[Emitt Evan Baker]

As for the Australian news show on Islam, I don't know any "leftists" who wouldn't agree with the correlation between certain Islamic "theologies" and murderous terror. All ideologies that can answer every question with such certainty are murderous. Linda(?) was doing a poor job of articulating her concerns. Here in the States the danger is that, while those Aussie talking heads seemed to have a good grasp on the distinction between Muslim and the specific form of Islam that is open to this ideological violence, the lazy discourse here doesn't find such nuances as sexy as crusades based on their own certainties.

The one extra misleading part of the broadcast was the bit about "name a terror act in the last ten years not connected to radical Islam". The codification of the various violences daily present in the world is skillfully and carefully done to achieve just the sort of triumphant silencing of the self-examination that was achieved on the show. Ask the question differently. Name a systemic violence that has caused terrible suffering in the world for an idea other than Islam. Ask the question that way and the list would be a spectrum of primate activity. This is not to absolve the Islamic ideology in anyway but to wonder what thought patterns you are being trained in to see only one subset of the murders on the planet and what ends does this thought pattern serve.

[John Isbell]

I guess the murders in Oregon earlier this month were connected to Islam in that the perpetrator was harassing a Muslim woman when bystanders got themselves stabbed by him.

[David Anthony]

Originally Posted by Nigel Mace

With your customary solicitude for the peoples of Scotland to the fore, David, you have hit upon a bitter but limited truth. When the Tories' notorious EVEL is taken into account there are going to be many issues on which she will not command a majority - even with her deplorable alliance with the DUP.

.

I've the greatest respect and affection for the Scots, Nigel; for the SNP, much less so.
I hope you'll forgive me for, or at any rate understand, a certain schadenfreude when I point out that in earlier posts I correctly predicted the way Scots Nat support was going, whereas you yourself did not.

[Rob Stuart]

Originally Posted by William A. Baurle

We shall see, Matt. I take all of your other points on the chin. Guilty as charged. Call me what you will. All I'm concerned about at the moment is saving innocent lives. No more innocent people being stabbed and/or killed in the name of the "peaceful" Allah. The time has come for a rational resistance.

Enough is enough.

I'm no Islamist apologist. I'm with you on the absolute importance of saving innocent lives from the depredations of terrorism, and so is the Mayor of London in spite of your bizarre and defamatory comments about what you imagine he believes. By any reasonable definition Khan is the very model of a moderate Muslim.

I think we might disagree on what constitutes 'rational resistance', however...

[Jim Moonan]

Earlier in the day I was working on a response to the discussion/debate/vitriol that was seemingly unfairly hostile to a good chap, William. Though he, too, was dishing his fair share.

I hadn't finished it and wasn't certain I would ever finish it or whether it would be a PM or post -- But that's all over now. Bill has flounced.

So I'll post what I had written thus far -- though inarticulate and incomplete -- and let it be my parting gift to Bill, who might not ever open it.

I think Bill's perspective is a valid one -- and he's not alone. There are a growing group of thinkers (Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali are in the forefront) that are, in essence, saying that there are tenets of the Islamic faith that are in desperate, critical need of scrutiny in order for the religion to thrive, even survive. All sides (there are more than two sides to what we are facing) need to engage in true debate aimed at resolution. This is not a competition to prove anyone is right or wrong, or that anyone can win by winning or lose by losing. It goes much, much deeper than that, I’m afraid. (Trump would like us to think that way – that winning is everything). The hard work must be done in the trenches.

As Sam Harris said, “It’s like fighting with fog.”

That Islam is emphatically proclaimed by many to be a religion of peace is indication that Muslims are open to reforming it from being a totalitarian religion of inflexible domination over the individual spirit. Push for reform. Support the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are living the reformed version. Go forcefully, overwhelmingly after the vicious murders that use Islam as a façade for murderous actions.

[Emitt Evan Baker]

I hear you Jim but the said fact is that Hitchens (a great writer) allowed his school boy approach to religion to lead him into playing poster child for a theoretical war that sadly had little in common with the actual war that was waged in Iraq. While I always respected his support of the Kurds, he was never-the-less a dupe for an exchange that would eventually lead to the so-called American liberation, a human rights disaster that ended as toss up in its competition with the Baath for most civilians killed and most civil society destroyed. Never mind the absolute betrayal of the American soldiers used up in that conflict.
Hitchens has sadly passed and Harris and Ali are hardly bringing anything new or growing to the table, though at least Ali can claim the right to criticize from the inside. Ali is largely seen as compromised by many feminist Islamic voices that I have run across. I don't claim that as a final verdict by I think the exchange between them (which is public and readily available online) is important to look into. She certainly has allowed some unsavory voices in Western politics to use her without, IMO, putting very much distance between them and herself. That said, I respect her story and her experiences which are moving. Personally I think Harris is an irrelevant fool when it comes to describing the nuances of the evolution of human spirituality. But, to each her own.

That certain forms of Islam and certain cultural certainties of Islamic society are pretty foul is, I think, obvious. What isn't obvious is whether people outside that society are better suited to engage those problems with rhetoric and demands that are usually built on deep misunderstandings at best, if not less than noble ulterior motives. That we have just offered more weapons and support to one of the most brutal regimes in the Islam in Saudi Arabia should be the clue that all of this smoke about women's rights and free society is cover for something else entirely. That Hitchens et al. refused to see how deeply that smoke compromised the use their rhetoric was put to, remains to this day unfathomable to me. And I liked the guy.

[Nigel Mace]

SNP support was not primarily the issue in the election. As even Andrew Neil has sussed the actual fall in the SNP's vote share was a miserly 1.7%, yet we lost 21 seats. The reason is exactly what I have described and pointed to in my postings above - tactical campaigning and voting by all three Unionist parties in what it is now clear was a common strategy orchestrated from the top. The 'sharing out' of the seat gained, mirrors, with uncanny accuracy, the levels of the Unionist's relative results in the preceding local elections. We will make every endeavour not to be caught twice and voters, taken for mugs by all three, are likely not to fall for the same trick again - for it demeans them.

You were also hyperbolically wrong about the dreadful Tories. As to your warm feelings about "the Scots", I seem to remember that your hope was that they - not the SNP - were "stuffed".

[David Anthony]

That was a typo, Nigel, which I had subsequently corrected.
(According to the BBC, the SNP won 59.3% of the seats with 36.9% of the vote; the Tories 22% of the seats with 28.6% of the vote; Labour 11.8% of the seats with 27.1% of the vote; and the Lib Dems 6.7% of the seats with 7.5% of the vote. The SNP's share of the vote fell by 13.1% while the Tories' share increased by 13.7%.)

[John Whitworth]

Harol Wilson ran a minority Government from 1964 to 1966,when he converted it into a majority Government which lasted until 1970. Attlee governed with a minority Government if the early 1950s.Or was it Churchill that did it. I was very very small. The very first Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald was a minority government.

The Heath thing was a special case, three day week and all that.

[David Anthony]

Well, anyway, God bless Ruth Davidson and God bless the Scots: they saved us from disaster.