DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum I found this intersting- Muslim Demographics

I don't know how accurate the numbers might be, and don't know I agree with everything presented, but it is something to think about.

Any thoughts??

http://www.youtube.com/v/6-3X5hIFXYU

I found the theory somewhat valid but with the piece just stating that the information they are basing the numbers off of comes from "historical fact" without acknowledging where these "historical facts" evolve leaves many holes in the numbers, so though the theory is valid it is far from sound, and am sure a math equation could be created to dispute some of the claims.

Interesting thoughts here, but would like to hear both sides of the story before judging.

The Catholics aren't gonna like this.
Factually interesting (if it indeed factual), but at the end the narrator described it as "a call to action" which I guess means the producers of this piece (Christian/Catholic types I assume) are worried about the Muslim faith making major inroads in our society.

In the end I don't think it'll matter. I give the human species 100 years, tops. And maybe a lot less. A LOT less. I don't have a lot of faith for the long-term survival of this planet because we are too greedy and too absorbed in our own lives and our own instant gratification to worry about the future. We SAY we do, but we don't walk the walk. We only talk it.
Have a nice day!

"In 39 years france will be an islamic republic?" What does that even mean? "The world is changing, and it's time to wake up." "A muslim plan to evangelize americans." I dare someone to find where that was said in complete sincerity and seriousness. This video clip just spews Xenophobia of the christian right that we only see during election years.

At the end it said Islam just passed Christianity in regards to numbers...No...Islam has always been bigger than Christianity. This was seriously hard to watch for me. I highly doubt the accuracy of those numbers even though their actual point is probably correct. What I do know for sure is that at this point , 55% of americans between the ages of 18-25 are white. They are right, America will be a lot different culturally when our children are running it but guess what? The nativist party died a long time ago. This discrimination really has no place in america, the melting pot of the world.

I feel this is the same type of fear that was instilled in the 50's that led to the great white flight and the rise of the suburbs when the black population rose in the inner city. But guess what, we are not being enslaved by the black community. We as a civilized nation have embraced the community with open arms like we should and I am completely comfortable with current state of american culture.

Will american population be "overrun" with muslims soon? No. Their numbers still dwarf those of blacks and latinos who have held steady at 15%, but does it really matter? America will change, if you don't believe that you got to get your head out of the dirt. And like America has done before, we should welcome the change with open arms and understanding so we can continue to show the world that, in fact we are the best country in the world! (stepping down from the soapbox) Did anyone else feel the same way about this clip?

For whats it worth...

CIA World Factbook

has England's fertility rate at 1.98 which is pretty close to the 2.1 for population growth. It is also proven that fertility rates go down during a recession and France has had 10% unemployment for over a decade now.

To me, this video seems just like fear-mongering. IDK if I'm reading too much into it, but its seems like a disguised anti-Muslim propaganda video.

Pleasant thoughts on a Sunday morning...

Religion is detrimental to man.

Hilarious. I love the way the narrator always says "IMMIGRATION" in a spooky voice. This film is not disguised propaganda; it is propaganda. It is designed to scare unintelligent people into thinking the world is coming to an end.

However, ridiculous video aside, if pupulation fluctuation trends continue as is, there will eventually come a time when Christianity is a minor religion on its way to extinction - and it won't mean a damn thing. One religion will usurp another...BIG DEAL!

And btw, the video did not say anything about China.

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Athiests are some of the more hateful, agenda-driven people I've met.

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As an atheist, I can say that some religious types can be some of the most agenda-driven people you could meet. By far.

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You also find a lot of them acting "holier than though" just because they aren't tied to any strict sense of moral beliefs.

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Maybe I'm not getting your exact meaning, but I think you know that people don't have to be religious to have a good sense of morality. For the record, I don't think religion in and of itself is a bad thing.

Why be so narrow in your criticism by only implicating religion? Better to say any dogmatic belief system is detrimental to humanity.

Buy one, get one free!

Available in two colors!


Think of your daughter or granddaughter having to wear one of these ...

It's not about the religion, its about the culture that the extremists of that religion would impose on all of us. Make no mistake, the Muslim extremists would follow wherever the religion gains dominance. Those who would claim there is equivalence between Christian Fundamentalists and Radical Islamists need to ask themselves how much Christian Fundamentalism has affected their rights as opposed to how much Radical Islam most definitely would. You would either submit or convert or die, dig?

