Reza Aslan equates Rick Santorum with murderous Iranian Supremo

Rick Santorum is not a nut-case. Asserting so is ludicrous. What Santorum is is an old-fashion conservative who is a very religious man. This is fully in keeping with traditional American values but, of course, in this Age of Nonsense in which we live, old-fashion conservatives are demonized as loons or nut-cases. This is very typical of the Left (Islamic supremacists too) to describe those who oppose them as haters, as people unhinged.

I certainly don't agree with all of Santorum's policy positions, but he does understand far better than Obama how capitalistic economies work, the importance of American military power and the projection of that power throughout the world and he has a fairly good idea of the many menaces which Islam poses to true liberty. He also has a great respect for the American Constitution, in part because he is a lawyer, and I challenge anyone to tell me where Santorum would like to abrogate any part of the Constitution. Might as well call William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan nutcases as call Santorum this. Really, one should be very concerned when he finds himself in agreement with Reza Aslan on most anything.

You wrote about Reza Aslan: 'Even a broken clock is right twice a day'

They didn't have clocks in the 7th Century. That's where Reza wants to take us.

He's a clown!

Duh-swami: Speaking as someone who probably will vote for Santorum if he gets the Republican nomination, I think you go just a tad overboard.

Why nut-case I wonder?

"If that nut-case managed to get elected, then we would have a dangerous fundamentalist in charge of a nuclear-armed military."
Don't worry too much, as long as you do not insist on publicly displaying some disgusting , unnatural physical doughnut fetish, and as long as you are not an iranian mullah, ahmadinejad fan, or are an iranian in America who favors iranian security over Americas interests, santorum is not a threat to you.
Otherwise prepare for someone who is acutely aware of the true menace islam is to the world. Prepare for someone who will make it uncomfortable for you if you prize your pp over your conscience.

I think you go just a tad overboard.

Thank you...I appreciate your endorsement, and so does Sir Rick...

@ give me doughnuts

I am so sick and tired of hearing this nonsense repeated.

Show me where the Bible has any open-ended commands for Jews or Christians to commit any sort of violence toward unbelievers. Once you're done with that, show me where Jews or Christians are committing such acts (or condoning/supporting them), on a regular basis, all over the world, in obedience to those commands.

Good joke, CGW.

But on the other hand, even before the grimly amusing hypothetical comparison, Hiroshima and current Teheran do have something in common: both filled with hundreds of thousands of internationally dangerous fanatics and their enablers.

shriek!! ..good Christians don't say ASS, oh no!, please forgive me :->

champ, LOL, and from a good Christian sweetheart like yourself!

(More, please!)

GMD, what you say is about as utterly bigoted a statement as I have ever heard in many a decade of living. You probably don't know any seriously devout people personally, and base all you think you know on a reading of Margaret Attwood's _Handmaid's Tale_. If I told you that we Evangelicals prefer live-stewed liberated lesbians to dead-roasted turkeys for Thanksgiving, you'd probably believe me.

Take a leaf from out blog host, who's taken the time and trouble to read up from Islamic sources and study the history of the Islamic world.

thank you, CGW! ..um, more might get me in twubble around here with those that like to police my every word and mar my "good Christian" image ..again ..yeah I'm so glad that Jesus loves me juuust the way that I am, warts and all! okay I don't have any warts (ew!), but you know what I mean, lol :)

give me abreak ...

You can't possibly be agreeing with Reza Asslick? What's dangerous is not Rick Santorum, but letting Iran obtain a nuclear weapon; which Israel fears as well! Hey you've got some 'splainin to do, so we're all ears, I mean eyes ...

One of the great overlooked phenomenon of our time, Kepha, (though I know you personally haven't overlooked it, nor have others like gravenimage, dda or champ), is secular extremism. God knows there are loads of Muslim extremists out there and, yes, you do occasionally find a Christian or Jewish extremist, though even when you do such folks are merely annoying and virtually never lethal, but what remains largely unmentioned is that a hell of a lot of those on the Left who are not religious are themselves progressive, secular extremists and they are utterly clueless that they are.

