You forgot about the part where we all plant trees and hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

Hitchens:
Understand them yet?

Then fight the "messianic cult of death". Fight the cult that worships death in the temple, in the synagogue, in the church, in the streets, in the halls of power, in every place such foul, repulsive, hateful, death-loving enemies of humanity are found. And since "it", "like European fascism and communism before it, will send me to my grave whatever I do." I will go down to that grave fighting.

But the last time I checked, history's grave contains European fascism and communism both.

Mr Sullivan, do you intend to bury Islam?! You're gonna need a bigger shovel.

The same was true with Jim Crow. Black people being allowed to live, work, ride, and marry with white people was a grievance of the KKK. Decades later, racism still exists, and even the KKK still exists, but the related terrorism and deaths have drastically decreased.

First, its Cohen's quote, and second he specifies Islamism as in extremist/jihadist.
By shovel, bullet, economics, education, security....its a good goal.

Indeed. But Cohen's entire argument is that rich idealistic Westerners are deluded by thinking that if only we could convince the terrorists that we're nice people, everything would be hunky dory.

No. There may indeed be people like that, since there's nothing so daft that nobody will believe it, but that is not a widely-held view, and arguing against that view is pointless.

The people we have to reach aren't the terrorists. The people we have to reach are the people who are fodder for their recruiters. Those are the people who we need to understand, and who we need to help to understand us.

You may indeed have a point about delusional Western thinking. One need only look to Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and numerous abortion clinic bombings to realize that Christian fundamentalists are as prone to acts of terrorism as their Muslim Mid Eastern counterparts.

Up until 9/11 Timothy Mc Veigh, who had ties to a Christian fundamentalist extremist group called Christian Identity, was responsible for the worst terrorist attack on US soil, the Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, many of them children. The person responsible for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing has yet to be captured and is known to be associated with domestic Christian fundamentalist groups. For quite sometime now, there have been countless bombings of abortion clinics, family planning centers and terrorist threats from domestic Christian extremists. In 1987, a number of white supremacists influenced by "Christian Idenity" teaching were indicted for plotting to poison the municipal water supplies of two major American cities.

(http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/07/1671.shtml)

We may really have a very hard time convincing Islamic fundamentalists, or anyone else for that matter, that we are "nice people" and we believe that God is love.

A little something I picked up at the Reason website. It has several hotlinks, too many to add, and some interesting comments as well.

Londonistan

The Washington Post this morning offers a lengthy piece about the "sprawling shape and deep history of al Qaeda and related extremist groups in London." Writes the Post, the British capital long ago "became 'the Star Wars bar scene' for Islamic radicals, as former White House counterterrorism official Steven Simon called it, attracting a polyglot group of intellectuals, preachers, financiers, arms traders, technology specialists, forgers, travel organizers and foot soldiers."

"Today," according to the piece, "al Qaeda and its offshoots retain broader connections to London than to any other city in Europe . . ."

The NYT fronts its own version of the London story, writing that in recent years, "Britain had become a breeding ground for hate," and its capital "a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base . . ."

The New Stateman's Jamie Campbell wrote last August about Why terrorists love Britain.
Posted by Charles Paul Freund at July 10, 2005 10:26 AM

Actually, we caught him.

BTW, Undertoad, in your own way, you did pick an instructive example.

In 1924 the Klan had an estimated membership of 4.5 million and was able to openly march in Washington. Today, the Klan has no real open political power. The difference is not the Klan, but that the rest of our society has grown up. No attempt to eradicate the Klan by force would have succeeded. What happened is that people eventually saw them for what they are. If the Federal goverment had tried to eradicate the Klan by invading Alabama, many people who would not have considered joining them would have supported them. Violence used against them was their recruiting tool.

My bad, Rich. I should have checked additional sources. When?

Two years ago

His trial ended 3 months ago.

Left home on the way to work that morning?
I hope to fuck your talking about violating client/attorney privilege and not business concerns. :eyebrow:

Thank you. Short term memory? Who? Me? Its a nuisance sometimes. :mg:

At any rate, at large or behind bars, the point remains the same.

Right on the money.

So how do we get Islamists to reform their society?

Don't tell me what we don't do to achieve this, tell me what we DO.

If I knew that, I'd be telling them, not arguing on a message board. But I don't have to be a doctor to tell someone to stop shooting themselves in the foot.