Not all Muslims are radicals, Dave. In fact, almost all of them (over 99%) would not identify with those extremists. Most Muslims are no different than most Christians - they are human. Almost all humans want the same thing, a peaceful life. Religion, for most people, is incidental to living. Most Muslims respect life, and the more exposure they have to Western culture, the more their lives will be indistinguishable from those of Christians.

Did you know that radical Christians used to execute heretics? Then something happened. Christianity was rendered impotent in the wake of an intellectual revolution in which people began to believe their lives were more valuable than a dogmatic belief system. The proliferation of technology has intensified the revolution, and Christians have been losing the cultural war ever since. The same thing will happen to Islamic nations when enough of their people realize that the individual is valuable and the best form of religion is the castrated version practiced in America.

Islamic Radicalization On The Rise


Mark Steyn

Orange County Register

February 20, 2009


‘It is hard to understand this deal,” said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy. And, if the special envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living memory can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have?

Nevertheless, let’s try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn’t worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the whole of Malakand Region. If “region” sounds a bit of an imprecise term, Malakand has over five million people, all of whom are now living under a murderous theocracy. Still, peace rallies have broken out all over the Swat Valley, and, at a Swat peace rally, it helps to stand well back: As one headline put it, “Journalist Killed While Covering Peace Rally.”

But don’t worry about Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of “extremists”: The Swat Valley is a good hundred miles from the “nation”’s capital, Islamabad — or about as far as Northern Vermont is from Southern Vermont. And, of course, Islamabad is safely under the control of the famously moderate Ali Zardari. A few days before the Swat deal, Mr. Zardari marked the dawn of the Obama era by releasing from house arrest A. Q. Khan, the celebrated scientist and one-stop shop for all your Islamic nuclear needs, for whose generosity North Korea and Iran are especially grateful.


From Islamabad, let us zip a world away to London. Actually, it’s nearer than you think. The flight routes between Pakistan and the United Kingdom are some of the busiest in the world. Can you get a direct flight from your local airport to, say, Bradford?

Where?

Bradford, Yorkshire. There are four flights a week from Islamabad to Bradford, a town where 75 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins. But don’t worry, in the country as a whole, only 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins.

Among that growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He was in the news the other day for threatening (as the columnist Melanie Phillips put it) “to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords” if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film Fitna. Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Minheer Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested at Heathrow and returned to the Netherlands.

The Home Secretary is best known for an inspired change of terminology: Last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism (an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as “anti-Islamic activity.” Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much for Islam’s reputation — i.e., it’s an “anti-Islamic activity” in the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.

Anyway, Geert Wilders’s short film is basically a compilation video of footage from various recent Muslim terrorist atrocities — whoops, sorry, “anti-Islamic activities” — accompanied by the relevant chapter and verse from the Koran. Jacqui Smith banned the filmmaker on “public order” grounds — in other words, the government’s fear that Lord Ahmed meant what he said about a 10,000-strong mob besieging the Palace of Westminster. You might conceivably get the impression from Wilders’s movie that many Muslims are irrational and violent types it’s best to steer well clear of. But, if you didn’t, Jacqui Smith pretty much confirmed it: We can’t have chaps walking around saying Muslims are violent because they’ll go bananas and smash the place up.

So, confronted by blackmail, the British government caved. So did the Pakistani government in Swat. But, in fairness to Islamabad, they waited until the shooting was well underway before throwing in the towel. In London, you no longer have to go that far. You just give the impression your more excitable chums might not be able to restrain themselves. “Nice little G7 advanced western democracy you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.” Twenty years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative ministry defended the right of a left-wing author Salman Rushdie to publish a book in the face of Muslim riots and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempted mob hit. Two decades on, a supposedly progressive government surrenders to the mob before it’s even taken to the streets.

In his first TV interview as president, Barack Obama told viewers of al-Arabiya TV that he wanted to restore the “same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” I’m not sure quite what golden age he’s looking back to there — the Beirut barracks slaughter? the embassy hostages? — but the point is, it’s very hard to turn back the clock. Because the facts on the ground change, and change remorselessly.

