Poor bob. A wonderful libertarian information clearinghouse hasn’t become a home for right wing nonsense, lies, and propaganda. Tragic!

Still talking about Hunter Biden, eh? You still have nothing better? Another Benghazi nothing burger with fries….something fake to keep you mad at the right person. There’s zero credible evidence on that laptop, no evidence it ever belonged to Hunter, at best there’s evidence someone who hacked his email account at the same time the Russians hacked Clinton and the DNC created it, adding tons of fake information, photoshopped photos, fake and doctored emails, etc. Because the right had possession of it, and tampered with the contents for 9 months before “turning it over” (to Giuliani?), it’s nothing. Like a piece of evidence allegedly taken from a crime scene, washed, dipped in blood, exposed to close range gun fire, wiped with dna, tested at a filthy unaccredited lab with zero anti-cross contamination protocols, then handed to police and expecting a conviction. Just so stupid.

They don’t “vouch” for the emails….they say there are indications some of them are real….not all. Liars.

So family is fair game….now….but not Trump’s criminal family that undeniably took BILLIONS in bribes from horrific murderous dictators and Trump covered for them, directed his DOJ to not investigate or to just exonerate people like Mohammed bin Salman, even bragging he saved Mohammed’s ass from consequences for the live dismemberment of an American. Far from the only KNOWN bribe, Melania…..Don Jr, Eric, Jared, likely Barron too. Better investigate since this kind of stuff outrages you….but it doesn’t really, now does it? It’s just a crutch you cling to like an emotional support blanket, propaganda.

Oh wow! Right wing media isn’t reliable!? Who knew!? (EVERYBODY KNEW, YOU DUMB SHIT…for decades)

Whine some more, snowflakes. Why not create your own? (Because it would be chock full of insanity from day one, with zero real information or usefulness and you know it).

have read a number of Lee descendants were okay w/removing his statues, too. by now, i'd hope, most folks know R.E.L. said statues weren't gonna be helpful.

“I think it wiser, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

of course, he was talking about a gettysburg memorial, so maybe he was reluctant to have a memorial at the site of his gravest error.

but the issue is like most things: complicated. like the lincoln emancipation memorial. get how the couchant slave is a downer, but the fact former slaves paid for its erection, the model for the slave was t.s. eliott grandpa's gardener, a former escaped slave, and is mohammed ali's direct ancestor - is kinda cool. maybe worth having around just to explain all the details around its history.

Copyright claim by Mohamed Ali?

If 300000000 were dedicated to the destruction of western civilization, it would be destroyed today.

Her contention that the peaceful majority is irrelevant means we must be in fear of and at war with every group we could name, because they all have radicals. That's simply asinine.

She is really angry about this question.
There are MANY Islamic peace movements, contrary to their implications that this single woman is it. Just a few below.

Islamic Peace Movement UK, more widely known as Islamic Movement UK or IMUK, is the largest Islamic organisation in the UK.[1] It was formed in 1989 in Leeds by Mohammed Kilyam

Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad (Mir-za Mas-roor Ah-mad) is the fifth Khalifa (Caliph) of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

Spearhead by the Muslim Peace Coalition, 100 New York Imams in the spring of 2011 stood together to issue an historic statement that established the link between wars at home and wars abroad.

Well, no, it's a problem I have with Christians because they say what Jesus says is the truth.

Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."

A Christian says, "See, Jesus said it so it must be true."

A person may then ask, "Er, so why should we trust this Jesus person?"

There follows a fair bit of circuitous reasoning from the Christian that usually ends with the assertion, "Because Jesus said so."

And there you stand along side the Muslim telling us that "Mohammed is the way - because Mohammed and I say so."

And along side the member of the Peoples Temple who says "Jim Jones is the way - because Jim Jones and I say so."

And you all sound just as bat-shit crazy.

This is unbelievably sloppy thinking. You have a woeful understanding of no true scotsman as well as, apparently, the english language in general.

There are divorced catholics because catholic doctrine is not that it's literally impossible to obtain a divorce. Catholics who get divorces don't suffer sudden existential collapse and wink out of reality. There are no catholics who doubt and despise the bible, who believe that there's no god or historical jesus, and who participate in no catholic tradition. That would be contradictory, and oh look, it's possible to construct a 'no true...' statement that is nevertheless correct. There are no pro-lifers who believe abortion is fine and should be freely available to everyone. There are no democrats who are republicans. There are no jews who believe jesus is the son of god. There are no peaceful muslims.

Put that aside for now. You're arguing for the end of all moral judgement and distinction. Humans are not consistent, therefore it would be outrageous to condemn a car thief for stealing a car. After all, look at all the times he didn't steal a car. Fuck off.