Bill Maher would be my choice for Exhibit Number One here. Respecting an aggregate element, MSNBC would be a great candidate for what I'm talking about. It's stunning and highly revealing that the MSNBC and BBC kind of folks out there are oblivious of their own prejudices, all the while they excoriate traditionalists for theirs. You know, sometimes it's a tough call which group in our age is the greater hypocrite---Muslims or the modern Western Left. Reasonable minds can differ. Hope you and yours are doing well, Kepha.

What a wonderful story, CGW! ..thank you for sharing it with us here.

Thanks for the moral support.

One of the great overlooked phenomenon of our time, Kepha, (though I know you personally haven't overlooked it, nor have others like gravenimage, dda or champ), is secular extremism. God knows there are loads of Muslim extremists out there and, yes, you do occasionally find a Christian or Jewish extremist, though even when you do such folks are merely annoying and virtually never lethal, but what remains largely unmentioned is that a hell of a lot of those on the Left who are not religious are themselves progressive, secular extremists and they are utterly clueless that they are.

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That's a great point, Wellington ..I wholly agree.

Rick Santorum, God bless him, is a Roman Catholic not a Christian fundamentalist-not that it would concern me if he were for reasons stated by Mo.

CGW :

From the story you took the time to provide us...

"I also noticed that the main person who was determined to get me beheaded was not present when they came to release me. I asked them where this guy was. And with much hesitation they replied that his son had died on the same day they planned to execute me. Although I continue to go through much persecution, one thing I know is that the Lord’s hand is upon me."
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The part above reminds me of the old joke about the Devil in Teheran:

"A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I had planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death."" (Frankl)

There is merit in what you have written, LemonLime. Too many conservatives and moderates still don't "get" Islam, but almost all (90%+) who do are conservative or are at least not liberal in a modern way but rather in an old kind of Harry Truman manner. And almost without exception (I suppose Grover Norquist is a fine example here of an exception), those non-Muslims who villify those who criticize Islam for the many pathologies inherent in it are modern Leftists. God knows, Robert Spencer himself has innumerable times indicated the great amount of interference that modern liberals run for Islam. And just suppose for argument's sake that the Left was almost entirely united on the idea that Islam is indeed a menace to liberty and equality under the law. The extent of opposition conservatives would then provide to continiued criticism of Islam would not amount to much and would do little harm I should think.

As for Bush himself, I have wondered now and again if by this time he bascially knows that Islam is really screwed up. I did notice that in the last two years or so of his presidency he essentially ceased referring to Islam in glowing terms. He didn't criticize it but there was really no more maudlin praise of it. Well, who really knows but Bush himself and his immediate circle what he thinks now.

On a positive note, I do know a lot of liberals (have to since I work in academia) and even some of them have pretty much done a 180 on Islam over the past few years. One liberal woman I spoke to not long ago observed to me that Muslims seem to always be whining about something. I will allow myself to be encouraged by a remark like this. Hope you're doing well.

DD, there are many more inspiring stories at the link I provided. It kind of makes one realize how much we who have been brought up in a Christian household (Catholic in my case) take the privilege for granted.

I truly believe that islam will eventually be eliminated. Good will triumph over Evil. The Almighty will not allow Satan to destroy humankind, neither in this temporal plane nor for eternity.

On a different note, guess what? My family and I might be moving to North Dakota FOR REAL. If we do, I'll get in touch with your sister, since we'd live fairly close to her. (At least I think so - doesn't she live in Williston? We'd be moving to an area close to Dickinson.) I'll be in touch with you through Robert should all of this come to pass. If you ever come to visit your sister, I'd really enjoy getting together; we could even invite APF and a few other "local" JWers up and make it a big party. What do you say?

Thanks for your reply, Wellington.

"And just suppose for argument's sake that the Left was almost entirely united on the idea that Islam is indeed a menace to liberty and equality under the law. The extent of opposition conservatives would then provide to continiued criticism of Islam would not amount to much and would do little harm I should think."

We know your hypothetical is not going to happen. But the converse is in fact the case, and seems more realizable. Again, conservatives and centrists are, in their sincere (and sincerely deluded) respect for Islam and for the vast majority of Muslims, enabling PC MC (if not, indeed, manifesting PC MC in the Body Politic of which they are a significant presence) -- and without this enablement, Leftists would be marginalized.

