Why CAIR drives Vince Flynn nuts

He's no one's stylist, and his characters hardly cast a shadow, yet Vince Flynn is one of America's best-selling thriller writers. Why? Because his stories are good reflections of the realities of our time, including the overwhelming Islamic dominance of global terrorism.

In a way, it's a lesson for the rest of the American entertainment industry. There's a lot of talent being poured into movies and TV shows that take the opposite approach, trying to downplay Islam's role in the violence that afflicts our world, against all the evidence. And virtually all those movies, shows, and their producers are bleeding red ink.

Americans don't like to be propagandized. Especially when the truth is so plain.

so...

"Americans don't like to be propagandized. Especially when the truth is so plain."

I think Americans know more of the last 24hours than they do of the last 200 years.

They are a highly progagandized nation who are advertised to at every second.

When a nation is so used to being told what to think rather than how to think, it does stupid thoughtless things.....

Vince Flynn is wrong in stating that there were not Irish-American groups that were angered by "the Patriot Game." There were. The difference is that groups like NORAID and Friends of Sinn Fein were not portrayed by the mainstream media as the collective representatives of Irish America during the Troubles in the way that groups like CAIR and the Muslim Council of Britain currently are portrayed as the representatives of Muslims communities.

I disagree with the Provisional IRA but I also think analogies between them and the Jihadists are ridiculous. Some of the tactics used by some, but not all, Irish Republicans were wrong but at least their cause of a United Ireland (at least in my opinion) was entirely justified. This cannot be said of the Jihadists and Islamic supremacists who wish to create a represive Islamic totalitarian society throughout the World. I also have a problem with this analogy by Vince Flynn because it leads one to believe that there was not sympathy and support in Irish-America and in other Irish communites for the IRA and this is simply not the case. The money, weapons, and political support from Irish communities in America, Britain, Australia that went to the IRA and Sinn Fein is very well documented. Many individuals from these communities also went a step further and became actively involved in the IRA's campagin against Britain. Just some names that come to mind are the PIRA's first Chief of Staff Seán Mac Stíofáin who was born and raised in Liverpool, as well as one of the last IRA members killed during the Troubles, Diarmuid O'Neill of London. I think the lesson we in the counter-Jihad movement should take from the Troubles in Northern Ireland is that there are likely many many people in Islamic communities in the West who are entirely supportive and sympathetic towards the Jihadists.

oh yes, the support for the IRA is another classic example of thoughtlessness from the no-longer-Irish who were born and bred in different countries some even on different continents.

You could say that after the "propagandized Americans" that funded death in Ireland and Britian found out the consequences that "propaganda" makes some people do after September 11 2001, many people in Britian and Ireland were happy because they realised that, thanks to Islamic terrorists (some trained by American supported IRA), terrorism from the no-longer-Irish would stop.

So 9/11, an event when more people were killed in a few hours than in 30 years of sectarian violence from Loyalists, Republicans, and British security forces, was a "happy" time for you "exposesithlords"??? Or should I just call you "Ward Churchill"? because 9/11 was "Chickens coming Home to Roost" right?

If you are going to blame Irish-Americans for the Troubles I hope that you at least also give us alot of credit for helping to bring about an end to them with the Good Friday Agreement. The Troubles did not begin because of Irish-Americans, they began because of the second class status of Irish Catholics in their own country by a foreign government. No Jihadists have been trained by the IRA although quite a number of Loyalist terrorists have been trained by the British government.

And what the does no-longer-Irish mean??? Please elaborate.

"Vince Flynn, whose latest Mitch Rapp spy thriller, "Protect and Defend," just hit No. 1 on the best-sellers list, says torturing terrorists is "far more effective than liberals would have you believe."

Right. Blame the big bad liberals for merely pointing out that a person will always "sing like a canary" when his lungs are slowly being filled with water. (read a description of water-boarding if you haven't done so already; it's sickening stuff). When you're being tortured, you'll say anything to make it stop. But, of course, pointing this out is just an example of "PC crap"--a catchphrase to describe anything a conservative disagrees with.

Some conservatives (I said SOME--don't jump down my throat and accuse me of generalizing, mmmkay?) truly are pathetic.

(also, I agree with the poster above who says that the cause of a unified Ireland was justified, though some of the means employed were not; comparing them to Al Qaeda is ridiculous. Al Qaeda seeks not the liberation of a country, but the destruction of the West. There's a monumental difference)

"Right. Blame the big bad liberals for merely pointing out that a person will always "sing like a canary" when his lungs are slowly being filled with water. (read a description of water-boarding if you haven't done so already; it's sickening stuff)."