Even in 30 years. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, while the Muslim world increased from 15 percent to 20 percent. And in 2030, it won’t even be possible to re-take that survey, because by that point half the “developed world ” will itself be Muslim: In Bradford — as in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and almost every other western European city from Malmo to Marseilles — the principal population growth comes from Islam.

Thirty years ago, in the Obama golden age, a British documentary-maker was so horrified by the “honor killing” of a teenage member of the House of Saud at the behest of her father, the king’s brother, that he made a famous TV film about it, Death Of A Princess. The furious Saudis threatened a trade boycott with Britain over this unwanted exposure.

Today, we have honor killings not just in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but in Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, Toronto, Dallas, and Buffalo. And they barely raise an eyebrow.

Along with the demographic growth has come radicalization: It’s not just that there are more Muslims, but that, within that growing population, moderate Islam is on the decline — in Singapore, in the Balkans, in northern England — and radicalized, Arabized, Wahhabized Islam is on the rise. So we have degrees of accommodation: surrender in Islamabad, appeasement in London, acceptance in Toronto and Buffalo.

According to ABC News, a team of UCLA professors have used biogeographic theories to locate Osama bin Laden’s hideout as one of three possible houses in the small town of Parachinar, and have suggested to the Pentagon they keep an eye on these buildings. But the problem isn’t confined to three buildings. It ripples ever outwards, to the new hardcore sharia state in Malakand, up the road to nuclear Islamabad, over to Bradford on that jet-speed conveyor-belt of child brides, down to the House of Lords and beyond.

Meanwhile, President Obama has removed Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and returned it to the British. Given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust will almost certainly be arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/muslim-swat-government-2314278-muslims-islamabad

Anti immigration propaganda. Can't say if the numbers are right but it's been established in other more even-minded things I've read in the past that white Europe is indeed a winnowing population overall. So be it. Immigration has been a mixed bag for them. Yes, extremist groups have gained a foot hold but they've also been the destination for a lot of the brain-drain of the middle east for a few decades now. That has very certainly benefited them and their economies. Nothing Americans can do about that. And about Canada, ditto. I love how this piece almost shines a positive light on Latino immigration for bringing up Christian/Catholic birth rates. At any rate the numbers aren't going to stand in white America's favor for very much longer. The people that get the most bent about this are conservative southern and midwestern white males. Again, so be it. And the figure that in 30 years there'll be 50 million Muslims in the US (if that's even accurate I have doubts) means that they'll be roughly 1/8th of the population. Big wup. Doesn't exactly mean forced burkhas for your grand daughters.

Call me crazy but I don't really worry about any of this stuff. You know what never changes? That everything always changes. The demographics are and will continue to change, period. And you know what I expect to happen with the continued great success, financial gain and middle class arrival of the Muslim masses world wide? What's happened with every other religion that's had great success world wide.... fracture upon fracture, dilution upon dilution, and eventually good old fashioned apathy. It's inevitable. The natural curse that accompanies the spoils.

agreed.


People had the same fears about christianity back when the earth was flat.

Where did they get there data? Then don't refer to any studies (that I saw, did I miss it) or who may have done them so how can we tell if it's accurate or a scare tactic? Is any of this information credible?

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If you think religion is bad now, wait until you have to be a practicing member. I suspect you are really going to hate it then.

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But you see, I don't think religion (Christianity) is that bad right now which is why I refer to it as a castrated version of its historical self. I also don't agree with your prediction that a Muslim government in America would force me to be a Muslim. It is going to be a long time before an Islamic majority is reality. (I am not convinced it will even happen i.e. China.) There is one thing that is more powerful than any religion: it is the desire to be free to direct one's own life. Muslims under oppressive regimes are being kept from this at present, but it is getting harder for them to do so as their civilizations are increasingly influenced by Western culture. That is why the puritanical Muslims hate us so much. I believe the breakdown of dogmatic thinking is an historical inevitability.once people begin to understand their value is inherent in themselves. I think this is happening in the Islamic world.

People think things are bad right now. Think what it would be like if Muslims were all like what right-wingers would have us believe they are. The world would be obliterated in a few years.