I don't expect a sufficient number of Leftists to wake up about Islam; but I do expect conservatives and centrists capable of this kind of change of mind. And that's why I'm angry and impatient at them; for their retardation in this respect is maddening, considering the growing emergency around the world. This inability or reluctance on their part to connect the dots between terrorism and "jihadism" to Islam itself and to the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are co-dependently enabling (when not covertly sympathetic to, or even supporting) its pernicious core (its revered texts and "Prophet") and effects (e.g., to pick one out of fucking millions of examples one could adduce over the past century, only increasing metastatically in our time) yet another blown up church full of innocent Christians peacefully celebrating mass in Nigeria) -- is outrageous and simply unacceptable. I refuse to treat them with kid gloves and guarded optimism as you seem prone to do.

It is unsurprising when Leftists go through their Islamophiliac spasms and dance; it aggrieves, however, when those who should know better continue, dutifully, day in and day out, to go to the trouble of helping to water and nourish the monstrous growth of PC MC all around us. When the enlightened U.S.A. in the 1940s came to the eminently reasonable conclusion that Japanese-Americans (and Italian-Americans and German-Americans) had to be interned, the Leftist opposition was minuscule, and ultimately culturally and sociopolitically insignificant.

Today, with an even more dangerous enemy, that sociopolitico-cultural equation is diametrically reversed, and we have silver-haired conservative Generals in the U.S. Army ordering U.S. Marines to be instructed (by an Afghan Muslim no less) in classes on how to fucking piss -- away from Mecca out of "respect" for the backward monsters we are spending billions to help by, among a thousand other unnatural shocks, propping up Sharia law in their country. And it's all the fault of the conservatives and centrists for a) letting it happen, and b) continuing to enable it like abused housewives at best (and sincerely deluded Pod People at worst).

Your response to me here is unclear. Or maybe you were responding to someone else? I don't know.

Well, LemonLime, the ray of light out there which is shining more brightly with each passing month, certainly with each passing year, is that a greater percentage of Americans, ditto for Brits, the Dutch, Germans, French, Canadians, Australians, etc., are getting their fill of Islam and know at some level of consciousness that it's not just another religion. Just think what percentage of Westerners thought ill of Islam twenty years ago compared to now. And then project twenty years forward to how Islam will be perceived by the bulk of those in the West. My God, even some of the elites by then will be shaking their heads and wondering aloud what the hell is the matter with Islam. All part of the new Hundred Years War we're in.

Yeah, it's going to take about that long but I'm betting liberty wins out over totalitarianism but only after exploring every wrong possibility before opting for the right one---treating Islam for the pariah which it is. Would I like to fast forward all this? You betcha'. But mankind has to be talked slowly into accepting a totally new idea, in this case that a major religion can be rotten to the core. Gonna' take time on this one. Damn shame it's got to be this way but it's going to be this way.

I sadly agree, Wellington; though I would add a second factor to explain the retardation of our collective progress in waking up: in addition to the difficulty of believing that a major world religion is pernicious and dangerous, there is the added difficulty of believing that innumerable millions who follow that religion are also pernicious and dangerous, and millions who may seem laxer are nevertheless unacceptably enabling their more fanatical brethren -- and I don't buy for a minute that for-sale-swamp hogwash that would exculpate hundreds of millions of Muslims from their guilt in this regard through gymnastic explanations that they must be "ignorant" of their own Islam or are too afraid of their thuggish fellows to come out of the closet. This may explain a certain number, but not sufficiently so to make a damn difference to the grim choices we are going to have to make to protect our societies from a deadly danger metastasizing in space and in time, all over the world, and accelerating in fanatical velocity as their Prime Directive -- there all along woven into the fabric of their culture (which saturates their daily lives, families, popular culture, society, religion, politics,), but subdued into temporary weakness these past 300 years -- is undergoing an international revival galvanized among other things by Western technology.

Well expressed, LemonLime. As I have often noted here at JW, the ultimate problem Muslim is not the so-called radical but rather the so-called moderate. It would be better if all adult Muslims were fully devout, i.e., radical, since then the non-Muslim portion of the world would come to the correct conclusion about Islam sooner respecting what to do about this huge mess created by man's worst religion of all time.

What an irony, no? So-called moderate Muslims are more of an obstacle to eventually marginalizing Islam than are the Muslim nut-jobs. And here is what is most important to grasp---it is this: Precisely because so many so-called moderate Muslims exist, the constitutions and laws of free nations, which protect all kinds of liberties, are ready-made to protect all of Islam and this will come close to a fatal mistake long term. Fluid times, no?

