Show one sentence, one phrase, one word, one letter where I “[discount] right wing violence”. You will not find it. You will, on the other hand, find a few places where I note that both Islamist and right-wing violence are a concern – though we (at least most of us) can have a reasonable, adult conversation about which is the greater concern.

You did not refute my – admitably debatable – claim. Instead you suggested it may be untrue. And again, even if it was, I adjusted that claim.

I am well aware of the work the SPLC does in monitoring non-right-wing extremism, as I pointed out befre when I mentioned the article on campus antisemitism. This does not, in my view detract from their responsibility to label some Islamist groups as hate groups also. For example, the Federation for American Immigration reform was – belatedly, in my opinion – labeled a hate group for a) the racism of its founder, b) the platform it gives to white nationalist conspiracy theories about the North American Union and the “reconquista”, and c) it’s current connection to racist groups like the CCC. Compare the bigotry and actions of FAIR with, say, the Muslim American Society.

http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_I.....ociety.htm

And again, to return to my original question, do you consider the various hearings into right-wing extremism to also be a waste of time? If so, why?

BZZZZT! Wrong. I am not Muslim and am generally opposed to religion on ideological grounds, though I do not believe in attacking, demonizing, or degrading people simply for having religious beliefs.

“Since the events of a lone loonatic in Okahoma literally 10s of 1000s (if not more) Muslims have been brutally murdered at the hands of their co-religionists. Most of the victims of muslim terror attacks are muslims themselves.”

Let’s see, that lone lunatic blew up the building in 1995 IIRC, the same year which the bloody Bosnian war, as well as the destruction of the Serbian Republic in Krajina by Catholic Croatia, ended. Looks like Christians don’t get along too well all the time either. All throughout that time the Tamil Tigers were still active, and they were Hindus.

The point is that these insurgencies we see have far less to do with Islam, but rather certain economic and political processes which have been going on in these countries. Islam is used by various parties to justify things that have nothing to do with the religion, and are sometimes opposed to its teachings.

“But Hey! You’ve got ONLY one terror attack in with which to distract us from islamic Oklahoma murder and from which to draw an ridiculous and unfounded equivalence between 1000s of Far Right islamist inspired acts of mass-murder, and the actions of but a single individual.”

Sorry but you can’t have it both ways- the majority of Islamic terror attacks you alluded to were committed outside of the US. Inside the US, one is far more likely to be killed by a domestic terrorist than a foreign one.

“Muslim clerics often condemn acts of islamist inspired Far Right murder, but none are willing to take any concrete actions to ensure that other actions are thwarted.”

Sorry but the question I was answering was the assertion that Muslims clerics don’t condemn terror, a lie of idiotic proportions. I don’t see what “concrete actions” they should take.

“Islam isn’t ( despite its claims) an Abrahamic religion, and its clerics, thus, are under no moral or religious compuction , the way Jews and Christians are, to tell us the truth.”

Laughably incorrect. The line of argument you are using used to be used against Jews, nearly word for word.

“Several high ranking islamist clerics ( all of whom are Far Right) such as Yosuf Qaradawi have publically condemned terror attacks in, only to be videoed promoting and condoning acts of Islamist inspired Far Right violence against both Jews and Christians behind closed doors. Several documentaries done in Britian have shown many muslim clerics lying through their teeth on this question. Your links thus, and the info they contain haven’t any value whatsoever.”

Sooooo…if we find a few people in a particular group lying, then everyone belonging to this group must be lying! This is an excellent logical concept.

1) I think it makes more sense to put them on the right instead of the left, but black supremacist organizations are monitored by the SPLC. They don’t really qualify as left, but I imagine that right-wing opponents of the SPLC believe that the SPLC is ignoring such groups and should monitor such groups.

2) They also sometimes have stuff about animal rights extremists and environmentalist extremists. I’m not sure they really belong as they are neither bigoted nor part of the radical right. But the SPLC do monitor them.

So, the SPLC goes after groups other than radical right and/or white supremacist organizations.

Tom

What’s wrong about King’s hearings is that they waste the time of a Congress that should be dealing with real issues and inflame the public in exactly the way the McCarthy hearings did half a century ago. If you are unaware of the work SPLC does in monitoring hate groups not that are not part of the extreme right you have not investigated the SPLC very thoroughly. Perhaps you are “one of those gay, atheist, College Democrat, SPLC-supporting Grand Dragons” but you are wrong about this issue.

Mr. Khan wrote this in respect to Pakistan’s recent events. How true all of this is, I don’t know. I just wanted to share this, because like me, there are some who don’t know much besides what some anti-Muslim groups have to say.

Minnie

However, keep in mind, as Ruslan stated, we (U.S.) usually don’t have the problems like in other countries. I’ve also noticed that in Britain, there are different groups holding protests at the Mosques. In fact, Terry Jones (Westboro) was to go to U.K. next month to protest at a mosque in Luton, but, was disinvited by EDL, in addition, there was petitions by other groups to attempt to deny him a visa.

First off, what is the truth? Religion, to me, is a code of law that promises a pie in the sky if you’re good and a thousand years of nightmares if you’re bad.