It's possible to make generalisations about arbitrarily large groups that share common attributes. People who steal things are thieves. Apples are fruits. Muslims are violent.

By definition, all muslims share first the belief that mohammed was a good person and second the conviction to follow his example and instruction. By necessity, all muslims share the guilt for the evils of that man, and the evils brought into the world as a result of his legacy.

As psychologist Nicolai Sennels explains, "Mohammed, the prime example for Muslims, married Aisha when she was six and had intercourse with her when she was nine. Besides, according to the Quran (4:24), Muslims are allowed to have sex with female slaves[.]" In addition, "uncovered women are in many Muslim cultures seen as a kind of prostitute, and if a man is aroused by such a female, then – partly due to the corrupted logic of responsibility within Muslim psychology – the female is blamed for being raped (and will therefore often face execution)."

Andrew C. McCarthy, in his book entitled The Grand Jihad, described rape by Muslim immigrants as the "unspoken epidemic of Western Europe." Six years later, it continues to expand and sweep across the continent. Ingrid Carlqvist documents how Sweden is now the rape capital of the West, and when "Michael Hess, a local politician from [the] Sweden Democrat Party, tried to warn his nation that 'it is deeply rooted in Islam's culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings' he was charged with 'denigration of ethnic groups'" – a crime in Sweden.

According to Islamic clerics, a woman who fails to wear a headscarf is asking to be raped. Consequently, in the eyes of Muslim men, Western women are seen as "promiscuous, loose, and willing," and since no one in the Islamic community refutes this, they engage in the violence and abuse of power that rape represents. In Australia, Lebanese gangs threaten policemen's wives and girlfriends with rape. In 2006, the mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al Hilali, maintained that "women who do not veil themselves, and allow themselves to be 'uncovered meat,' are at fault if they are raped."

In Rotherham, England, some 1,400 British children as young as 11 were plied with drugs before being passed around and sexually abused by Muslims. As shocking as this was, it is the fifth sex abuse ring led by Muslims

In Nigeria, Boko Haram seized 300 schoolgirls in order to sell them on the open market.

In Pakistan, the police do nothing as Hindu and Christian children as young as 7 years old are gang-raped and sold as prostitutes or slaves to wealthy Muslim families. From 2011 through 2014, approximately 550 Egyptian Coptic Christian girls were abducted and sexually abused by Muslim men.

I could go on and on, but the point is that in Islam, a women is considered to be a subservient and second class person. Men are supreme and women who do not dress appropriately (per Islamic standards) risk things happening to them. This is nothing new, it is part of their culture. Exposing them to women not raised in that culture is going to lead to incidents.

Now, please note that I do not think that we should not accept refugees. But I do think that we should make sure that women are aware of the situation and we should absolutely be enforcing the law in regards to the people breaking it, refugees or not.

@newtboy @ChaosEngine --

I think there are a LOT of political/geographical influences that exacerbate underlying problems, like ChaosEngine is saying. But, a lot of the underlying problems can be traced to the religions themselves too. And while extremists / fundamentalists in Christianity and Islam are both very very bad, I don't necessarily think that both religions are "indistinguishable" in terms of generating those extremists.

Bill thinks that Islam is worse about generating those people than Christianity and other religions. That's where the "motherlode of bad ideas" thing comes from. I tend to think he's at least partially right -- but social/political/economic/geographic issues are certainly a very big influence that he doesn't usually touch on. And in the video Fareed makes a very good point about many Muslim countries NOT having high rates of extremist incidents that tends to support the importance of those other factors that aren't directly tied to religion.

Bill might come across as anti-Islam more frequently (especially of late), but I think he's really quite equal opportunity anti-religion in general. But one of the ways that he perceives Islam being worse than Christianity is that if you make fun of the pope, or suggest that he's a pedophile or something, you're a lot less likely to end up dead than if you say something critical about Mohammed.

As shitty as Christianity is / may be, in the west we've progressed far enough that at least we can criticize its faults without (too much) fear of being killed for pointing them out. And THAT has been very helpful in the rapid diminishing of Christianity in Europe and the UK, even though we haven't caught up in the US yet. I think that is where Bill makes a fair point, and something that potentially counters Fareed's seemingly more rational / steady Eddie take on the issue.

What a load of horseshit.

I have no intention of arguing that Mohammed was anything other than a terrible human being.

But to say that all Muslims are guilty of mass rape or genocide is so patently absurd it's barely worth rebutting.

Are they guilty of cognitive dissonance? Hell yeah.

