Good article Kyle. I am a liberal myself whose disdain for religion is not just limited to Christianity.

Nice try, Kyle. But (unfortunately for you) political Islam remains firmly allied with the American Left… while both are consistently treated with appropriate derision by conservative Americans.

See also, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left” http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/089526076X

Kyle should be applauded for defending principles of classical liberalism (aka, neo-conservativism)— but his Marxist conceit of moral relativism clearly retards any genuine progress.

If the American Left really stands for the values of Marxism— if it really does uphold socialist ideals (and on all counts, it clearly does)— then stop pointing the finger at Christianity and start apologizing for for Marxist mass murderers (like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Honneker, Mussolini, Caeucescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi, il Sung, Mugabe, Castro, Che, PFLP, FARC, IRA, ETA, Red Army faction, etc., ad nauseum) who’ve managed to slaughter more innocents in a shorter period of history than Islam ever dreamed.

Or isn’t it important to use the same bloody measuring stick for your ilk?

“we must distinguish between Muslims and Islam”

ISLAMOPHOBIA!

Get thee to sensitivity training!

Wow, Kyle, that’s a switch!

When is everyone going to realize that man-made religions are no substitute for the inconceivable divine?

As we’ve designed them, our religions only serve to divide us into judgmental, belligerent mobs. Coincidentally, neither of the qualities are obviously holy.

“no defense”?

Didn’t Kyle just defend the “right” of Islamo-fascists to murder US peacekeepers? http://badgerherald.com/oped/2007/09/25/iraqiinsurgentshav.php

Cognitive dissonance, thy name is Kyle.

Kyle, no matter how hard you try, redemption shall remain a pipe dream…distant, unattainable and a totally unworthy endeavor.

for once kyle, i wholeheartedly agree.

I think most people who don’t attack Militant Islamic beliefs do so because the water has become so muddy from all the right-wing screeches of “Islamofascism.” Those who wish to attack the weak justification of violence found by some in Islam should do it by becoming well-versed in Islamic texts. Now a days, you practically need a seminary degree to attack Christianity without coming off like a bitter, raving rationalist (a wonderful development, IMO), and Islam shouldn’t be held to lesser standards.

8:52: I’m not quite sure how you equate classical liberalism with neo-conservatism - please elaborate on this comparison while I read Jefferson’s “The Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom” again.

9:12: The fact that you equate upholding “socialist ideals” - and no, Marx didn’t create the principles of socialism - with “Communist” states like fascist WW2 Germany seems to demonstrate that you just want to spray your reductivism everywhere like a puppy who isn’t house-trained.

Alas, I have found a shred of truth in one of your articles:

“Islam is not a race”

Unfortunately, that’s the first true, unbiased, not degrading statement you’ve printed all semester. Congrats, Islamophobe.

wow, no wonder he hates barack obama.

Kyle, go to hell! You stick up for Muslims all the time, especially when you’re bashing Jews! Nothing you could say or do at this point will erase the fact that you are full of shit, just like the rest of the BH staff!

Fuck off, assholes!

“Didn’t Kyle just defend the “right” of Islamo-fascists to murder US peacekeepers?”

That assumes that every insurgent is an “Islamo-fascist”. Many, I’m sure, are more concerned with expelling foreign troops than advancing political Islam.

“then stop pointing the finger at Christianity and start apologizing for for Marxist mass murderers (like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Honneker, Mussolini, Caeucescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi, il Sung, Mugabe, Castro, Che, PFLP, FARC, IRA, ETA, Red Army faction, etc., ad nauseum)”

You’d make a better point if you didn’t group all political extremist and terrorist groups together under the label of “Marxism.” Based on comments in other articles today, “Marxism” is applied as “things we don’t like.” Hitler and Mussolini were corporatist fascists, IRA is Roman Catholic, and ETA is Basque separatist. And the rest, even self-proclaimed Marxists, hardly followed classical Marxist thought. Indeed, maintaining one “Marxism” is as foolish as casting Orthodox, Catholic, Calvinist, and UCC followers as a united Christian front. Even so, there is a wide spectrum of ideology to the left of the Democratic party which is falsely labeled “Marxism,” such as adjective-anarchists, democratic socialists, primitivists, luddites, lettrists, Zapatistas, Magonistas, the list goes on.

I do agree wholeheartedly with what Kyle says, the left has a tendency to play PC-police at the expense of forgetting our values. Fundamentalism of any form is a threat to human freedom. However, in the fight between such fundamentalist and reactionary sentimients with attempts by the West to install bourgeois democracy wherever it goes (opposed to autochtonous and indigenous forms of autonomy and democracy), it is difficult to pick sides, and we have generally sided against empire.