"...I'd really enjoy getting together; we could even invite APF and a few other "local" JWers up and make it a big party. What do you say?"
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I say that's a capital idea! If you see APF, tell him I send my regards, please.

Best to your family, and good luck with the possible move!

Indeed, Wellington. The paradox you expressed has an extra twist of perverse torsion: it is a paradox that is massively and assiduously sustained by us.

I don't think there's ever been a time in history when a civilization so massively and energetically and scrupulously assisted its own deadly enemy as the modern West has been doing and continues to do now.

Another, closely related, paradoxical irony: it is precisely those many (alas, far too many) Westerners who handwringingly worry that we might "go down the slippery slope" toward crimes of humanity including genocide against Muslims who will -- through the very handrwringing worry they have positively cultivated as a multifarious sociopolitico-cultural industry -- make it more likely than not that the West will have to go down that road, out of sheer survival as the situation becomes alarmingly worse precisely because we will have waited too long to take far milder measures pre-emptively, now and in the near future.

Hesperado

I doubt that you're a practising Christian. You tend to damn Christianity with faint praise.

But I have a suggestion for you, as a spiritual discipline, for the remainder of the season of Lent. You won't take it up, but I'm suggesting it, just in case. Because if you did do it, it might be beneficial for you.

Find a Catholic church that is open during the day, within reach of where you live.

And every day, or every week, as you are able, I want you to go in there and light a candle for St Jude.

And even if you don't believe in the Biblical God - or if you have bitterly and coldly or furiously or in despair decided in your heart of hearts that He is impotent and useless, utterly powerless to truly and finally deliver anyone who has once been born into, or converted into, for whatever reason, the cult of Islam - I **dare you** as you light that candle to invoke St Jude, Patron Saint of (so-called) Lost Causes, and pray for the Awakening of the free peoples, for the Confusion and Defeat of the Jihad, and...last but not least...for the Conversion of Muslims to Christ, which will involve the raising of the dead, the healing of the sick, and the casting out of demons. All of which Our Lord coolly told his disciples he was giving them Authority to do, as if it were not even any particularly big deal: "I saw Satan like lightning fall from heaven...sure, fine, the demons are subject to you, but rejoice rather that your names are written in the book of life".

You could throw in a specific prayer asking God to bless and protect Mr Robert Spencer, toward whom you continually express a good deal of ill-concealed bitterness and anger...Lemon, Lime **and Bitters**.

To repeat: each day, or at least once a week, the remainder of this Season of Lent, light a candle for St Jude.

dda,

God doesn't save man in history (innumerable diseased, raped and murdered (not to mention accidentally killed) children throughout the centuries can attest to that); He will, however, save man from history, at a timeless moment only He knows.

Did God save Muslims from Islam for the 1,000 years during which Muslims attacked, killed, abducted, enslaved, raped, tortured, and otherwise abused Christians and other non-Muslims from the 7th to the 17th century? What is He waiting for? He can only be waiting to be literalized by literalists into some Entity who can stop Muslims from being Muslim, apparently.

I still say: abandon the abstractions for a time, light a candle for St Jude, and actually try *praying* for something. You could always start by praying for whoever happens to be your Congressperson...

*I* pray because Yeshua told me to do it. He said, Ask and you shall receive"; and there is no reason to think he meant that the 'asking' was to be exclusively restricted to the realm of the immaterial.

Of course, by praying for specifics, you run the risk of not getting it, and being disappointed. Still, there's such a thing as being too proud to ask... If you never ask for anything- be it spiritual or temporal - then of course you will get nothing...When we ask other *people* for things, sometimes they say no (and sometimes they don't explain why); so why should we expect God to be different from our friends and our parents? He isn't a slot machine; he's a Person.

All I know is this: from my own lived experience, and that of many, many other Christians I have known in my own life, or from the writings of those who have historically recorded and communicated their experiences: prayer *does*, every now and again, indeed quite often, correlate with something that *happens* in the material world, in human minds and lives and relationships, in space and time and history, and sometimes even in the lives of cities and nations. And I suspect that some of the critical points in history - where things could have gone far worse for humanity, for Israel, for Christendom, than they did in fact go - may have gone the way they did, because of prayers we do not even know about, uttered by unknown saints.

