The Morley Safer interviews were quite good. When the Muslim asked indignantly if “this is what freedom means, freedom to be insulted,” Safer said well, yes!

I’m pretty sure it reflects cultural differences rather than male/female ones. I’ve seen lots of female blog commenters who are more in line with Gary than Rebecca.

Terrye,

I think that when the NorKs finally go belly up we will find out that our little Kimchie was one of the most vicious mass murderers and torturers in human history. He will make Pol-Pot, Stalin, and Saddam look benevolent.

You might want to do a little research on Sweden. They are basic giving away the store (i.e. their culture) for free to multiculturalism.

Dean’s comment that women were better off under saddam is why he is a moron. Women in Iraq were treated the same as men in Iraq, as private property of the ruling party who could be raped, tortured and abused when the tyrants were feeling in the mood. They were equal to men as far as having no real rights, they were equal to men in the fact that Saddam could do to them anything that he wanted.

Iraqs transition to Democracy will not be perfect. And when the constitution comes out it will have aspects that we deplore. And it will be OK to critique those shortcomings. But the Iraqi people will have the chance for change through the ballot box. The only chance for change before the overthrow of Saddam was through violence and Saddam had proven that a internal revolt of the Iraqi people was never going to happen and his boys were going to continue his reign. After the first Gulf War we tried the “let the Iraqi people do it themselves” method and Saddam crushed the revolt and the Iraqi’s never tried it again because they knew that the U.N. would sit and watch as whole towns were destroyed. Saddam knew there would be no internal revolt because he crushed them so completly that the population was as docile as a trained poodle. Any potential revolt leader knew that all his family and the all of his relatives would be killed and tortured in the most inhumane manner that it was better to accept the rule of Saddam. Saddam was not strong enough to defeat the military of the U.S. but he had his own people under his thumb and they could not get out from under him.

Kevin Peters

First we have to take care of the subjugation of muslim women here, right here, at home in the West, before venturing forth to the outside word. If one takes care of the situation at home, and muslim women and apostates have freedom of choice, then these same individuals serve as powerful example to muslim nations.

ambisinistral:

I could not agree with you more.

Some laws we have in the West are so much a part of the fabric of the West, that we take them for granted – as if there were no such laws. In some instances there are’nt. The example is Britain. There is no written constitution in the UK, yet freedom of expression as a right, is taken for granted. It is part of the common law and practice of this nation. These same practices were taken to the New World, where they were codified in law.

Your post reads well.

Van Gogh was a polemist who often used “sick jokes” to shock his readers. In the Netherlands there is a lot of hypocrisy about WWII.

As you probably know more Jews were killed in the Netherlands than anywhere else in Europe, but after the war everybody pretended they had been in the resistance, especially the socialist establishment.

An extreme example of this hypocrisy is documentary film maker Louis van Gasteren who build his entire career on WWII and was a hero to the Dutch sixties left.

In recent years the truth has come out that during the war Van Gasteren actually killed a Jewish roommate for his money and used his political connections after the war to clear his record and get ‘resistance hero’ status. In the months before his death Theo van Gogh has written a lot about this weird scandal.

Leon de Winter and Sonja Barend are both typical holier than thou socialist hypocrites. Van Gogh wrote the articles you refer to years ago, in the early nineties. He never used those mock anti-semitic slurs since.

I’ve advocated the same thing in this forum — that laws specifically targetting aspects of Islam incompatable with America Constitutional values be passed. There is a precedent in American Law for doing that. Google Mormon and Supreme Court and you’ll see that such a tactic was used to force the mormon Church to drop polygamy in the 19th Century.

I think an explicit law against any organization that advocates the death penalty of apostacy, coupled with seizure of assets as part of the sanction, would be quite useful. Arguing against the law (ie; for their right to kill people) would be a public relations nightmare for Moslems, and the ablility to tie up the assets of Mosques that violated the law would be most useful.

I’ve long held that we need to stop screwing arounds and confront the American Moslem community directly over aspects of their religion that we find intolerable.