Isnt that what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne when the constantly reelected Senator Kennedy left her to drown? You know, the guy ranting against water boarding.

irish_infidel

I am afraid you are wrong on several counts and links between the IRA and Muslims are clear and well documented if you care to look them up. To give just one example in the early 1970s a ship called the “Claudy?” was intercepted by the Irish navy carrying several tons of weapons from Libya. There was considerable publicity at the time and a number of IRA men in the south were jailed for a year or two but it is not generally known that the Irish government quietly passed about 50% of the weapons on to the IRA. It is a matter of record that the British government suppressed at least one television documentary examining the links between the Irish government and the IRA.

It was subsequently reported that several members of the IRA went to Libya for training on shoulder launched ground-to-air missiles. The weapons sent from North America got the publicity but much of the IRA's weaponry was of Soviet origin channelled through the Arab countries of the Middle East. As a matter of interest if you look at the guard of honour at Bobby Sands funeral in about 1979 you will see they are carrying Russian SKS carbines. A detail not noticed by the British press. Also an Ulster Protestant told me that the technology of roadside bombs being against American forces in Iraq had been perfected and passed on by the IRA.

So no, Irish Americans were not to blame for the IRA they were just one of many fingers in the pie.

However JW watchers might be interested in the following conversation I had with a young Englishman long before 9/11

Me: There is something very nasty coming with the Muslims.

Him: Why?

Me: the papers are full of nothing but how wonderful they are and how badly we treated them. The British press was full of such stories about Ireland and the Irish in the mid-1960s and now we know the security services had warned them the Ulster situation was going to blow and they were trying to head off the trouble.

As an Irishman and historian I can assure you that Irish history as perceived is the greatest load of BS on earth. Frankly do not blame Irishman because they are always cheered on by liberal Englishman. Dimmis par excellence they have their natural English commonsense surgically removed and replaced with a combination of total ignorance and self-righteous stupidity.

BTW Chief of Staff Seán Mac Stíofáin was born John Stevenson and from Walthamstow in London. I think his obituary noted that he had one Irish grandparent.

RoobartSbunsar

All Irishman would like to see our country united but you cannot unite a country where a large proportion of the population is told they are foreign and they must ethnically cleanse themselves.

Ulster Protestants are not foreign. The Irish Republican position is that they are Irishmen, no republican organization has called for the Protestant people to leave only for the British government and their institutions to leave.

irish_infidel

In other words they mush cleanse themselves of hated foreign connections. Stop fooling yourself, Irish Law, Institutions and Government are based on British models and they work pretty well.

In the early 1970’s a Catholic Archbishop said the Protestants could not be bombed into a United Ireland. What was the jovial response from the Speaker of the Irish Parliament?

“No, but they might be bombed out of it!”

He said he was only joking, I wonder if the Protestants saw the joke?

Could natures own apologist be losing his taste for the Islam has been hijacked meme ?
He ruined 24 he so is going to hell.

@ Fred

I never said that the IRA did not recieve weapons from any Muslim States or that there weren't any links between them. Yes they did recieve weapons from Libya, largely as a gift from Gaddafi during the 80s to use against the British in revenge for allowing the US to use British bases to retaliate after PAN-AM. Today these links come mostly in the form of shitty leftist articles in An Phoblact (Sinn Feins weekly). The IRA-Libyan connection also this seems to have been a one way relationship. As you said, Libya trained them- not the other way around. There is no evidence whatsoever of the IRA training any Muslim terrorist organization. All the "evidence" presented in British tabloids about this is extremely flimsy. Like the "IRA sniper in the West Bank." A member of the PLO left his weapon behind after a sniper attack (as the IRA used to do)on a member of the IDF and it was reported by the British that "the IRA were training Palestinian terrorists" as if they needed any help from the IRA to learn how to kill people. They were caught in Columbia helping FARC and that nearly brought down Stormont and destroyed the Good Friday Agreement. Why would they risk everything including Sinn Fein being able to fundraise in America to help Jihadists in Iraq?

