Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

PalArab chaos reigns as everyone is buying weapons

A very revealing article in the Arabic (and not the English) side of the Palestine News Network. (I am doing my own paraphrasiing of the Google auto-translation to make it easier to read):

Qalqiliya - Palestinians are acquiring weapons not only to fight the occupation, but also because of the family disputes and clan clashes that have become more prominent, as well as the use of arms by the warring factions. This is resulting in ordinary Palestinian people acquiring weapons for self-defense in light of the chaos of security problems, the law and the lack of control by the government.

PNN reviews this phenomenon which is entrenched in Palestinian society and diminishes the chances for stability and the rule of law, and replaces it with the law of the jungle.

The rest of the article talks about the black market in weapons, apparently from Arabs in Israel; how the price has gone up as demand has increased lately so guns now cost three times what they cost at the height of the Intifada. Palestinian Arab families are vying to have the best weapons, and bullets are easy to smuggle in from Israel.

Families that cannot afford guns are buying hunting rifles which are manufactured locally by PalArabs.

300 weapons have gone into a single small village in the northern West Bank in anticipation of the coming chaos.

This pretty much proves that PalArab society is doomed. Putting thousands of weapons in the hands of a people who are trigger-happy to begin with, in a place where it is not even conceivable that there will ever be an effective police force or a working judicial and penal system, is a recipe for any Palestinian-controlled areas to become Somalia, with warlords and clans killing each other forever.

The very idea that this could be the nucleus for an effective state is utterly idiotic. We have an immature people who have no discipline and no self-control being given deadly toys. It is a hundred times worse than the most lawless inner-city ghettos in American history.

Which brings up the obvious but little-discussed fact: Even if all the political pieces fell into place, even if the most dovish Israeli government would give all the territories to a PalArab government that pledged unequivocal peace, the resulting Palestinian Arab state would not be tenable. No possible PA government could impose order over the PalArabs without being extraordinarily repressive. Civil war may not be assured, but deadly chaos most certainly is.

It is inevitable that the daily lives of Palestinian Arabs in any sort of independent state are going to be miserable and far, far worse than under "occupation."

But on the bright side - they can always blame the Jews!

Dead PalArabs that I missed - we're up to 142

Since I found the Palestine Human Rights Monitoring Group site, which also maintains a list of Palestinian Arabs who were violently killed by each other (or themselves), I am now compiling a list of deaths I had missed in my count since June 25. Here's what I have so far from late June to mid-September.

I am comparing these with names listed in PCHR, my sole source of PalArab self-deaths until I discovered other sources. It is possible that a couple of these are repeats and the names were spelled wildly differently, but I'm pretty sure I didn't record these deaths previously. In general PCHR records more than PHRMG but there are definitely some that PHRMG finds that PCHR did not record.

Tahiea Jirjawy Magazy Camp shooting 28/6/2006 dead cause bullet in the chest
Zaher Salman Mhareka 27 Salfeet Family Dispute 1/7/2006 dead cause bullet in head from Tha'r Sleman Moadi when he was in barber and he's from AL Aqsa Martyrs Kataeb
Tha'r Sleman Moadi 26 Salfeet Family Dispute 1/7/2006 dead cause bullet in chest from AL Aqsa Martyrs Kataeb
Zaher Sleman 27 Salfeet shooting 2/7/2006 dead during cross fire and he's from AL Aqsa Martyrs Kataeb
Basel Tha'r 40 Biet Lahia gun fire 1/7/2006 dead during family dispute
Tha'r Madi 25 salfeet shooting 1/7/2006 dead during cross fire and he's from AL Aqsa Martyrs Kataeb
Faiq Ata Madi 50 Salfeet shooting 1/7/2006 dead during cross fire and he's from AL Aqsa Martyrs Kataeb
Moatasim Qudeih Khan Younis Arm Clashes 16/8/2006 Killed in arm clashes between members of Fatah and Hamas activities.
Mahmoud Amin Awad Jaber 43 Kufur Laqif east of Qalqilia Misuse of Weapons 19/8/2006 Killed accidently by a bullet fired toward him
Wasim Nasim Salman El Masri 18 Khan Younis Police 28/8/2006 Killed by a bullet in the abdomen in Khan Younis
Ra'ed Al Natoor Nablus shooting 9/9/2006 Unknown gun men

So this adds 11 more to the count, which has now hit 141.

UPDATE: 142.

