One wonders what PajamasMedia is thinking?

You waste breath on ignorant bigots like Doodslag and John “more rubble, less trouble” Samford.

They can’t distinguish the difference between the ocean and the sky, much less between Islam and Islamism.

You’ll get more intelligent comment out of a toilet bowl.

One huge stumbling block to our winning over the Afghan of the countryside will be how we deal with the opium crop. There is no legal replacement that equal the rewards of opium with the amount of work needed to produce it.

What we should do is throw out the drug warriors and get real. We need opium for many legal and medical uses. We should set up an choice like the Columbian’s did. “Oro o plomo”? Gold or Lead?

Sell us your opium crop at a fair price. (and make sure that it is a fair price.) We will give you other assistance and protect you.

But, if you insist on selling your opium on the black market or to the Taliban, we will burn your crop and provide you with only a bare subsistence.

That is a language that the average Afghan understands. Once we remove the opium funding for the Taliban we can move on from there. We co-opt them like in Iraq and give them something to lose if the Taliban comes back.

It doesn’t really matter what we do with the opium. We can use it or burn it, or dump it in the ocean. In the long run it is cheaper than the “erad” tactics we have tried before.

Remember, strategy is your goal, tactics are the way you work toward that goal. Stop thinking tactically and start thinking strategically.

Evidence please! All the facts point to Islam being the enemy. Where is your evidence that it’s not?
4700+ terrorist events carried out against America or American interests between 1980 and 2000 and most of them were by
a.) Boy Scouts
b.) 7th Day Adventists
c.) Muslims
d.) none of the above
Anyone who thinks Msulims are not to blame is in the position of blaming Pearl Harbor on the pilots of those Jap Planes.
Morooons try to pass off the war Islam has been waging against America since 1979 when the Embassy in Tehran was overran as the actions of a few wild-eyed radicals. Every time Muslims hold victory parades celebrating suicide bombings or the murder of non-muslim children, it puts the lie to that theory.

I could win the war on terror in a month. Every time there is an Islamic terror attack, select 2 Mosques at random and bomb them that next Friday during second prayer.
The Mullahs want Jihad, give them Jihad. Nothing like a 2,000 Lb JDAM during Prayers to get that message across. We would have to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions to do this, but that would be a good thing in and of itself.

If that doesn’t work, we nuke mecca.

You retail the absurd idea that Jihad begins with al Banna? Then what about the billion slaves of Islam suffering under the jackboot today — the same numbers that were born under Islam’s horrible star before al Banna ever darkened the earth? They were once Jews, Christians, animists, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, et al. Islam slaughtered its way into their domains within the first centuries of it terrible birth through Jihad — which was then, remained, and will always remain Islam’s form of warfare to spread and preserve Islam. You are a leftist tool asserting that violent Jihad is an invention of Al Banna.

Further, you reveal your gaping ignorance of Islam by asserting that I am the one “insisting on conflating the religion with politico-religious ideologies and superstition.” Perhaps Erdogan of Turkey might know more about the topic that you? In 2007 the famously “secular” Islamic leader (oxymoron rich, isn’t it?) quipped: “The term “moderate Islam” is ugly and offensive — Islam is Islam”.

Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi has also famously weighed in asserting that there is no separation whatsoever between the exertion of the religious Islamic impulse, and the legalistic, and governmental impulse. No separation. None. Doubt what I say? Remember, this is one of the foremost experts on Islam in the West — speaking at a Muslim forum — and this account is on an Islamic website. Read it and weep:

“No Separation Between Religion and Politics

On Islam’s position of establishing religious parties, he said, “There is nothing wrong in establishing religious-oriented parties-and this applies to Christians too-provided that all parties respect the law and the constitution.”

http://www.iumsonline.net/english/articles/2004/09/article02.shtml

So you appear to be the one conflating and confusing issues. The successful separation of Church and State is something came about in the Christian West. It’s something that has never existed successfully in the Islamic world. And to compound your foolishness, you’ve utterly confused the capacity of the American nation — the same nation you denigrate above, which has perfected the separation of Church and State, from the Islamic nation which has never done so, and may never do so. There have been halting dalliances into this realm with the forays of Attaturk in the early 20th Century, but we see how well that’s working out in Turkey.