Yes the Irish government did supply some arms to the IRA under the Lynch government in 1969. But 50% of the IRA's arsonal? No way. Maybe 50% of the of small amount of weapons the IRA had at the time, this would be the I Ran Away IRA of 1969 that could not even defend their own streets not the Provisonals which the Irish government never supported. This was done primarily to pacify the demands from people in the South for the Lynch government to invade the North to protect the Nationalist people from Loyalist mobs and rioters. The arms deal was a secret at the time, including to most in the Irish government, and the subsequent Arms Trial of those ministers that did it, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney as well as Captain James Kelly from Irish Army Intelligence is one of the most famous events in Irish history. This trial was in 1970 and there is absolutely no evidence of Irish government supplying arms past this point. The British government however supported the UDA and UVF into the 1980s and 1990s.

Tiocfaid Ar LA Fred

What does having a system of government based on a British model have to do with anything? Most Western democracies, including the US, are based largely on the British system and they do quite well without having to sit in Westminister. What matters is whether this model is operated and controlled by those in London or those in Dublin. My ideal would be some form of Eire Nua. A Federal Ireland based on the Four Provinces with regional parliments in each and a National Parliment in Dublin. Former Unionists would be within the reach of power in a nine county Ulster and would also have a much greater representation in the Dail than they currently do in Westminster.

I've never heard that Cardinals comment before and I think he was stupid to say such a thing. It certainly was not in the spirit of Wolfetone.

"Isnt that what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne when the constantly reelected Senator Kennedy left her to drown? You know, the guy ranting against water boarding."

Hey, I'm no Kennedy fan--and he's from my state. The guy's a murderer.

First I'm mad as H at CAIR et all for preventing many books in my favorite genre from being published. I miss them.

Isnt that what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne when the constantly reelected Senator Kennedy left her to drown? You know, the guy ranting against water boarding.
Good call for Eric66

Roobart, I have a challenge for you. Would you just Try to go 48 hours without using a label?
Every time you use a label instead of thinking you close your eyes and your mind.
In other words you turn into George Wallace.
Your challenge begins now.

"Roobart, I have a challenge for you. Would you just Try to go 48 hours without using a label?
Every time you use a label instead of thinking you close your eyes and your mind.
In other words you turn into George Wallace.
Your challenge begins now."

I'd be happy to do so if the conservatives on this site weren't bashing liberals almost as often as they bash Muslims (the said Muslim-bashing being fully justified, don't get me wrong).

Let me mention this: for several years, conservatives controlled all three branches of government in the States. What did they do to stop Jihad? Nothing.

And yet people on this site blame liberals.

It strikes me as grossly illogical.

Three minutes.

LOL, Aunt Bea.

Roobart just can't help himself.

Well Mr. Flynn has new ideas and material to write more thriller books.

exposesithlords

if you and your family had fled ireland, forced out/ put into indentured service (slavery) under an invading army, ie Great Britain. You were forced under famine/war/land grab by a puppet state ruled from great britain to relocate/forced under slavery/expelled to the United States. would you be happy about it? i'm sure you would try and regain your culture, and rightly so, you would identify yourself as being irish and rightly so. you don't become "american" and lose your birth nationality, your ethnic origins.
then once you had relocated/forced into slavery you heard stories from the "old country" of massacres, war and more land grabs from the British imperialist forces. Also major ethnic cleansing with Scots protestants being "relocated" "indentured" (slaves) servants being moved from scotland to northern ireland to kill the catholic bloodline.

now jump forward to the 1960's/70's. There are calls for independence from the blood thirsty protestant north. mass discrimination from protestants against the irish catholics. this situation was very similar to serbs in kosovo being cleansed and discriminated against by albanians.
next you have a mass demonstration on 30th january 1972, bloody sunday. 26 unarmed men, including a catholic priest waving a white flag, are massacred by trigger happy british paras. now tell me that irish americans are not going to use their wealth and power to fight against british injustice which their people have endured for centuries.

(and for the record, I don't even think Vince Flynn is that good a novelist, as far as conservative writers are concerned. Daniel Silva is light years ahead of him.)

irish_infidel

I don't wish to turn JW into an Irish slanging match so I will put one more post on this thread it and leave it at that.

When I said 50% I was referring to the Lybian shipment and this was not intended to be an accurate figure. I asked a man who served there about Northern Ireland and knowing my nationality he was very reluctant to say anything. The one thing he did say when I mentioned the Libyan shipment was “We reckon they got 50% of that stuff in the end” but nothing else.