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And the point still stands... religion is not what is detrimental, it is Man that is. Religion is just something that gets bent into a tool by some for their work of being detrimental.

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Ever read the Old Testament, Purp? There are entire ethnic groups that would disagree with your assertion that religion in itself is harmless.

And they would be wrong. Religion, without Man, is nothing.

It is Man's use and iterpretation of it that makes it Good or Bad. It, in and of itself, is neutral ... or, if we go back to Schroedinger's Cat, it is both... but it is only in the presence of Man that it becomes completely one or the other.

Schroedinger aside, I still asert that it is neither and it is only Man's use/misuse of it that is Good or Bad. Much like a gun: In it's Good form, it allows you to kill food for you to survive. In it's bad form, it allows you to murder. But it does neither without you and it is the Free Will of Man and Man's Ambitions and Desires that determines which one it becomes.

Religion, in it's Good form, helps or comforts hundreds of millions of people. In its bad form, it has led to wars that have killed millions of people. Yin & Yang... but the common thread in both is Man.

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It is Man's use and iterpretation of it that makes it Good or Bad. It, in and of itself, is neutral

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So true... if you look at the Muslim religion as it's written, it's a pretty peaceful religion in general... it's like anything else,, taken to extremes, it gets scary as hell.....

I've read a loose english interpretation of the Koran and it's nothing like the extremists promote as true meaning.... (it was quite a while ago so please don't ask me to quote anything...) But I remember coming away thinking,, I can't adhere to this, it's not my cup of tea, but it's not all horrible either.

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were a.) entirely deserved; b.) largely deserved; c.) somewhat deserved; etc.

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I wonder what the numbers would have shown had they added: d.) completly undeserved. If your not given a choice like that, how likely is you can rely on that poll as being accurate.

It may very well have included that - probably did (note the "etc" in my reply) - I listed the ones that indicated degrees of radical attitudes.

I tried reading that link and it came up all crazy,, pages won't display,, can you go back and look to see if the really did add that in there.. I was just wondering.... thanks man

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15066&R=161881B104

Just Like Us! Really?

Gallup says only 7 percent of the world's Muslims are political radicals. Yet 36 percent think the 9/11 attacks were in some way justified
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by Robert Satloff
05/12/2008, Volume 013, Issue 33
The Weekly Standard



On the inside back cover of books published by Gallup Press there is the following breathtaking statement:

Gallup Press exists to educate and inform the people who govern, manage, teach and lead the world's six billion citizens. Each book meets Gallup's requirements of integrity, trust and independence and is based on a Gallup-approved science and research.

Don't be distracted by the bad grammar. Focus instead on Gallup's "requirements of integrity, trust and independence." Thanks to a remarkable admission by a coauthor of Gallup's new bestseller Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, we are now able to know precisely what Gallup's "requirements" really are.

Who Speaks for Islam? is written by John L. Esposito, founding director of Georgetown University's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. As the authors state at the outset, the book's goal is to "democratize the debate" about a potential clash between Western and Muslim civilizations by shedding light on the "actual views of everyday Muslims"--especially the "silenced majority" whose views Esposito and Mogahed argue are lost in the din about terrorism, extremism, and Islamofascism.

This majority, they contend, are just like us. They pray like Americans, dream of professional advancement like Americans, delight in technology like Americans, celebrate democracy like Americans, and cherish the ideal of women's equality like Americans. In fact, the authors write, "everyday Muslims" are so similar to ordinary Americans that "conflict between the Muslim and Western communities is far from inevitable."

Similar arguments have been made before; some of this is true, some is rubbish, much is irrelevant. The real debate about the "clash of civilizations" is about whether a determined element of radical Muslims could, like the Bolsheviks, take control of their societies and lead them into conflict with the West. The question often revolves around a disputed data point: Of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, how many are radicals? If the number is relatively small, then the fear of a clash is inflated; if the number is relatively large, then the nightmare might not be so outlandish after all.

What gives "Who Speaks for Islam?" its aura of credibility is that its answers are allegedly based on hard data, not taxi-driver anecdotes from a quick visit to Cairo. The book draws on a mammoth, six-year effort to poll and interview tens of thousands of Muslims in more than 35 countries with Muslim majorities or substantial minorities. The polling sample, Esposito and Mogahed claim, represents "more than 90 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims." To back up the claim, the book bears the name of the gold-standard of American polling firms, Gallup.

