadaffi provided money and weaponry to any organization or country that hated the US or NATO, including the communist government of Nicaragua, the IRA, the ETA, and the Italian Red Brigades. To classify Libyan terrorism as "Islamic terrorism" is naive at best given that Qadaffi is far more of a student of Hitler or Stalin than he is of say Ibn Abd al-Wahhab or even Sayyid Qutb.

Additionally, nearly all of the true examples of Islamic terrorism you provided can be linked back to two strains of Islam, Khomeinism (after the late Ayatollah Khomeini) and Wahhabism.

Khomeinism is already quite unpopular in the land of its birth, as you can see with the daily reports of protests and insurrections in Iran. How can this be if the majority of the population consists of Muslims and all Muslims support the formation of such regimes?

Wahhabism is still alive and kicking, unfortunately, but this is largely due to the United States' continued (and unfortunately naive) patronage of Saudi Arabia. So long as the Wahhabi religious establishment there remains intact, the anti-Western, anti-American, pro-terrorist crap will continue to be the rallying cry for Muslims worldwide. The Wahhabis have infiltrated a great deal of prestigious Islamic religious positions between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and 2002. They control 80% of the mosques in the US and Europe and fan the flames of extremism worldwide through their interpretation of the Qur'an. If you want to defeat Islamic terrorism, then I suggest the US come clean and acknowledge Riyadh as an adversary. Because so long as we keep on viewing the Saudis as our friends, the more time (to say nothing of money) they will continue to say one thing in the mosque and something very different at the Embassy.

I look forward to your response.