But wait, Bernie, the Amish look down on those very same things as well, but you're not complaining about them.

Very true. But if the Amish acted like Muslims and wanted to force us to accept their religion, I would want the Amish thrown out of this country. Certainly if they started burning down night clubs and churches or trashing the offices of Playboy Magazine or raping or killing women who had the audacity to walk in public without a headscarf.

Some of my readers may protest, "Wait, wait, wait, Bernie. Only the crazies do that. Not normal Muslims". Then you missed this story:

Washington Post, 19 Mar 2002, They Died for Lack of a Head Scarf

The fire was a tragedy that could have struck anywhere. Fifteen girls between ages 13 and 17 were trampled to death and 52 others were hurt when a blaze swept through their school. [...]

But another far more sinister detail in this particular tragedy shows that it could not have happened anywhere but Saudi Arabia.

Firefighters told the Saudi press that morality police forced girls to stay inside the burning building because they were not wearing the head scarves and black cloaks known as abayas that women must wear in public in that kingdom. One Saudi paper said the morality police stopped men who tried to help the girls escape the building, saying, "It is sinful to approach them."

Girls died because zealots at the gate would rather see them burn than appear in public dressed inappropriately.

Who are these men who would choose a scarf and an abaya over a girl's life? The morality police, or mutawwai'in as they are known in Arabic, are officers of the Kafkaesque-sounding Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The State Department describes the committee in its annual human rights report as a "semi-autonomous agency that enforces adherence to Islamic norms by monitoring public behavior."

These events go on all the time all over the Islamic world. Almost every single democratic concept and human value that the Western world developed is abrogated by Islam. Once in the majority they would destroy all symbols of any other religion.

So although the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, most are still a threat to Western Civilization. No, they won't go around beheading and torturing. They won't blow up buses or train stations. They won't send their women and children into coffee shops with explosives strapped to their waists. But once they are the majority, they will put the fear of Allah into us and we will quietly and meekly close down the bars and booze clubs, stop the presses at Playboy and Maxim, remove piggy banks from toy stores, museums will remove artwork that their staff members deem offensive to Muslims, school children will not have pork in their schools.

Very few Muslims blow themselves up, but they are nonetheless a threat to modern civilization. If moderate Muslims had the nerve to stand up against the barbarity of the religion they were born into I would say there was a chance that Muslims could accept Western values. But once a Muslim always a Muslim. To turn apostate or to criticize Islam is to invite a death warrant. The few extremists will dominate over all moderate Muslims as we have seen in the cartoon riots in the UK, Denmark, and the rest of the world. Even in New York City we saw signs that the extremists want Islam to rule the world.

And everywhere, the blogosphere, even the MSM ask "Where are the Muslim moderates?" Stupid question. They're hiding. Almost every single Muslim in the world is afraid because even non-Muslims are afraid. At one time our great American Press took on the Mafia, fearless reporters investigated murderers and the most violent of criminals and fearlessly stood up against tyranny everywhere in the world. But if the once mighty and great New York Times shit in its pants to reprint some innocuous Mohammed Cartoons for fear of a teeny, tiny, infinitesimal fraction of a speck of violent Muslims, what is the poor, solitary, moderate Muslim to do? And what would happen if we let even greater numbers of them into this country? Well, most of cable TV would be reciting the Hadiths of Mohammed 24/7. If you wonder what Cable Islam would look like, check out Radio Islam.

"Surely, you must be wrong, these people can't all be as backward and primitive as you say. What about the great contributions of Islam to Civilization?"

Of course portraying Islam as a barbaric, primitive religion without mentioning that its practitioners were considered a shining light to the rest of the world when it was going through the dark ages, invites criticism that we are not being fair and balanced, that only a bigot would have a one-sided, stereotypical view of Muslims.

There is no shortage of blogs pointing out the once greatness of Islam. Upon noting the proliferation of the Sebastian Vivar Rodriguez rant being reposted all over the blogosphere and in emails, The Two Percent Company complains:

But where the hell does Rodriguez get off suggesting that all of Islamic culture, in practice, is solely about death, crime, filth, and a total lack of any valuable contributions to the human race? There are plenty of Islamic scholars throughout history who have made great contributions to the enlightenment of humankind. In fact, while Europe was languishing in the so-called "Dark Ages," Islamic science and culture was thriving and flourishing. Islam has certainly contributed more than enough to be considered a "valuable" culture by Rodriguez's standards. Do any of these look familiar?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Where the hell do you think we got these numerals from?... The concepts of zero and infinity, so important to so much of our modern mathematics, owe far, far more to the East (including Islam, India and the Far East) than they ever have or will to Western civilization, which maintained an irrational fear of the literally irrational for centuries upon centuries. Astronomy, algebra, philosophy, experimental sciences...Islamic culture has contributed a wealth of knowledge to the world, no matter what some of its current misguided adherents are doing.

Although all of the above is true for the Islamic past, in the eleventh century Muslim science and the numbers of scientists started to decline. After the thirteenth century they would still produce occasional scientists but they were the exception, not the rule. Sadly, Very little of value has come out of the world of Islam for over 900 years. See my previous post The Arab Contribution to Civilization: Nothing Lately.

Sadly too, there have been fewer Muslim Nobel Laureates than fingers on your hand despite being 25% of the population of this planet.

For some insight as to why this is so:

The Brussels Journal, Islam and the Left’s Miscalculation

... What is known as Islam’s "golden age” happened largely in spite of Islam, rather than thanks to it. Connecting the brief blossoming of arts and sciences in Baghdad and Cordoba with the "benevolent” influence of Islam is the same as saying that the high level of scholarship on Pushkin or Tolstoy in Moscow in the 1950s was the result of Stalinism and dialectical materialism, or that the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwaengler was as good as it was in the late 1930s thanks to Nazism. But the true causes of squalor and corruption in the Muslim world are indeed moral and cultural, rather than economic. After that brief period of flowering its had very little to offer to the world, either in the sphere of ideas or in the sphere of material production—even though it had that unique geographic position at the crossroads of civilizations...

So in defense of Islam let me say that at one time it might have been great [due to help from Jews] and that 99.99% of Muslims will never kill anyone over their religion [hopefully]. But we should all be very afraid of letting them into the West. Please take no offense of the following use of the word infest, but try to appreciate it in its clinical sense. According to my previous post on world Muslim population growth, Africa is now majority Muslim as is the Middle East. Asia is over one quarter Muslim. As Muslims infest areas they immigrate into, they slowly take over like an unstoppable fungus. Once Sharia Law is insinuated into a country, no Muslim man can marry a non-Muslim woman unless she converts. No Muslim woman can marry a non-Muslim man unless he converts. The wives and children of Apostates cannot become non-Muslims. Christians are killed and tortured until they convert. No Women, Muslim or otherwise, can go into the streets without headscarves.

And Eurabia is within sight. Those who do not believe it need to read EU to redefine meaning of Islamic Terror. A new Islam-speak is coming to Europe where "Islam in itself means peace" and acts of 'Islamic terror' are redefined to the politically correct 'terrorists who abusively invoke Islam'. non-Muslims failing to pray 5 times a day to Allah will be whipped, women will be killed for not wearing burkas and no one will know why because there will be no way to express in words what is actually happening.

Be scared. Be very scared.