I'll well aware of the 1970’s arms trial as indeed I am aware the outcome. As I remember it the court concluded they had imported and distributed arms but they were not acting illegally.

Politics being the filthy game it is the dirty work has to be done by intermediaries and it will be many years before we really know who did what and why. If you read Tim Pat Coogan book, “The IRA” he contemptuously refers to the Irish Special Branch as “Lynchs Police” and gloats over the fact some of its members were keeping the IRA well-informed of government moves. Even so, Irish politicians did not need to do anything to help beyond ensuring that the people chasing the IRA did not run fast enough to catch them.

I do not read the trashy British tabloids although when I was younger I did occasionally look at the pictures. As with any useful information you have to pick up fragments here and there. The reference to the suppressed television documentary about the assistance the Irish government was giving the IRA came in the Thatcher era from an article in the liberal “Guardian”. It was listed as one of a number of programmes the government had suppressed and the only one relating to Ireland.

The British magazine “Private Eye” did carry a story that the IRA had got so much money from Gadaffi it had sensibly decided to invest it in real estate all over Europe. Consequently it was the best funded political organisation in Ireland maintaining offices with paid workers in every town of any size. This is probably why it has achieved a breakthrough in Dublin politics and may even displace the traditional parties. The British government is probably not too worried by this as revolutionaries and idealists must eventually confront political reality and they might even consider it payback time. After all Ireland's international relations cannot change much and if they became too revolutionary the US Marines will be coming up Dublin Bay before you can say People's Republic.

A little quote from Bernadette Devlin MP in 1969

“For half-a-century it (The Unionist government) has misgoverned us, but it is on the way out. Now we are witnessing its dying convulsions. And with traditional Irish mercy, when we've got it down, we will kick it into the ground.”

I know she was only 21 at the time, nevertheless 25 years later her daughter was arrested for IRA activity in Germany and this is not terribly reassuring to the Unionists.

You'll be pleased to know that I do not speak any Irish as in common with many Dubliners I had to learn it at school and thoroughly detested it. How dare anyone ram this language down my throat and tell me I wasn't a proper Irishman if I didn't learn it! However my cousin is a considerable Irish scholar and I shall have to ask her what your closing lines mean sometime. I am sure it is something suitably insulting.

Coming a little back OT posters would be interested to hear that in 1945 the Irish Prime Minister and leader independent Ireland who had walked shrewd political tightrope during war thought it necessary to demonstrate Irelands political independence. On hearing of the death of Adolf Hitler he made a special journey to the German embassy in Dublin to sign a book of condolence - In Irish of course.

leonthepigfarmer

I usually agree with your posts but you clearly do not know too much history and American support for Irish revolutionaries is quite incomprehensible. Had any Irish rebellion up to 1800 succeeded the United States would either not exist or be a collection of a dozen weak States on the eastern seaboard. And for the rest of the world that would be a very bad thing indeed.

OT....
Roob...Liberals 'need' to get bashed...often.
It is doing you guys a kindness. It allows you to build a defense, to sharpen your verbal skills with talking points. To try really hard to come up with new, and good, ideas. To stop and think, even if it does give you a headache. Of course if you actually get past the headache phase, you will probably drop liberalism at that point...you will either become a conservative, or a Hari Krishna. Those prone to headaches from thinking to hard, are better as H.K's. Meditation is the art of thoughtlessness.
But short of 'nirvana', Roob, the conservatives here are just trying to help you liberals out. The more you try and defend any liberal opinion, the bashing will increase. Soon you will learn how to run the gauntlet without getting hit...good luck...

"Meditation is the art of thoughtlessness."

So anyone who practices Zen buddhism, or any other path that involves meditation, is thoughtless. I find it entertaining that the same people who accuse me of generalizing end up doing the exact same thing.

As for me: I have no plans to drop my "liberal views" anytime soon. Contrary to what you may think, I arrived at my position through many years of thinking, reading, and arguing. If I am anti-capital punishment, pro-gay rights, and pro-civil rights, it is not reflexively that I've adopted these positions. (I am pro-life, however, as I believe it would be inconsistent for me to oppose capital punishment but support abortion). I doubt that anything will convince you otherwise, but I could care less.