Kyle is criticizing a Palestinian?! What’s going on here? Has he become an agent of the Israel Lobby?

Maybe he’s finally realized that Socialists will have their heads cut off if Islam conquers the world?

11:41am and 2:08pm: Dr. John Ray has exhaustively demonstrated that Hitler was a Leftist. http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/id9.html

The IRA and ETA were both atheistic Marxists (read their manifestos).

The rest of them were also socialists of one Marxist flavor or another.

That’s one big steaming pile of corpses your dogs left in history’s living room. Own it.

For those who wish to explore the subject in greater depth, a useful recent resource would be a book by an expert on Italian Fascism: “The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century”, by A. James Gregor. http://www.amazon.com/Faces-Janus-Marxism-Fascism-Twentieth/dp/0300106025

Gregor demonstrates conclusively that Fascism and Nazism modelled their methods on Lenin and Stalin and that the Fascist idea of adding nationalism to socialism was later taken up by Stalin and Mao— so that (in the end) Fascism and Communism were two very similar Leftist sects. So during the era of their big confrontation, Soviet Russia and Maoist China were therefore perfectly correct in accusing each other of being Fascists.

Thus, the idea that Nazism and Fascism were Rightist is an old Soviet lie that Left-leaning intellectuals in the West have perpetuated in flagrant denial of historical reality.

11:41am: “Those who wish to attack the weak justification of violence found by some in Islam should do it by becoming well-versed in Islamic texts.”

Or Leftists could support the real “tiny minority” of well-versed secular Muslims. http://www.secularislam.org/blog/post/SI_Blog/21/The-St-Petersburg-Declaration

… instead your average Leftist in academia applauds the Islamo-fascist apologists of CAIR, ad nauseum.

Leftist hypocrisy on stilts.

11:41am drooled: “I’m not quite sure how you equate classical liberalism with neo-conservatism - please elaborate”

Your ignorance can be remedied by educating yourself on classical liberalism of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

What Leftists disparagingly refer to as “neo-con” is nothing more than a conservative appeal to principles of classical liberalism.

Explaining his disenchantment with the modern Democratic Party’s gradual evolution into a far Leftist (read: Marxist) entity, Ronald Reagan said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.”

I’m not quite sure how those who today call themselves “progressive” equate their pedigree with the principles of classical liberalism— please elaborate after you’ve taken your Haldol.

3:49 drooled: “modern Democratic Party’s gradual evolution into a far Leftist (read: Marxist) entity”

The Democratic Party is nothing more than the Party of the raging bourgeoisie. Nothing about Clinton, Edwards, or Kerry says “proletarian.”

The fascist-communist link is still quite bullshit. Fascism was promoted by the Catholic Church, the extreme upper-class, and the military, while Communism lived in the factories and inteligencia. Barrington Moore’s book “From Dictatorship to Democracy” shows the clear difference in how fascist and communist states formed, and why they formed that way. And lest we forget, the United States government has launched coups to overthrow Communist states and has overwhelmingly supported fascist states.

And seriously, promoting unreviewed blog articles written by Fred Thompson supporters, and books written by a former advisor to Ferdinand Marcos does nothing to grant legitimacy to your claims.

Just a quick point: There is no contradiction between disdaining the ideology of resistance groups (i.e. Hamas, as mentioned in the article) and supporting their fight for justice and self-determination. The first step for any people in their quest for freedom is the right to rule themselves. As Gandhi never ceased to point out, any people would rather be ruled by the worst of their own than the best that a foreign government has to offer.

From Palestine to Iraq, the form the resistance movements have taken are, regrettably, theocratic. This doesn’t make their efforts any less worthy of support.

And let’s not forget the American revolutionaries were led by slaveowners and Protestant fundamentalists. But to abolitionist deists like Thomas Paine, the cause of national soveriegnty trumped such concerns.

I purposefully tried to avoid this political element of Islam in the article, but to avoid the the appearance of inconsistency with previous articles I felt a terse post was warranted. I know that my concerned, far-right readership will appreciate it.

well said Kyle

3:49pm, I now understand where you are coming from, as you are arguing that neo-conservative ECONOMICS are the inheritors of classical liberal ECONOMICS (each person you cited is foremost an economist, and the wikipedia article you cited deals chiefly with the politics of economics). Given the fiscal responsibility of the Bush administration, I think it’d do you one better to refer to this as Libertarian economics, but to each his own.