A 30-year-old woman was killed and her five-year old daughter critically wounded after being shot in their home in Kalanswa, Zaka reported Monday night.

The girl was evacuated to Beilinson Hospital for treatment.

Police speculated that the woman, Fatama Salama and her daughter, were shot due to an unpaid debt and that the father of the family was likely the target.

According to Israel Radio, a grenade was thrown into the family's home some months ago.

Israel "Not Eligible for Protection under International Humanitarian Law"

Anyone doubting the hypocrisy of the Palestinian Arab "human rights" groups need only to look at the description of (yet another) international conference about PalArabs:

PCHR and International Federation for Human Rights, in cooperation with a number of Palestinian, Israeli, Arab and international human rights organizations; civil society organizations; solidarity groups with the Palestinian people; and human rights lawyers, academics and experts, will organize a conference on international protection for Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) in the period 13-15 December 2006 in Geneva. The conference seeks to lobby the Swiss Government as Depository of the Fourth Geneva Convention to convene a meeting of the High Contracting Parties to task a strong international protection force within the OPT to protect Palestinian civilians and their property.

The idea of organizing this conference emerged for two reasons:

First, there has been unprecedented deterioration in the situation in the OPT, under which crimes committed by IOF against Palestinian civilians have dramatically increased to include killings, destruction of property and economic infrastructure and a total siege mainly targeting Palestinian civilians.

Second, the international community tasked a strong international force consisting of 15,000 soldiers, mostly European, in response to an Israeli demand to protect Israel after a 34-day war against Lebanon and Hizbullah, although Israel is a nuclear country, which has the fourth strongest army in the world, and it is not eligible for protection under international humanitarian law.

The amount of hypocrisy and falsehood here is stunning:

Even though the PCHR itself reports on PalArab infighting and security chaos in the territories, this conference that is supposedly meant to protect Palestinian Arabs completely ignores this major source of their misery. It would not be a good idea to tell the world that Arabs treat fellow Arabs worse than Israelis do.
For the "fourth strongest army in the world" that is supposedly "targeting" Palestinian Arab civilians, they sure do a bad job. Hell, yesterday Arabs killed more people in Iraq than the IDF killed in weeks.
The last paragraph quoted shows the sheer bigotry of these supposed defenders of "human rights." They are saying explicitly that Jews do not have the right to be defended according to their twisted interpretation of international law. Besides the absurdity of framing the UN as a pro-Israeli force in Lebanon that is solely meant to protect Israelis, these moral midgets make up their own arbitrary rules whereby, effectively, Jewish Israeli is allowed, or supposed, to be killed.

A corrolary to this is that Hezbollah has every right to target Israeli Jewish civilians with cluster munitions, according to the PCHR. Any defensive move Israel does is, by their definition, illegal.

In other words, these people who claim to be supporters of human rights are defining Jewish Israelis as being subhuman who do not enjoy any human rights at all.

Just because someone says they are part of a "human rights" organization does not make them moral. As we can see here, the most immoral and twisted thinking can find a pleasant home as it hides behind high-minded platitudes about "human rights" that are effectively not about human rights at all, but about the abrogation of the human rights of Jews.

Tale of two tortures

From the Iranian Radio Broadcast Service:

The human right groups have slammed U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney’s allegations in support of torture.
In a recent interview with one of the American TV channels, Cheney approved the worst kind of torture in which the prisoner practically struggles between life and death.

From the historic Washington Post archives:

CRUCIFIED BY THE ARABS
The Washington Post (1877-1954) - Washington, D.C.
Author: Special Cable to The Washington Post.
Date: Nov 30, 1911
Start Page: 1
Document Types: front_page
Text Word Count: 204

Rome, Nov. 29. -- A party of officers, surgeons, and reporters who have been searching the places in Tripoli retaken by the Italians on November 26 found many bodies of Italian victims of the fighting of October 23.... These bodies had been atrociously mutilated. Some of the victims had been crucified and their eyelids stitched so that they could not close them. Some had been buried to their arm pits, their hands lopped off and their eyes gouged out. The agonized faces of many of them suggest that they had endured awful torture before death came.

Car thefts = "resistance?"

I don't want to read too much into an auto-translated word, but an article in the Arabic "Palestine News Network" speaking about the rash of car thefts by Palestinian Arabs against Israelis, refers to the thefts as "resistance."

Both the Google and WorldLingo language tools translated it the same way.