Secondly, Islam is an Abrahamic religion. Abraham is mentioned in some passages of the Qur’an, and said book is an added component to both the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and the New Testament. The Qur’an does not replace either of those books, as I learned in a recent college class, but it adds to those earlier tomes.

-”The ‘good’ in Islam lay [sic] only in that which promotes the dissemination and spread of islam [sic].”
The same can be said of Christianity, but I do not know if that is also the case in Judaism.

You’re a pretty striaghtforward guy, Ruslan, in that it’s quite obvious you hate Christinas far more then you love your fellow Muslims.

Since the events of a lone loonatic in Okahoma literally 10s of 1000s (if not more) Muslims have been brutally murdered at the hands of their co-religionists. Most of the victims of muslim terror attacks are muslims themselves.

But Hey! You’ve got ONLY one terror attack in with which to distract us from islamic Oklahoma murder and from which to draw an ridiculous and unfounded equivalence between 1000s of Far Right islamist inspired acts of mass-murder, and the actions of but a single individual.

“Absolute, idiotic lie. Did you even bother to check? Try Google some time.”

Muslim clerics often condemn acts of islamist inspired Far Right murder, but none are willing to take any concrete actions to ensure that other actions are thwarted. And there’s a darned good reason for that state of affairs

Islam isn’t ( despite its claims) an Abrahamic religion, and its clerics, thus, are under no moral or religious compuction , the way Jews and Christians are, to tell us the truth.

Several high ranking islamist clerics ( all of whom are Far Right) such as Yosuf Qaradawi have publically condemned terror attacks in, only to be videoed promoting and condoning acts of Islamist inspired Far Right violence against both Jews and Christians behind closed doors. Several documentaries done in Britian have shown many muslim clerics lying through their teeth on this question. Your links thus, and the info they contain haven’t any value whatsoever.

The ‘good’ in Islam lay only in that which promotes the dissemination and spread of islam. When the truth becomes a hindrence to that ptopagation, then the TRUTH is considered an evil.

Remember that most human beings can walk and chew gum at the same time. Just because a person is concerned about one problem does not mean one can assume s/he does not care about other problems. I am not even suggesting the SPLC stray from its niche of far-right extremism. It is what they do and they do it well. I am just suggesting that they make a change in one small area, hate group designation, by being aware of the antisemitism, homophobia, and racism of some Islamic groups. They do the same with other religious fanatics without offending mainstream believers (evangelical anti-gay groups, radical traditionalist Catholics, the Jewish Defense League.)

I have not seen anything suggesting more than 3,000 Americans died from far-right violence in the 20th Century. But let us grant Ruslan his immature obsession with “fail” (Seriously, you sound like a 13-year-old boy) at the expense of adult, intelligent conversation and assume my earlier figure is incorrect. I will change it to “more Americans have been killed in the last decade by Islamic terrorism than by far-right terrorism.” Does this new sentence detract from my point?

The question in my other post was not rhetorical. I honestly want to know why people do not mind investigations into far-right extremism – “pro-life” terrorism, the Patriot movement, or extremists in the military – and yet are offended by this investigation. Why do some (rightfully) mock Beck, Jones, and company’s paranoia about the DHS report and yet see this as an affront to civil liberties?

I’m at a loss because, I’m sensing that there are people who just want to cause chaos and fighting amongst the population to divert our attention away from what’s really happening.

I just read a post about former NY atty John Whitbeck who now lives in Saudi Arabia. According to the post I read, he’s alleged to be a 9/11 truther and appears to be anti-American. On this same site, I read a post about Mr. Assange is allegedly trying to harm this country by exposing an ‘American-Israeli Global Domination,’ (or a sort of conspiracy of both) and that one of his staffers, Mr. Shamir (this name is alleged to be a pseudonym) is allegedly trying to form stronger ties with Russia-he is alleged to be anti-semite and holocaust denier.

I talked about the cookie jar, because there are a lot of Americans moving to UAE under the pretext of not wanting to pay taxes. I saw photos on the above website that I mentioned with former Sinn Fein members in a cave while visiting Syria.

With this, I’d like to know ‘what’s up!’

Tom

If King has stopped supporting the IRA, I haven’t heard about it- in general I’m not very familiar with King, but I know he is/was a big supporter of Sinn Fein.

I am very comfortable calling King a racist, but the fact that he supports the IRA is not part of that. Only about .25% of the time did the IRA intentionally kill civilians (and some of them were not completely innocent) (if people want to hear the details of how I came up with that figure, let me know, but I will say that it is based largely on information from the very academic and neutral site Conflict Archive on the InterNet at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ ).

But that’s not the main point. On Torture, you can probably do some major damage to King, considering how he feels about torture in the War on Terror and torture of suspected IRA members in the early years of the Troubles. (some info about the torture in N. Ireland can be found about 1/3 the way down the following page- http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/.....mcg73a.htm ) King is a VERY enthusiastic supporter of turture in the War on Terror.