It’s quite funny to observe how it’s always the flim-flam Muslims and their leftist abettors in the West always asserting that the “religion” of Islam is somehow (magically) separate from the “political” Islam. Tell that to the 8 dead seminary students killed in Israel yesterday. Which branch of Hamas claimed the evil deed? The “religious”, or the “political”?

And then there’s this:

“Good ideas, both from the Euro Enlightnement and the Islamic one, get buried and lost and it isn’t for all of Europe, America, or the Enlightenment to bear the blame for what the idiotic religious elements have wrought in our own time” — Josh Strawn

Again, talk about conflation! When the Christians begin rampaging at the drop of a hat, when their priests begin calling from their pulpits for the beheadings of the Jews and rival Christian sects, when their priests begin running entire countries, when their parishioners conduct over 10,000 separate terrorist attacks in a 6 year time horizong, attacks all targeting innocent unbelievers in their libraries, innocents in their nursery schools, innocents sleeping in their beds — and when they constantly cite passages from their Christian or Jewish bibles for all the murder they’re conducting, when the “idiotic religious elements” of the West begin acting as the Muslims have been doing all along — come back and we’ll talk.

Yes, I DO think history matters, even if 800 years. 200 years ago, our founders chopped up the Bible until it hardly existed anymore and said there could be no religious test for public office. Today, you couldn’t think of running for office without proving your religious cred to the country. Good ideas, both from the Euro Enlightnement and the Islamic one, get buried and lost and it isn’t for all of Europe, America, or the Enlightenment to bear the blame for what the idiotic religious elements have wrought in our own time and country any more than all Muslims must now be told by experts like you that their religion is “the problem” to the exclusion of so many more pressing and potent factors.

We do NOT share the same position on Islam, as you continue insisting on conflating the religion with politico-religious ideologies and superstition. I know non-superstitious Muslims and I know Muslims who are anti-Islamism.

I don’t take full credit for the originality of my argument in this regard, although I do have far more knowledge than you know of how things are transpiring in Afghanistan. But Martin Amis makes many of the same distinctions I do with regard to Islam vs. Islamism, and I dare say that Stephen Schwartz knows more than the both of us combined about Marxist prevaricators and reformism in Islam.

As for the history of Islam, I can only say that I didn’t miss the work of Attar, Khayyam, Averroes and Avicenna, as you seem to have. Not calling you mean names, but perhaps suggesting you beef up your bookshelf.

As for calling the Serbian mobs droolers being bigoted, we also saw similar drooling Islamic mobs burning Danish embassies. It’s hardly bigoted of me to refer to either as such. The problem is not with saying that Serbians or Muslims can be drooling scoundrels. The problem is with suggesting that something about them as people is inherently scoundrelesque or that they couldn’t help but be drooling, riotous slugs.

Our primary difference is in my insistence on separating out the scoundrels from the noble ones. If you believe, as I think you do, that the mobs of Islamofascists who deter democracy in Iraq deserve to be eliminated, then you would do well to remember that the Iraqis and Kurds who we fight alongside also venerate the same God.

The bigotry of your reply is in its implication that something in the Arab or Muslim bloodstream will forever doom them to backsliding into the Dark Ages, whereas the Euro-Christians did not. I’m afraid that in the portion of Iraq known as Kurdistan, while elements such as the PKK unfortunately continue to thrive, the region is in many other ways an exemplar of progressivism. The Iraqi Kurds are not Christians, atheists, or Hindus–they are Sunni Muslims.

Just call it Islamism, DOOD. It’s three more letters but three billion times more precise and less ignorant. Words and history matter.

Talk about “tripe”. Equating our revolutionary humanist enlightenment American revolution with the likes motives and tactics of the mujahideen is grotesque.

as the drooling Serbian mobs do.”

Talk about “ignorant and bigoted diatribes”

you are as wrong as the Muslims who take offense when Islamism is denigrated for the repulsive ideology it is.”

Sounds like you and me are pretty much on the same page viz. Islam — so why call me all kinds of mean names?

