Sarah, a lot of what you say is really important. The only thing I can add is that the phenomenon you describe in the Arab “honor culture” is primarily about MALE honor and MALE entitlement. At the beginning of the ascendancy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, I had fantasies of the UN sending an entirely female army over to protect the rights of Afghan women. It would never happen, of course, because Arab males are not the only ones with a misplaced sense of entitlement.

Brad, you raise an important issue. I was surprised you pointed to the comment of ABK when I thought there was an even better example among the comments to that very same piece of yours.
With respect to ABK, the phrase “too many Muslims” is indeed offensive. But two things make the offense seem almost out-of-context. The first is that it occurred in an otherwise non-inflammatory, non-offensive comment about practicality and numbers, ironically a comment largely in agreement with your original posting, I believe. The second is that ABK alleged that the reason for “too many” is that they are here illegally. I don’t know if that is true or not, but if it is, then the comment is entirely reasonable in the context of a society in which laws should be respected and obeyed. Looked at that way, the parallel is not “too many Jews,” but “too many crimes.”
I am very curious why you did not point to the two harsh and very offensive postings by the commnenter calling him(her)self “truth teller.” Truth teller had no commentary on the subject you raised. He/she did nothing but toss epithets and make ad-hominem attacks, including on the assumed ethnicity of another commenter (who happened to be me, but I’d feel the same way regardless of who was attacked). Why did you not point to truth teller’s comments as examples of hate speech? Why, in fact, are they not a superior example?

With all due respect Marian, you make the all-too-common, yet colossal error that the Taliban are Arab. They most certainly are not, and along with the majority of Afghans, are ethnically Pushto.

As a devotee of Lucifer, I don’t feel there are too many of any other religion in the public schools, although I’d of course like to see more children of practicing Luciferians. But I believe every religion should have to prove its worth. Maybe this does not have to be like your Elijah calling down fire from heaven, but the more children are exposed to the real results of religious practice the better choices they can make.

If you ask American, Israeli and European liberals and leftists what the key problem with Islam is, they will answer that there is a lack of tolerance. Not of course a lack of tolerance on the part of the throat-slitters, car burners, gang rapists, car bombers and hate preachers of Islam. On the contrary they will assert that there is a great tolerance deficit on the part of Western nations toward Islam.
In a rational political calculus, we take for granted that the people blowing up synagogues, stabbing their sisters to death for wearing jeans, and kidnapping and beheading people they don’t like, are the ones suffering from a tolerance shortage. But to a progressive brutal violence by a minority is always a symptom that they are being oppressed, rather than that they are the ones doing the oppressing.
Since progressives tend to define minority status as proof of oppression, violence is simply another way that the minority responds to being oppressed. So if a pair of well off middle class Muslim professionals drive a car bomb over to a Scottish airport, clearly they were reacting to a whole boatload or planeload of oppression. Perhaps they were outraged over a terrorist being downed by a drone, or saw the name of Allah in an ice cream cone, or maybe it was all the unveiled women. Those are just details in the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that every First World nation is oppressive and racist. Muslim violence is comeuppance or blowback, and the only solution is to be more and more tolerant of Muslims.
Having classified Western nations as always being in the wrong, and Muslims as being always in the right, where reasonable people see a failure to fight terrorism, progressives see a failure to fight intolerance.
Given a mandate, conservative governments will try to get to grips with violent Islamists. Liberal governments will try to get to grips with anyone who criticizes Islam. And naturally it becomes a good deal more difficult to point out that Muslim violence is a serious problem, when you’ve passed laws prohibiting anyone from making any mention of Muslims and violence in the same sentence.
This has the convenience of making it illegal to point out the stupidity of progressive policymaking, which is something that their fellow People’s Democratic regimes routinely do, at least until everyone begins starving to death. Tens of thousands dead in America, Europe, Israeli and Australia has not done much to chip away at the insistence of multiple governments that Islam is a religion of peace. And even conservatives have adopted the liberal mantra that Islamic violence is something carried out by splinter groups, in response to not being tolerated enough. The solution being more cowbell, or more tolerance. But so far the “Hug them until they love us” approach has not yielded any dividends, except more bombs and bullet holes, and bodies in morgues.
The progressive insistence on a black and white worldview, and on locating the locus of evil within their own society, has made it impossible for the vast majority of them to even consider the possibility that the violent, reactionary, patriarchal and misogynist ideology they should be fighting is Islam, not Christianity or Judaism.
But the problem with expecting people to think outside the box of their beliefs, is that it’s simply easier for them not to. For progressives the problem remains not Islam, but people who aren’t tolerant enough of Islam. Which creates a rush to feed the “intolerant ones” to the Muslim Crocodile of Peace, in the hopes of being eaten last.
So, Israeli leftists offer up the settlers as the problem. Europe offers up Israel as the problem. European leftists offer up European conservatives. America offers up Europe, Israel and anyone it can lay its long foreign policy mitts on. The Crocodile of Peace grins, chews and demands more.
‘
The shocking truth though is that the problem has never been a tolerance deficit, but a tolerance surplus. Tolerance is all very well good, but there are some things that shouldn’t be tolerated. Murder, rape, car bombings, airplane hijackings and Imams preaching all of the above under the green flag of Islam top the list. The more the tolerance surplus grows, the worse the violence becomes.
Urban policymakers found this out the hard way when they tried to tackle crime by blaming society, not the criminals. Prisons became revolving doors. Cops became social workers. Crime became rampant. It took a new generation of conservative politicians to pass mandatory sentencing laws, victim rights bills, restore the death penalty and stop coddling criminals. And so the tolerance surplus was closed.
Until the tolerance surplus with Islam is closed, the violence that Islam brings to our shores will continue.