fred

as a side note, i only found this out in the last few months, but the americas used white slaves, notably irish slaves and the poor "indentured" working class from london. indentured meaning prisoners caught stealing an apple etc and thrown into prison and given the choice to work off their incarceration in the new world, meaning a life of slavery.
well i had heard about the indentured "servants" of georgia heralding from london but i never knew that they were slaves. oliver twist was a slave, the chimney sweeps in london were slaves. the irish had no ways of rebelling due to massive numbers of them in oppression and with no access to weapons. similar to the british today who can only defend themselves with household objects, a householder was even arrested for hitting an intruder with a brick! (i divulge)

there are many documents in the US library which records white slavery.

http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT

and this article from trinidad news, nov 2007

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161228338

and finally, not sure where i have gone with this post? but the word "slav" came from slave, meaning eastern europeans used as slaves.
i agree that any rebellion would've resulted in a weaker America but the irish hadn't a fighting chance in overpowering their british oppressors.

sorry oliver twist was a fictional character but based on the indentured "servants" and children of the "work houses" in london.

Slavs were indeed used as slaves--by Muslims. Probably explains my disdain for Islam.

And the worst part about the whole thing for Vince Flynn (and so many other similarly concerned folks) is that now that he has expressed publicly his disapproval of the manipulative PR tactics practiced by the Islamic group CAIR, CAIR and its Islamic terrorism affiliates are probably plotting to assassinate him for "slandering Islam."

The list of American people Islam has targeted for death because they expressed disapproval (or worse) of Islamic practices is huge--and growing.

"CAIR and its Islamic terrorism affiliates are probably plotting to assassinate him for "slandering Islam.""

I doubt it--he's too high-profile. They'd know the finger would immediately be pointed at them.
No, these guys go after weaker prey.

Not to get into the middle of a word brawl about Ireland, but I always thought that all those Irish, whether in Ireland itself or abroad, who wanted a united Ireland could have best achieved it by taking the approach Martin Luther King did here in America, i.e., the path of massive, non-violent resistance. Such a tactic would never work in any political entity that was not essentially decent, had no capacity for contrition and which did not honor the rule of law. Such a polity would just kill anyone who sought change (often forgotten where Gandhi is concerned----he was damn lucky it was the British in India and not someone else.) But a nation which had lost its way but could still be shamed, America before the Civil Rights Era or England in Ireland over the centuries as examples, could be forced to change most likely and effectively were this route taken I would contend.

Since I have no British or Irish blood in me, I have no real dog in this fight but merely proffer this opinion out of as much objectivity as I can summon up. That's all.

Roobert Sbunsar:

George W. Bush was recently cited by an Islamic website as a target for beheading. Now, how much higher profile can Islam go than this?

'High-profile' doesn't mean squat with Islam, my dear friend. Islam will target ANYONE!

Remember Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981?

Islam is an 'equal opportunity' assassin!

Wellington;

the problem of racial discrimination (and particularly segregation) in the United States that you have brought up was largely confined to the former Confederate states.

Although blacks suffered discrimination int he north to some degree, they were NOT the only ones who had to deal with that. Many ethnicities had to deal with discrimination in the north. The northern states of the USA until recently held over 75% of the nation's total population.

Alas, being from the north I feel no shame whatever on the matter as the northern United States was no more guilty of racial discrimination than anywhere else (to some degree I am sure you will note that wherever you live there has been discrimination--does that bring shame to you?I doubt it). In fact, western Europe's treatment of its immigrants from third world nations is far worse than the amount of discrimination that went onthe northern USA. Are Europeans "shamed" ?? I doubt it.

RoobartSbunsar,

I've just started reading "The Suicide of Reason" by Lee Harris, a book that has been discussed on JihadWatch in the past. I did a search for essays by Harris and came across the three paragraphs below, attributed to Harris, as part of a blog entry at

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008567.php

"The irony of Richard Butler's attack on America's "double standard" is that we have in fact practiced a double standard, but not the one that he had in mind in his critique of American policy. Our double standard has been one in which we allow others to attack us out of blind hatred, animated by the barbarous principles of the vendetta or blood feud, while we, on our part, strive in every way to minimize any unnecessary loss of enemy life, even at the risk of endangering our own. They murder innocent Americans in the pursuit of their wretched fantasies, simply because of who we are, while we refrain even from subjecting them to airport searches, out of fear of making them feel unwelcome in our society.

If we are to teach others a sense of the realistic, it is imperative that we not lose our own. We must not let our noble ideals betray us into betraying our very ideals. The only way that these ideals will find a place in the world of tomorrow is if we are prepared to defend them today - and to defend them at whatever cost is required.

