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Originally posted by Dave:
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originally posted by Dave the Wonder Boy:

That so often, man-or-woman-on-the-street Muslims, or "moderate" Muslims, so often voice belief in the same violent ideology as the radicalists.

Whether the man on the street Muslim would do the violence him/her-self, I find it bone-chilling that he/she approves of it. And I think it's with a twisted sense of "fairness" that the media tends to portray Muslims as less favorable on average to violence than they truly are.
I think that ties into the umma concept I talked about before. Muslims see their co-religionists under siege, in Chechnya, the Balkans, Palestine, eastern Turkistan (western China), and between India and Pakistan.

They emphathise with their fellow Muslims' struggles. They approve of the "freedom fighting", in the same way many American approved of the IRA's atrocious activities in Northern Ireland. (Many English people will never forgive the IRA for killing Lord Mountbatten. And who supplied the money for those bombs? Irish-Americans in Boston and New York.)

But would those moderate Muslims take up guns themselves? No, aside from the hardcore muhajadeen who kicked the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and who keep popping up all over the place.
I strongly dispute that any AMERICANS were sympathetic to the IRA blowing people up in England and Northern Ireland.

Or were even sympathetic to that cause.

Irish immigrants, yes, working in the U.S. and sending money and materials back to Ireland, but not Americans.

I again assert that no Americans, or Christians worldwide, engage in suicide bombings, regardless of the fact that Christians are targeted in pretty much all the Islamic firefight zones you list. Despite the fact that Christians and other non-Christian westerners are targeted across the world, Christians do not "empathize" and use that empathy to rationalize violence and suicide bombings.
I could start the list of nations where Christians are targeted and killed with Sudan, Liberia, and the Phillipines, and pretty much fill just about every Muslim nation between those points.

And despite about 2 million Christians murdered in Sudan since 1981 (and about 1 million other non-Muslims there), even after 9/11/2001, and many petitions for action from Christians worldwide, we are not carpet-bombing, suicide bombing or otherwise waging violence there.

I have little sympathy for the Chechens, they've done a lot of destruction to Russia, bombings of many Russian civilians, and if Chechens had just lived as Russian citizens instead of violently declaring independence, they would not be in their current situation. It is as good an example as any of Muslim rationalization of aggression.

Again, I see this Islamic glamorization of "martyrdom" as a dehumanizing fanaticism that is unique to --and widespread within-- Muslim ideology, despite attempts by the media and humanists to downplay that fanaticism and violence as only a small outer fringe of Muslims.

And again, I would compare that Muslim belief to that of the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, in that their Islamic beliefs allow them to exterminate anyone who disagrees with their warped ideology.

As an Israeli diplomat recently said ( on BBC news a few days ago) of the Palestinians' endless recruitment of suicide bombers:
"They hate us more than they love their own children."