Also, you ignore my main thrust which is that we’ve simply replaced hideous Islamic tyrannies for slightly less (for the time being) fascistic Islamic regimes. How much time before these so-called “peace-loving Muslims” revert to type and begin funding their own sundry Jihads to terrify and spread Islam? Afghanistan has little avenue for the same kinds of massive revenues that Iraq presents, yet their narco-dollars are going to fund Jihad both within and without Afghanistan — the local governement does very little to stop it. In addition, Islamic Sharia forms the core of the new Afghanistani Constitution — and already there have been troubling signs that “apostates” or those who “insult Islam” do so at risk for their lives. This is a country WE installed, and self desribed “Islamic Republic”. Their “friendship” with us, such as it is, is only temporary. When we leave, the open hatred contempt and double dealing will only intensify, and Afghanistan will revert to a terror center. I guess you’re choosing to remain willfully ignorant of the trajectory of Sharia in Afghanistan, or you wouldn’t make such weak and credulous arguments.

Further, please don’t trot out desiccated old silliness like the “Muslim scholars centuries before the European enlightenment” were all fuzzy and brilliant and so much better than us when we were living in caves… Who cares what the Muslims did, or more accurately, what Marxist prevaricators and their Islamist triumphal apologist friends propagandize that the Muslims did, 800 years ago? The Muslims themselves all admit that the so-called (and much overrated) “gates of itjihad” were slammed resoundingly shut forever.

I don’t mean to be rude, but it is you,, Mr. Strawn, who is spouting a bunch of swill.

You have visited my pieces before on PJM with this tripe and it makes me wonder if you feel some compelling need to sully up my work by attaching to it your unsupportable, ignorant and bigoted diatribes against Islam. One may–and indeed SHOULD–call superstition in any guise, Islamic or otherwise, the enemy. And one may call Islamism the enemy. But calling Islam the enemy is muddy-headed nonsense. When folks like you do this, you are as wrong as the Muslims who take offense when Islamism is denigrated for the repulsive ideology it is.

Do you really mean to mount an unqualified attack on the religion of the noble men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who fight on our side for peace and justice against the fascists who oppress them? Islam is a motivating force for them as well and they interpret its warlike suras, as the original Afghan mujahideen did, as calls to fight against tyrants. Calls to war shouldn’t really be problematic unless one is a pacifist or ashamed of our revolutionary history.

Plenty of American soldiers pray to a God with the name name as the drooling Serbian mobs do. The sole difference is that Americans think that God means by his own warlike injunctions, that people like Osama bin-Laden should be vanquished and shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the lives of peace-loving Muslims any longer. The Serbs believe that He means for them to exterminate innocents and burn embassies in the name of their mythological and divinely blessed “history.”

Muslim scholars centuries before the European enlightenment had inventively interpreted the Qu’ran as a book that suggested that the afterlife–a highly superstitious idea–referred instead to the passage from ignorance into Enlightenment. History unfortunately didn’t shine well on those men, and they lost their battle of ideas. But they were Muslim nonetheless and their culture and ideas distinctly Islamic, if inspired in part by Greek philosophers. To imagine that the crusade to stamp out ignorance and superstition couldn’t be or has never been a cause of Islam is to ignore the historical record.

40 Valium tablets are cheap.

It’s time we root out all the old corrupt and foolish and deceptive “advisors” and “experts” on the Middle East and Islam, and begin facing reality.

These people have led us down the path of calamity for three decades — and they still have the ear of our politicians. Until we face the fact that Islam is a supremacist war doctrine, until we face the fact that Islam uses terror to gain advantage, to gain territory, to drive and murder “infidels” before their jackboot, and to consolidate power over its adherents, we will get nowhere.

We’ve spent a trillion dollars fighting the so-called “war on terror” — and we’ve toppled two fascist Islamic regimes and replaced them with two slightly less fascist Islamic regimes.

It is only a matter of time, and a few more Saudi or UAE or Kuwaiti or Iranian billions to flow into more mosques and madrassa before those slightly less fascist slamic regimes revert to the slightly more fascistic regimes of yore.

Islam is the enemy.