I've argued in the past that almost all members of religions are hypocrites; either you believe your religion is divine and therefore, infallible, or you're just making up your own morality and therefore tacitly acknowledging your religion is a flawed man-made thing.

But since the alternative is insane fanatical fundamentalism, I can forgive a little hypocrisy.

The moral gap between hypocrisy and mass rape or genocide is pretty fucking substantial. If you can't or won't understand that, then you're looking at the world in terms of absolutes and little better than a fanatic yourself.

Oh, and ordinarily, I would take this as given, but just in case you really are that simple, I think mass rape and genocide are Bad Things.

Do not rape people. Do not murder people. Especially do not do this to lots of people.

Clear?

This is certainly hate speech. I hate muslims; not islam, muslims.

Muslims, like jews, christians and neo-nazis, are by definition not decent people. It's islam that we're concerned with in particular, and islam is substantially the worst of those ideologies.

It's easy, isn't it, lazily to accuse your opponents of ignorance - but I'm obliged to wonder how much you actually know about islam, its texts and its history.

It is a historical and scriptural fact that mohammed was a rapist and promoter of rape among his followers, as well as being a slaver and warlord and murderer of many thousands of people. All muslims know this, and all have chosen to endorse his crimes and follow his teachings and are, as a fundamental tenet of the islamic faith, expected to emulate his behaviour.

Can you dispute even a single word of what I've just asserted? All muslims are guilty of mass-rape. All muslims are guilty of mass-murder.

It's sad to see those who flatter themselves that they're progressives descend into rape-apology and collaboration with genocidal fascism.

The point at issue isn't 'is islam bad', though obviously it is; but 'is it possible to generalise about large numbers of people who are in the same club and believe the same things' well yes of course it is. As for corroborative evidence, this is not an assertion that requires it. To the extent that it's possible to generalise about anything, it must be possible to generalise about people who have voluntarily signed up to the same ideology.

What's more the actions of individual muslims aren't important. You can't judge any ideology by the actions of its supporters because mostly they will act from, for example, biological imperatives, personal temperament, cultural factors independent of religion and so on, regardless of what they profess to believe. Which is not to say religion isn't influential and dangerous. To assess the merit of an ideology you have to look at what it actually says, what are its core tenets, what are the principles it espouses, and if you do that and ask the question 'does islam promote violence' the answer is an unequivocal 'yes'. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with promoting violence, but it's not my fault these people can't structure a proposition clearly.

Let's build some consensus. I'm sure everyone here can agree that islam's claims are unfactual, that there is no allah, that mohammed was a liar and that all muslims are idiots. These things are obvious, but given these certain truths wherefore do we defend these delusional maniacs? Certainly none of them is innocent. These are creatures who have signed up to follow the example, the whole point of islam is to follow mohammed's example, of a notorious murderer, slaver and rapist (historical and canonical facts); whose rambling, repetitive book is riddled with threats of eternal torture for unbelievers and exhortations to the faithful to slay those unbelievers, hastening them to that unjust end. Guilty, every one.

If you oppose bigotry, you oppose islam.

@Asmo

You ought to be careful about accusing others of ignorance when you have to resort to googling "islam homogenous" and spamming us with the first links you find. Oh my, talk about making a fool of yourself.

All the PhDs in the world can't alter reality; personally I'd be suspicious of the intellectual credentials of anyone who wasted their career on so vacuous and puerile a subject. Every widespead philosophy will inevitably factionalise to some extent; this is hardly relevant where the objections are to its core tenets and universal beliefs. Remind me, which of the major sects is the good one?

Incidentally, I skipped over this before but the claim that there are 1.5 billion muslims in the world is an outright lie. Most of that number are muslim in the same sense that winston smith is a loyal supporter of ingsoc.

It's tedious to have to continually restate the case against islam in every discussion where the lazy and dishonest leap to the defence of an ideology they've failed to adequately research. Suffice to say that any liberal, modern thinker who had, say, read the qur'an, or looked into the life and character of mohammed, or talked to muslims about what they actually believe, which is never what they reveal to unsympathetic ears; would hesitate before condemning all anti-islamic sentiment as bigotry.

If Mohammed can't get out from under the mountain...

The nation of Islam is not Muslims. Its a cult, they believe Elijah Mohammed is a messiah whose real name is Wallace D. Fard Muhammad who faked his death and came back as Elijah Mohammed.

They believe blacks are the lost tribe of Israel. That Arabs are not true Muslims. And white race was created by Lucifer.

They also have a suicide pact as well as they are organized crime lime mafia and have performed many assassinations.

Ice they assassinated Malcolm who was "2nd" they replaced him with Louis Farrakhan who has admitted he killed Malcolm.