Roger–your comments were seminal in nature. You not only hit the nail on the head, you drove it into the coffin of Islamofascism. We have become much too tolerant of Islamic violence; there are always liberal apologists trying to state the case that senseless Islamic violence is an answer to Western intolerance. Your incisive comments have shown that this is not the case at all.

Steve,
I assume that is you, identified above as “Your Name”, who raised the issue of “Truth Teller”‘s comment about your last name. It was indeed a gratuitous and inappropriate comment.
In general, let’s see if we can all address each others ideas, not denigrate each other’s presumed religious or ethnic identities. It would be boring if we all agreed, but it would be shameful if our disgreements become excuses for being mean-spirited.

Rabbi Brad, thanks for the response here. Yes, that was me! I did insert my name in the Your Name field, but due to an expired captcha, that information did not pass through. FYI, there are very big problems with the functionality of the captcha system, and I have written a note to tech support about that. More than once, it has caused me to lose my entire draft comment and I have had to start all over again.

What (imaginary) “truth-teller” postings are you rambling about? There are NONE in this blog entry.
In a previous entry, however, there was a “truth-teller” posting. I got the reference: Steve Goldberg is Mort Klein’s hatchet man. Yes – that Mort Klein, ZOA president for life, who never met an Arab/Muslim he won’t like to see dead.
Steve: stop complaining. The rest of us have mastered the art of the expiring captcha business- it is not rocket science!
Rabbi Brad: as to “mean spirited” comments- have you checked out David Klinghoffer’s blog entries recently? He has at least once insulted you. Why ping on “truth-teller” and not Klinghoffer?

Throughout history Jews have been the victims of persecution that begins with stereotyping, so why are we letting ourselves engage in the same kind of rigid labeling? It’s tempting to look for simplistic answers to complex problems, but in the long run, that always multiplies the problems. There is nothing that “progressive governments” always do, and nothing that “conservative governments” always do successfully.
As a forensic psychologist, I can certainly agree that our criminal justice practices have been misquided in many ways. But we have a higher percentage of our population behind bars than any other nation. We have prosecutors who are more concerned with a conviction rate than with justice, police who torture arrestees into false confessions, silly laws that can send someone to prison for life for a third shoplifting offense. But why bother thinking about that? Let’s just bust more heads.
We won’t solve crime problems by turning America into a neo Third Reich, and we won’t combat militant Islam by spewing the same sort of venom that emanates from its leaders.

Alex –
You are certainly correct about David Klinghoffer insulting me on numerous ocassions, but I don’t control his content. Actually you do, and so do all the other people who choose to read his stuff.
I “pinged” truth teller because I do have some control over the content of this conversation and because I do not want it to degenerate into the kind of mean spirited, triumphalist tone which dominates Kingdom of Priests.
BTW, you are correct about the reference by another commenter, who referred to Muslims as “cockroaches”. That portion of his comment should come down.