But perhaps our greatest challenge will be to our own thinking. We must take a hard look at every idea we hold dear and ask, Does this idea even fit any more? And does it any longer make sense to speak of conservatives in a world in which a catastrophic change of some kind looms, or liberals when it is the core liberal values of all of us - even the most conservative - that are being threatened?"

If you haven't already, take a look at "The Suicide of Reason". I think you would find the book interesting, especially the challenge to assumptions held by both "conservatives" and "liberals", by Western Civilization in general, that our concept of reason is an innate characteristic of humans.

Wellington makes some of the same points above:

"Such a tactic would never work in any political entity that was not essentially decent, had no capacity for contrition and which did not honor the rule of law. Such a polity would just kill anyone who sought change (often forgotten where Gandhi is concerned----he was damn lucky it was the British in India and not someone else.) But a nation which had lost its way but could still be shamed, America before the Civil Rights Era or England in Ireland over the centuries as examples, could be forced to change most likely and effectively were this route taken I would contend."

OT:

"Moderate" Sameer Parker on his blog engaged with hardliner Samir Khan.

http://muslimmethod.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/to-the-one-in-his-parents-basement/#comment-209

Scary stuff.

From the link provided by awake:

"you are trying to call people to Islam by praying that they are destroyed and that their children are maimed?? Is this good adab?"

That just made me laugh.

pythagoras: Thank you for your post but I don't see how anything you wrote above negates my central point, which is that an essentially decent society that has done wrong can be put right by shaming it (collectively, not individually), most efficaciously I think by non-violent (but vigilant) means. I would also contend that the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish worlds in modern times are the most decent of all and that is why many continental European countries haven't measured up in this matter of ending discrimination. Since I am neither of Anglo-Saxon nor Jewish descent, I do not have any additional or "inside" reason to say what I have here. And one last point: the United States may indeed have been no more guilty of discrimination than many other nations (in fact, often less so), but America has always held itself to a higher standard in so many ways and has conducted itself along absolutist ethical lines, not relative ones. This is one of the chief reasons why America has been so great.

Elric66 said

Isnt that what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne when the constantly reelected Senator Kennedy left her to drown? You know, the guy ranting against water boarding.

Senator Kennedy waterboarded Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick as their car was sinking? Man, Liberals are really sickos, to think of waterboarding a helpless woman in that situation. And sickos, to carry waterboarding equipment around in the back of their car, just in case they might need it. Liberals love torture as long as they are the ones doing it, they just don't want us to get in on any of the fun. Sickos.

"Elric66 said

Isnt that what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne when the constantly reelected Senator Kennedy left her to drown? You know, the guy ranting against water boarding.

Senator Kennedy waterboarded Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick as their car was sinking? Man, Liberals are really sickos, to think of waterboarding a helpless woman in that situation. And sickos, to carry waterboarding equipment around in the back of their car, just in case they might need it. Liberals love torture as long as they are the ones doing it, they just don't want us to get in on any of the fun. Sickos."

hahahahah--that's a good one. Except she wasn't waterboarded. "Water-carred"? "Water-vehicled"? Something like that.

"And one last point: the United States may indeed have been no more guilty of discrimination than many other nations (in fact, often less so), but America has always held itself to a higher standard in so many ways and has conducted itself along absolutist ethical lines, not relative ones."

Agree completely with that.

Wellington said

Such a polity would just kill anyone who sought change (often forgotten where Gandhi is concerned----he was damn lucky it was the British in India and not someone else.)

It wasn't luck, it was the anthropic principle at work. I'm sure there have been many infidels who have tried the non-violent ahimsa techniques against Muslim invaders; they didn't live long enough for us to have heard of them. Gandhi tried it with the British instead of Muslims, so he lived.

"Gandhi tried it with the British instead of Muslims, so he lived."

The British were a part of the Western Civilization that was based on the Christian concepts of peace (though those concepts were not always employed). No such concepts of peace or compassion underlie the Muslim creed. Islam doesn't use a sword--it IS a sword. At best, it can be a dormant weapon; at worst, a bloody one.

special_guest: Thanks for your post and the link to the anthropic principle. Just two comments: 1) I believe Immanuel Kant anticipated this idea when he maintained that when truth is sought it is not a matter of the human mind comprehending the universe but rather how much the universe conforms to the way our mind is constructed. Kant termed this the "Intellectual Copernican Revolution." 2) I don't quite see how the anthropic principle applies to Gandhi and the British being in India. It still strikes me as mostly a matter of chance, anywhere from France or Portugal not having the will or the wherewithall to keep large portions of India, to Muslim rule in the subcontinent being exhausted by the eighteenth century, to India having more of what the British wanted. And for Gandhi all this added up to a chance most fortuitous.