I’ve been bringing stuff like this post to the attention of a friend of mine who is an anarchist Irish republican and does a lot of activism in Dublin, Ireland. His hope and mine is that we can get Sinn Fein to break with King and maybe even denounce him or something (SF is, in IRELAND, fairly consistently left-wing, so it makes sense to think that SF will ditch King). A big part of my blog is about encouraging SF to take a different approach to generating support in America (they talk too much about Irish-America and should be appealing to people who oppose inequality, imperialism, etc. generally).

Tom

Damn, how did I miss this? You said a century, effectively destroying your own argument as there were far more people killed in lynchings and related activity alone than killed in 9-11. Fail.

But presumably the relevant factor is the situation now, not the situation nearly a decade ago?

Absolute, idiotic lie. Did you even bother to check? Try Google some time.

http://theamericanmuslim.org/t.....rrorism_2/

“We have had over 2000 people slaughtered in 9/11, another 15 killed by the Fort Hood Massacre, two people shot in Missouri by a Muslim terrorist shooting outside a army recruiting office, a dozen terrorists arrested in a plot of terrorism in Indiana, and of course the attempted bombing of Time Square, all carried out by Radical Muslims, most in the last year alone!”

And yet far more people die due to ordinary, petty crime.

” The Koran, unlike the Bible, preaches hate and intolerance. Have you ever read the Koran?”

Have you? Have you ever read the Bible? Did you get to the part about smashing babies heads open on the rocks?

” The Koran supports the destruction of Infidels and open violence, (anyone outside of the religion of Islam). This is a part of the text.”

Please quote the part. I know you will, then I will quote the REST of that part, totally destroying your argument. This will be fun.

” The intolerance and hatred is built into the Koran, and this is a disturbing fact that all the politically correct liberals refuse to acknowledge.”

‘Politically correct liberals’ most likely acknowledge that the Koran is no worse than the Bible in that respect.

“Read the Koran for yourself, and study the history of Islam, their shameful treatment of women, minorities, and other religions.”

Ooh ooh, let me guess, by going to sites like Jihad watch and not actually talking to any Muslims or reading what they have to say!! What a great way to learn about a religion!!!

“There has been no public denouncement of Terrorist actions by any Muslim Cleric, and no public outrage by the Muslim community.”

That’s one of the most ridiculous comments I’ve ever seen anyone make on here. I’ve read about LOTS of Muslim clerics denouncing 9/11 and other terrorist acts, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the vast majority of American Muslims are as outraged by these terrorist attacks as anyone else is. For you to claim otherwise is ridiculous.

What’s next, are you going to try and convince me that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t exist, that President Obama is an alien from the planet formerly known as Pluto, or that the Pope is an iguana in disguise?

Why would anyone read the Quran? Are you a closet Muslim? The Bible advocates making slaves of folks from neighboring countries among other abominations. Many have also interpreted the Bible as advocating shameful treatment of women etc. You could look into these things yourself but there would be little point since a fool tends to believe foolishness regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

Read the Koran for yourself, and study the history of Islam, their shameful treatment of women, minorities, and other religions.

Why don’t you take a look at things which kill Americans annually, and compare it to how many Americans die due to terrorism every year. You might find you are getting all worked up over nothing.

Ian, have you forgotten lynching or the KKK? I believe they killed a lot more than 3,000 in the last century. Should we just forget about their depradations since they have lagged a little in the last ten years or don’t you consider it terrorism if their political views agree with yours?

What does exist, however, are Islamaphobes

This is what is occurring. One group of people may have recognized that the majority of us are in the dark about Muslim-related issues and decided to plant their views among us via claimsmaking. This has been helped in this post-9/11 climate, where Muslims are viewed with suspicion.

As another poster said: “Peace loving Muslims are victims and part of a duplicitous Machiavellian plot to subvert our Constitution by Islamic political interests.
This is not about religious redemption.It’s about power, influence and wealth in an attempt to introduce and ultimately replace our Constitution with Shari’ ah law.”

To which I rebut: there may be some who wish that, but Muslims make up 2% of the American population and are more or less spread out among our cities. And where is the evidence that “Islamic political interests” are seeking to “subvert our Constitution”? And how would our Constitution be undermined when the amendment process exposes a viewpoint to all who are interested? Mind you, I agree that more liberal Muslims are victims in this game of Islamophobia when we tar them with the same brush as their radical counterparts.

Another poster stated: “SPLC seems adamant in defending Islam while labeling evangelical groups as haters.”
To which I reply: the Southern Poverty and Law Center is defending Islam as a whole because of the rising tide of Islamophobia. We’re supposed to be a secular nation that doesn’t hold one religion above another, and somebody has to go to bat for the silent majority of good Muslims.

If you believe otherwise, you, like their exploited followers,are a testament to it’s deceptive success.

Ruslan, are those who investigate Patriot extremism also “cowards who get some kick out of being afraid all the time”?

And Samantha thus:

So homegrown terrorism is okay when it’s a group of crazy Christians blowing up clinics and killing doctors?

Need we remind ourselves of Josiah Quincy’s immortal dictum that “liberty is not safe where the people are not watchful.”

And George Santayana’s maxim that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”