I do hope you understand, however, that economics not only has no place whatever in this conversation, but to suggest that neo-conservatism and classical liberalism is only a philosophy of economics is ridiculous, and to use economics in such a metonymic way borders on dissembling. To even suggest that neo-conservatism as embodied in the Bush administration is primarily interested in promoting “the importance of human rationality,” “natural rights,” “the protection of civil liberties,” “constitutional limitations of government,” or “individual freedom from restraint” (all those other pesky components of classical liberalism) borders on doublethink and insanity.

If Kyle wasn’t a lefty, everyone would be calling him an anti-Muslim fool right now.

Kyle is nothing more than a confused college student.

Kyle 8:12pm drooled: “As Gandhi never ceased to point out, any people would rather be ruled by the worst of their own than the best that a foreign government has to offer.”

Rubbish. Iraq has invited Coalition forces to help rid their country of anti-democratic terrorists. The “resistance” you refer to are led and financed by non-Iraqi outsiders (Syria, Iran, al-Qaedists, etc.). Brave Iraqis support their democratically elected government and are working with Coalition forces to oust these outside interventionists.

Leftists are always fond of asking “What would Gandhi do?”

And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay for Iraqis (and their Coalition allies) to fight al-Qaedists, Iranians and Syrians who want to slaughter them to take Saddam’s place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER.

During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the Holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide Iraqi domestic policy just won’t cut it. When American’s think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers fighting alongside their Iraqi allies, risking their lives to prevent another Hitler or Saddam.

Gandhi probably wouldn’t approve, but most Americans and Iraqis can live with that.

4:58pm drooled: “Fascism was promoted by the Catholic Church”

Nice anti-Catholic bigotry (masquerading as rejoinder). The evidence clearly demonstrates that the 20th century’s bloodiest mass murderers— Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Honneker, Mussolini, Caeucescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi, il Sung, Mugabe, Mengistu, Castro, Che, PFLP, PKK, FMLN, FARC, IRA, ETA, Red Army faction, Shining Path, etc., ad nauseum— were all inspired by Marxism.

Or isn’t it important to use the same bloody measuring stick for your ilk?

100 million corpses don’t lie. Own it.

3:52, Everything boils down to economics. The average citizen thinks they’re taking sides of a just social cause, but their ultimate position on anything boils down to money in someone’s pocket. Capitalism IS money.

2:57— The Catholic Church generally supported fascism, look at Franco in Spain or Pinochet in Chile. On the other hand, lower clergy in Latin America also supported Communists, that’s why American-trained paramilitaries had to execute priests and nuns.

Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who, in the wake of the 9/11 Islamic terrorist outrages, stated:

"We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights, and — in contrast with Islamic countries — respect for religious and political rights."

Such a statement, at such a time, should not have been controversial. After all, how could Western Civilisation possibly be held as the moral and cultural equivalent of Islam — a religious and political ideology that orchestrated and celebrated the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah?

Hitler was a Leftist.

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” [—Adolf Hitler— Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306]

Hitler was no Christian, and his movement was no celebration of Christianity. He thought ill of Christianity, preferring Islam for its warrior spirit:

“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” [Adolf Hitler, quoted by Albert Speer, p. 96, Inside the Third Reich.] http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/id2.html

Much like today’s neo-com Leftists. [see “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left”] http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/089526076X

The neo-coms of old believed in the Soviet Union the way religious people believe in God. Those who spied for the USSR didn’t see themselves as traitors to their country, but rather loyalists to humanity and an ideal of America that’s never existed. When the Soviet Union fell, a few of them stopped for some introspection but most pressed on as if nothing happened. Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it nicely: “Without the Revolution, my life and my work are meaningless.”

Now that they no longer have to defend an indefensible regime, modern neo-coms are simply nihilists. They know what they oppose but they have no plans for the aftermath of the revolution which they still believe will happen. They don’t know what they want, but they know what they hate: the United States, capitalism personified.

So why are they allying with radical Islam? Horowitz says that the Neocoms still believe in Marx’s dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Once private property is abolished, the need for religion will vanish, and Islamic radicals will stop being Islamic and radical. The only thing standing in the way is the United States.

Sound insane? It is. They are.

Capitalism is perfect.