The answer to that all-important question, the authors say, is 7 percent. That is the percentage of Muslims who told pollsters that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were "completely" justified and who said they view the United States unfavorably--the double-barreled litmus test devised by Esposito and Mogahed to determine who is radical and who isn't.

The authors don't actually call even these people "radicals," however; the term they use is "politically radicalized," which implies that someone else is responsible for turning these otherwise ordinary Muslims into bin Laden sympathizers. By contrast, Muslims who said the 9/11 attacks were "not justified" they term "moderates."

More than half the book is an effort to distinguish the 7 percent of extremist Muslims from the "9 out of 10," as they say, who are moderates and then to focus our collective efforts on reaching out to the fringe element. With remarkable exactitude, they argue: "If the 7 percent (91 million) of the politically radicalized continue to feel politically dominated, occupied and disrespected, the West will have little, if any, chance of changing their minds." There is no need to worry about the 93 percent because, as Esposito and Mogahed have already argued, they are just like us.

There is much here to criticize. The not-so-hidden purpose of this book is to blur any difference between average Muslims around the world and average Americans, and the authors rise to the occasion at every turn. Take the very definition of "Islam." From Karen Armstrong to Bernard Lewis--and that's a pretty broad range--virtually every scholar of note (and many who aren't) has translated the term "Islam" as "submission to God." But "submission" evidently sounds off-putting to the American ear, so Esposito and Mogahed offer a different, more melodious translation--"a strong commitment to God"--that has a ring to it of everything but accuracy.

Or take the authors' cavalier attitude to the word "many." How many is many? Thirty percent of the vote won't get Hillary Clinton nominated for president, but it would be a lot if the subject were how many Americans cheat on their taxes or beat their wives. At the very least, one might expect a book based on polling data to be filled with numbers. This one isn't. Instead, page after page of Who Speaks for Islam? contains such useless and unsourced references as "many respondents cite" this or "many Muslims see" that.

Or take the authors' apparent indifference to facts. Twice, for example, they cite as convincing evidence for their argument poll data from "the ten most populous majority Muslim countries," which they then list as including Jordan and Lebanon, tiny states that don't even rank in the top 25 of Muslim majority countries. Twice they say their 10 specially polled countries collectively comprise 80 percent of the world Muslim population; in fact, the figure is barely 60 percent.

These problems would not matter much if the book gave readers the opportunity to review the poll data on which Esposito and Mogahed base their judgments. Alas, that is not the case. Neither the text nor the appendix includes the full data to a single question from any survey taken by Gallup over the entire six-year period of its World Poll initiative. We, the readers, either have to pay more than $20,000 to Gallup to gain access to its proprietary research or have to rely on the good faith of the authors.

Or, more accurately, we have to rely on Gallup's good name--the "integrity, trust and independence" cited above. Public comments by Mogahed at a luncheon I hosted at the Washington Institute on April 17 show exactly what that is worth.

Here's the context: As the event was about to close, Mogahed was pressed to explain the book's central claim that radicals constitute 7 percent of the world's Muslim population. A questioner focused on the critical distinction between the 7 percent of respondents who said the 9/11 attacks were "completely justified" and the other 93 percent. How many of those 93 percent, Mogahed was asked, actually answered that the attacks were "partly," "somewhat," or even "largely" justified? Were those people truly moderates?

In her answer, transcribed below, Mogahed refers in pollster code to numbers ascribed to the five possible answers to the poll question about justifying 9/11. Although she and Esposito never discuss the details of this question in their book, they did expound on them in a 2006 article in Foreign Policy magazine, which described a five-point scale in which "Ones" are respondents who said 9/11 was "totally unjustified" and "Fives" those who said the attacks were "completely justified."

In that article, she and Esposito wrote: "Respondents who said 9/11 was justified (4 or 5 on the same scale) are classified as radical." In the book they wrote two years later, they redefined "radical" to comprise a much smaller group--only the Fives. But in her luncheon remarks, Mogahed admitted that many of the "moderates" she and Esposito celebrated really aren't so moderate after all.