Corrie ten Boom saw prayers unanswered, in Ravensbruck. But she also saw prayers *answered*; enough answers to be going on with, enough to convince her, despite the horrors she witnessed, that God was real and present, acting in and through space and time, and that God was loving.

I was one of many who, from the moment of Gilad Shalit's being kidnapped by Hamas, prayed for him..

I knew, only too well, what Muslims would probably do to a Jewish boy in their clutches.

Many, many times I told myself: he has got to be dead. They must have killed him. I was sure they must have killed him. But something kept niggling at me, and I found myself going on praying. Year after year after year.

And whatever the arguments about whether he should have been ransomed at the price that he was, the fact remains - given that he has been ransomed - that despite all that time as a Jewish prisoner in the clutches of merciless Mohammedans he was still alive, and - so far as one can tell - fundamentally sane. For me, that is an answer not just to my prayers but to the prayers of many, both Jews and Christians.

I certainly don't agree with Rick Santorum on all issues, but this moral equivalence is simply *grotesque*. And no‚—it's not just Reza Aslan.

I've talked to people out here on the Left Coast in this bluest of blue states, who also claim that Rick Santorum is "as bad as Muslim fundamentalists". When I point out that he is hardly calling for women to be stoned in the streets, I hear "he would if he could". What ludicrous projection.

Here's Hillary Clinton saying 'extremists' “All Want to Control Women…Even Here At Home”

"Now, we know that young woman in Tunisia and her peers across the region already are facing extremists who will try to strip their rights, curb their participation, limit their ability to make choices for themselves. Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim..."

http://nation.foxnews.com/hillary-clinton/2012/03/12/hillary-clinton-republican-extremists-want-control-women

As though not having your employer pay for your birth control were the same as being faced with FGM, forced marriage, "honor killings", Hudud Laws, and stoning for rape victims. Ridiculous.

LemonLime, I agree with you—while the Left is the worst at the whitewashing of Islam and absurd moral equivalence, the whole of the West—across the political spectrum—is now suffused with this idiocy.

My only hope is that there do seem to be *some* people—even on the Left—who seem to have finally realized, at least to some extent, that there is something very, very wrong with Islam.

gravenimage and Wellington,

I think the most accurate way to put our overall situation in the West is that awareness is growing and snowballing, but at a snail's pace that has no justification and for which otherwise relatively decent and intelligent people bear responsibility, because that avoidable snail's pace of progress in waking up to the problem of Islam will not only very likely result in the mass murder of possibly millions of non-Muslims in the coming century (along with the havoc of destruction of property, dislocation of people, and psychological trauma of terror) -- it will also very likely force the West to be forced to treat Muslims with more violence than would have been necessary, had we woken up sooner and taken the comparatively milder measures which waking up sooner enables.

Again, it's 1938 all over again, with even more massively deadlier consequences likely to unfold -- and what infuriates and aggrieves is that this gargantuan catastrophic international train wreck that is slowly unfolding before our eyes is preventable, if only the majority in the West -- including the majority of non-Leftists as well as the majority of ordinary people who are not "elites" -- woke up now and quickly, instead of decades from now while inching and groping along like retarded somnambulists who have no excuse not to wake up now and quickly.

After all, we've woken up. I'm no rocket scientist or genius. Just a relatively intelligent Western guy with a normal life and a normal education (high school, a smattering of college, and an outlook of open-minded tolerance tinged with liberalism here and there capable of laughing at the jokes of Dana Carvey or The Simpsons or 30 Rock (or even Andy Dick or Howard Stern, for God's sake), or appreciating the devilishly devil-may-care mischief and insouciance of a Jack Nicholson). I'd say most of the folks in the anti-Islam movement (such as it is) reflect a variety of social types from a variety of backgrounds with a variety of life experiences (including travel to other countries, often to Muslim country or two): we are not all troglodytic redneck white trash by any means. And yet we have woken up by now.

Good God, it's 2012 for fuck sake, and Muslims all over the fucking world are perpetrating horribly, grotesquely and ghoulishly acts of violence for reasons that are fanatically deranged and saying (when not hatefully vociferating in mass demonstrations) outrageously anti-liberal things. The rest of the West among us (sadly, the majority) have no excuse. Shame on them.