Look at what you say about Muslims not marching in the street; it presupposes that the rational response of anyone who is bothered by something is to march in the street about it. But how many Catholics marched in the street to protest the IRA? Are Catholics then the members of an evil religion? When Irgun was bombing hotels, how many Jewish people in America took to the streets? Is Judaism evil?

Look at this list of clerical condemnations of Bin Laden put together by Juan Cole: http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/friedman-wrong-about-muslims-again-and.html

His page contains a link to this page, which is another library of comments from the Islamic leadership:
http://www.muhajabah.com/otherscondemn.php

I think that this idea that there is no Muslim resistance to extremism is a total myth.

Islam spans many, many races. Islam is a belief system, and its roots are in political murder and conquest.

To be a racist, I would need to speak ill of Arabs, or Persians, or Indonesians.

A close friend of mine is the son of the former banker for the dead Shah of Iran. The last I saw him (I moved out of state) we traded porn jokes in an Iranian bistro (yes, it was called a bistro).

All people have the basic qualities of what makes humanity great. When they choose to believe a doctrine that condones and in fact demands murder, they deserve no less than the enmity of all mankind.

Perfect solution? Convert them all. I don’t care to what religion. Bhuddism would be great for all I care. But in all practicality, they won’t be easily converted, and that means they’ll be killing us as their Quran demands and we’ll have to defend ourselves or continue to allow little children to get beheaded.

Our leaders want to wish away the reality, but it won’t be wished away. That’s where I stand.

You may be right, we may have gotten too caught up in attacks on each other (although I stand by my assessment of your initial comments); on the other hand, I have to see you offer much of a substanital argument against the things I’ve cited here. I refuse to see what I’m doing as false intellectualism because Mark provided some real evidence of concern, and I provided some counter-evidece to balance it. Those quotes above are significant, and worth considering seriously, but you seem so determined to simply ignore them. As far as I can tell, the only reason to do so is your pre-conceived notion of Islam that is about as sensible as assuming all Christians are born assassins because Pat Robertson is a ridiculous charicature.

You provided a site with information about Islam, I provided a lot of serious critiques of that site and the information it contained. You haven’t responded to those either, you just came back, called me a racist, and referred to my side of the debate as “ad hominem attacks.” I just don’t see anything of substance in what you’ve brought to the table here.

Congratulations on artlessly beating moral relativism into everything you see.

You might want to work on both your intellectualism and grammar if you want your ad hominem attacks to make more sense.

As to your statistics, cited above, a few things:

1) The fact that your source describes “36 years” of Sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland seems questionable because that particular fight went well back into the 19th century (that’s how Yeats and other Irish poets were involved). So either they are cherry-picking 36 years or they’re just not at all aware of the nature of the conflict.

2) The site you pointed out is pretty generally shrewd at manipulating history to defame a religion. For instance, in the history of the Crusades, they were smart enough to look up the Tabuk Crusades (A Muslim Crusade against Europe) but they’re entirely willing to overlook the fact that Christianity got its big boost at the end of a sword during the conquest of Charlemagne 100 years later. So the site is accusing Muhammed of attempting to convert, by force, the same pagan Saxons who would later be converted,by force, to Roman Catholicism.

3) It mentions the rape and mistreatment of women in Northern African countries by Muslim groups but failsto mention that those practices (along with female circumcision, another common practice in those societies) has been expressly condemned by the leaders of most Muslim groups, including middle eastern ones.

4) It links to a story about the mistreatment of Buddhist teachers in Thailand at the hands of Muslims on alertnet, but the same site’s treatment of Hamas talks about how the militant group that has promised to turn its guns on Israel this weekend is NOT Hamas, but the Martyr’s Brigade of Fatah.

None of this is to say that there aren’t bad things to report about these groups, and that I don’t have extreme reservations, but you seem to be responding with a sort of absurd and half-informed racism that can’t do anyone any good.