Rus: No worries, man, I ain’t gonna gang up on you. However, I think surveyor’s post on Islam was right on the money.
Speaking of “decoupling”: I’d like to decouple the foreign oil dependence argument from the Muslims as aggrieved victims argument.
America has been locking horns with the Muslims from very near our beginning. The lyric immortalized in the Marine Corps Hymn (“to the shores of Tripoli”) deals with the Barbary Coast Pirates and their predation of American ships.
From Wikipedia: In 1786, Thomas Jefferson, then the ambassador to France, and John Adams, then the ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain from Tripoli. The Americans asked Adja why his government was hostile to American ships, even though there had been no provocation. The ambassador’s response was reported to the Continental Congress:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.
Benjamin Franklin’s writings mention Islam and the difficulties in dealing with them, especially in light of Islam’s insistence on the primacy of their religion.
Make no mistake, this is a religion that has always been proselytized at the point of a sword. In point of fact, the verse exhorting believers to subjugate infidels is called the “Sword Verse” (Sura 9:5 in the Qu’ran). It is also a religion that insists on primacy and demands that unbelievers adhere to Shari’a (Islamic Law). The terms are onerous, to say the least.
The idea that we would not have collided with them at some point then becomes a little problematic. Obviously, our support of Israel and our policy there over the last 50+ years has exacerbated the situation, but lunatics like Osama and his ilk would have come after us at some point, for oo other reason than when you’re bent on world domination you eventually wind up coming after everybody.