Love, Big Pharma, Health insurance companies, Cable companies, professional sports leagues, and Enron

p.s. we appreciate you not giving us any special favors

enough with the 100 million statistic-those dictators are as “communist” as they are small-r “republican” many of these most infamous dictatorships (that’s precisely what they were, don’t pretend otherwise) masqueraded as “people’s republics.” as their command economies were appeals to marxism, their rubber-stamp parliaments appealed to democratic ideals. all were simply self-serving perversions of various ideologies, not meaningfully communist.

and it takes a true ignoramous to paint all military action by largely islamic groups in the same shade. palestinian resistance is not analogous to osama bin laden’s attacks, nor even is the resistance to american occupation by iraqis pissed off about years of oppression and the disastrous oil for food and resistance by al quaeda in iraq which seeks to inflame the iraqi conflict as part of nefarious global aims.

but the idiotic fire-breathing conservatives that kyle’s column attracts like the proverbial stink on a monkey have no capacity for such subtle but essential distinctions. they only operate in broad terms like “marxists” “islamo fascists” “leftists that hate america,” etc. that contort and obscure important realities to serve their shallow political goals and provide a false but comforting consistency to their ideology.

“Courageous” artists seemed happy to mock Christianity but curiously reluctant to hurl equivalent jibes at Islam. Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize-winning transvestite artist who looks very fetching in his little Disney-princess frocks, reveals that he self-censors when it comes to Muslims because “I don’t want my throat cut.”

Idiotarian @ 2:03pm: As readers can clearly see, it takes a genuine terrorism apologist to paint the mass murders of innocent civilians and Coalition peacekeepers in our global war on terrorism as “military action” and “resistance”.

These typical Leftist attempts to excuse terrorist mass murders (under a guise of grievance theories) clearly identify today’s Leftists as a mouthpiece for the enemy and unworthy of serious discourse.

What more do you need to see? Watch them fling their rhetorical feces through the bars of their ideological changes. Behold the hate-America Left’s Hall of Shame. http://www.zombietime.com/hallofshame/

Americans don’t expect anything less from today’s inheritors of mass murdering atheistic Marxists who brought us 100s of millions of innocent corpses over the past century.

Unless it isn’t important to use the same bloody measuring stick for your ilk? Own it.

Idiotarian @ 2:03pm: Here’s what “resistance” looks like to Leftists.

“Iraqi school guard, wife beheaded as children watch” http://www.reuters.com/article/gc05/idUSL2362541420071123

Kindly inform Badgers why Leftists insist on legitimating this evil as “military action” (instead of unequivocally condemning these terrorist mass murdering thugs)?

spit

Idiotarian @ 2:03pm: Another example of what Leftists call “military action” and legitimate “resistance” (as opposed to brutal terrorist mass murder).

Iraq Qaeda group kills 9 abducted officers http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSL2481365

An al Qaeda-led group said on Saturday it had killed nine Iraqi officers and posted an Internet video showing masked militants shooting the kneeling men in the head…

10,000+ terrorist atrocities since 9/11 and today’s Leftists are still spewing enemy propaganda in the form of greivance theory justifications. http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

spit

3:18-

“unworthy of serious discourse?” i suggest you attempt to engage in it first!

you completely reinforced my argument by using loaded, vague, often bullshit terminology.

Peacekeepers, atheistic Marxists, Leftists, are all vague or loaded and are deployed by you intellectually lazily or dishonestly simply to support your blind, self-deceptive, unwavering, fervent belief in the absolute righteousness and infallibility of all things and actions American, Christian and capitalistic.

You have no idea what my “ilk” is, and it is you who needs to use “the same bloody measuring stick” and realize that these “peacekeepers” could rightly be viewed in a very different light by residents of the country they occupy, a country that, regardless of culpability, has been subject to unimaginable chaos since the US invasion (not to say that life under Saddam was peachy keen). using “the same bloody measuring stick,” you would acknowledge that profit-seeking religious zealots (an exact foil of atheistic marxists) laid to waste the indigneous peoples and cultures of the Americas and Africa, whether by murder, enslavement or other means. If you properly employed this favorite measuring stick of yours, or observed its measurements, it would be clear to you that it is not ideology or religion that drives mass murderers (marxism, capitalism and the bulk of religious teachings are altruistic), it is the abuse of these ideas for nefarious, self-serving ends.

and if your brain were a little more able, or your eyes a little more open, you might put yourself in a foreigner’s shoes and at least entertain the idea that America does bad things, or at the bare minimum that the good things that America does sometimes have unfortunate consequences that make affected parties view those actions as unjust.

-Idiotarian

Idiotarian @ 4:47pm shrieked: “these ‘peacekeepers’ could rightly be viewed in a very different light by residents of the country they occupy, a country that, regardless of culpability, has been subject to unimaginable chaos since the US invasion”

Yes, yes, we know. More “greivance theory” justifications for terrorism. Spoken like a true propaganda mouthpiece for al-Qaeda. Idiotarian Leftists just can’t stop giving readers more evidence of their treachery.

At least there’s nothing vague about the Idiotarian Left’s bullshit. Behold their Hall of Shame. http://www.zombietime.com/hallofshame/

spit