MOGAHED: I can't off the top of my head [recall the data], but we are going to be putting some of those findings in our [updated] book and our website.

To clarify a couple of things about the book--the book is not a hard-covered polling report. The book is a book about the modern Muslim world that used its polling to inform its analysis. So that's important: It's meant for a general audience, and it's not meant to be a polling report. One very important reason why is because Gallup is selling subscriptions to its data. We are a for-profit company; we are not Pew. We are Gallup. So this isn't about ... it was not meant for the data to be free since we paid $20 million to collect [the data] ... that we paid all on our own. So just to clarify that ...

So, how did we come up with the word "politically radicalized" that we unfortunately used in the book? Here's why: because people who were Fives, people who said 9/11 was justified, looked distinctly different from the Fours ... At first, before we had enough data to do sort of a cluster analysis, we lumped the Fours and Fives together because that was our best judgment.

QUESTIONER: And what percent was that?

MOGAHED: I seriously don't remember but I think it was in the range of 7 to 8 percent [actually, 6.5 percent].

QUESTIONER: So it's seven Fours and seven Fives?

MOGAHED: Yes, we lumped these two and did our analysis. When we had enough data to really see when things broke away, here's what we found: Fives looked very different from the Fours, and Ones through Fours looked similar. [Mogahed then explained that, on another question, concerning suicide bombing, respondents who said 9/11 was only partially justified clustered with those who said it wasn't justified at all.] And so the Fives looked very different; they broke, they clustered away, and Ones through Fours clustered together. And that is how we decided to break them apart and decided how we were to define "politically radicalized" for our research.

Yes, we can say that a Four is not that moderate ... I don't know ... You are writing a book, you are trying to come up with terminology people can understand ... You know, maybe it wasn't the most technically accurate way of doing this, but this is how we made our cluster-based analysis.

So, there it is--the smoking gun. Mogahed publicly admitted they knew certain people weren't moderates but they still termed them so. She and Esposito cooked the books and dumbed down the text. Apparently, by the authors' own test, there are not 91 million radicals in Muslim societies but almost twice that number. They must have shrieked in horror to find their original estimate on the high side of assessments made by scholars, such as Daniel Pipes, whom Esposito routinely denounces as Islamophobes. To paraphrase Mogahed, maybe it wasn't the most technically accurate way of doing this, but their neat solution seems to have been to redefine 78 million people off the rolls of radicals.

The cover-up is even worse. The full data from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is another 23.1 percent of respondents--300 million Muslims--who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don't utter a word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.

And then there is the more fundamental fraud of using the 9/11 question as the measure of "who is a radical." Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing, and opposes equal rights for women but does not "completely" justify 9/11 is ... "moderate."

Could the smart people at Gallup really believe this? Regardless, they should immediately release all the data associated with their world poll and open all the files and archives of their Center for Muslim Studies to independent inspection. With a dose of transparency and a dollop of humility, the data just might teach something useful to the world's six billion citizens.

Robert Satloff is the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Sometimes I think that there is a possibility that 9/11 was justified.

Usually this is because I think that America is a terribly greedy and corrupt nation. And if these people who blew up our buildings were acting in the interest of god---striking against those whose lives and values are pretty much controlled by money. Then I think that religion trumps dollar bills and big government.

It is sad that these people died---but if there is a possibility that god let this happen to punish the corrupt---which America certainly is.

Sometimes I view this event this way. And it stems from the helplessness I feel with respect towards the wealthy and their influence in government.

I feel like America is ruled by money---and money undermines freedom and the voting process. And I believe that majority of Americans who act as though they submit to the lord are fools who are more in line with dollar bills than gods way.

Basically, this is a nation of hypocrites, and it seeks to exploit the poor and working class. And the government and wealthy work to control the rest of the population. And if you don't do what they want you to do---then you become one of the millions who are incarcerated. America is a prison state, and it is master of manipulation and exploitation.

But then---after thinking all this----I will try to dismiss it as pure speculation. And I will tell myself that this isn't the way America is supposed to be.

I know there is nothing people can do anymore. We are subjects to an almighty government who will find ways to destroy anyone who wants to live independently from government.


end of rant.

end of hope.

sigh, another day picking DERDEN's brain.

depression.

depression.

depression.