Wellington, sorry, I didn't read the wiki article before linking to it. It's not a very clear description of the Anthropic principle.

Where I've heard the term used is in cosmology. The question is, why do we find ourselves on a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, liquid water, moderate temperatures, Van Allen Radiation Belt to shield us from cosmic rays, etc.? What are the chances that all the conditions necessary for life would be the one place that we found ourselves? Are we so lucky as to be placed on the one planet in a trillion with exactly the right conditions? (Assuming there is no intelligent Creator, etc.)

The anthropic principle says that we find ourselves in the conditions to support life, because life can only develop in those conditions. If life (as we know it) appeared on the Moon, or Pluto, it could not survive, so there would be no-one to wonder how they ended up there.

Hmmm, I'm not doing much better than wiki.

Okay, wait, back to Gandhi. If Gandhi tried his non-violent protest against Muslim overlords, they would have killed him immediately, therefore we would have never heard of him. It is only because he tried it with the relatively peacefuly British that he lived, and lived to become famous. There will never be a non-violent peaceful protester in Dar al-Islam protesting against Islam, because non-violent peaceful protesters cannot develop and survive under the conditions of Dar al-Islam, just as life cannot develop on the Moon.

special_guest: In complete agreement with you that non-violent protest in the dar-al-Islam, assuming the protest has something negative to say about Islam, will never happen, at least for long. Islam is just about the most intolerant ideology, secular or spritual, I have ever come across. I have to laugh when Muslims assert that Islam is peace. Yeah, when it gets its way. When it doesn't, and it takes little to get Muslims into a fine froth (a Danish cartoon here, a papal comment there, will do the trick nicely), Islam becomes a death cult for a certain percentage of its followers. Always has, is doing so now and I see no real prospect of it being any different as mankind moves with understandable trepidation into the future, in no mean part due to the existence of the world's most wretched excuse for a religion, Islam. So glad I'm not a Muslim. The wonder of it is that anyone would want to be.

If I am anti-capital punishment, pro-gay rights, and pro-civil rights, it is not reflexively that I've adopted these positions. (I am pro-life, however, as I believe it would be inconsistent for me to oppose capital punishment but support abortion). I doubt that anything will convince you otherwise, but I could care less.Posted by: RoobartSbunsar

Well Mr. Sbunsar, I'm a lifelong Conservative who is pro-capital punishment; pro-gay rights (excluding gay marriage); and pro -civil rights. I see nothing wrong with executing murderers and everything wrong with murdering unborn babies but despite my personal feelings about abortion, I do not think abortion should be illegal, except late term abortion.

I did not have to adopt these positions, they just came naturally to me. I guess it's not fair to imply that they are intrinsic since we are all indoctrinated as children, but as adults we are free to change our minds and I didn't.

You state your "positions" as if they are alien to Conservatives but as you can see, they are not. Since I am a Conservative I know many other Conservatives and believe it or not, some of them are even anti-capital punishment!

Many Republican politicians are infected with the disease of political correctness, which they contracted from their Democrat colleagues. However, it is far more advanced on the Democrat side and the Republicans have not yet completely lost their minds. Many Republicans play the cultural Marxism game, but they know the score. The Democrats are clueless, along with some Republicans, like GWB and most of his administration. You understand what islam, jihad, and the muslim menace is all about. Why don't your fellow Democrats, especially those in government? Doesn't that worry you?

"You state your "positions" as if they are alien to Conservatives but as you can see, they are not. Since I am a Conservative I know many other Conservatives and believe it or not, some of them are even anti-capital punishment!"

I don't know very many Republicans who support gay marriage (which I do, although I believe it should be up to individual states to decide). In addition, very few that I know of oppose capital punishment. On the abortion issue, some of them seem to adopt a more libertarian position than others.

These are generalizations and, as such, could be wrong. But it does seem to me that there's a substantial difference in these positions between liberals and conservatives. This is why I always bristle anytime someone suggests that I should drop my liberal views (and if said "bristling" led me to be a tad brusque in my previous posts, I do apologize). I hold these views quite strongly, and anyone who suggests otherwise is mistaken.