As we've said before, PalArab leaders look at the conflict as a "zero sum game" while Israelis tend to look for solutions that are win/win. Now, we know that "resistance" is a keyword by the PalArabs to justify terror (as well as to justify why they treat their own people so badly). Given the zero-sum mentality, then petty crimes against Israelis become a low-level "resistance" as well.

This is just conjecture but it is plausible. I would appreciate it if someone who knows Arabic could translate the first paragraph for me at the original site.

Anti-semites can't stomach Neturei Karta

Too repulsive to post in full, too funny not to link.

A Jew-hating moron named Mark Glenn decides that the Neturei Karta's anti-Zionism is not authentic enough for him - because they still believe in the Talmud:

Then ‘the good Rabbi,’ (in typical self-absorbed Jewish fashion) not content with his 45 minutes of fame, decided that the remarks I made about his organization and about the Talmud would not be left out there as the last word, and thus, in typical Jewish fashion, –meaning nervy–got up there, and amidst a performance of lisping, spitting, and bobbing back and forth, actually tried to sell the idea to us stupid, illiterate Goyim that the Talmud was a book of ‘peace and love’.
…peace and love. The Talmud, with its scurrilous description of Jesus and Mary, the sanctioning of murder, lying, theft and genocide was a book of peace and love…

…and then, there it was waaaaay back there in the deepest recesses of the conference hall, like distant thunder or like a waft of air that carries with it the smell of something beautiful to behold, that wonderful word that needed to be said…

….’boooooh!’ followed by another and then another, and a few other comments such as ‘just sit down and shut up, we don’t want to hear it!’

And I smiled, not just with my cheeks, but with all of it, my wrinkling eyes, my bared teeth and all of my soul. He blew it. He let the cat out of the bag. Had he remained seated and took his beatings like a man instead getting back up there and trying to defend the indefensible in the typically Jewish way, meaning whiny, effeminate, and Woody Allenesque, then he might have had a chance.

But not now. He blew it and he knew it and we all knew it.

And when I came out of the men’s room wiping the tears away from my dark, semitic eyes, there they were, with their pale skin, reddish hair and bluish eyes, the Men in Black, the ‘good Rabbis’ from Neturei Karta, standing right in front of me, staring at me very intently. They both turned and began to walk away from the conference, and I could not help but notice something strange…Each of them struck at his breast with his fist, as if there were an imaginary knife that was not seen.

I had heard of something like this before, and I believe that it is something called ‘The Pulsa de Nura’ which is a curse within Talmudic Judaism that is hurled at those who are deemed as enemies of the Jews…

The sheer self-congratulatory air of Glenn, who fashions himself a Talmudic expert, is quite amusing, despite his clear and unadulterated hate which is only matched by his ignorance. But it is people like this who do more to disprove the "anti-Zionist is not anti-semite" chorus than any number of scholarly articles.

Of course, this bigoted ignorant hateful drivel was linked to by Google "News."

A 43-year old man near Nablus (not named) and 45-year old Sami Mutawe of Khan Younis were killed by more of those mysterious "unidentified gunmen" that seem to proliferate in PalArab areas.
A Hamas terrorist died while digging a tunnel to facilitate the murder of Jews.
A man was seriously injured from gunhots that were being fired to celebrate a wedding. Notably, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights was quoted in this article but the website itself has not been updated to mention any of the murders or injuries since October 19th. This means that they have not reported on at least 12 dead PalArabs that I managed to find out about through mostly Arabic sources. Which makes me wonder how many I have missed since I started the count.

Also, if this wedding victim dies, chances are pretty good I won't be able to find out about it.

Anyway, my count of PalArabs violently killed by each other since Operation Summer Rains is now at 129. And my count of NGOs, newspapers, wire services, charities, human rights organizations and Palestinian Arab ministries who keep track of these things remains at zero (PCHR being the exception that proves the rule.)

UPDATE: I did find another source that tries to count PalArabs killed by each other, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. But it is also woefully inadequate - they only count 73 in the same time period that I counted about 105. But it is another source to look at, as they do list names.

So there are two organizations that try to keep a count, but neither has updated their stats in a couple of weeks.

UPDATE 2: 130.

(IsraelNN.com) An Arab who was trying to steal at the site of the former Palestinian Authority (PA) airport near Rafiah was killed Sunday evening. PA sources claimed that Israeli soldiers were operating in the area and opened fire after PA police fired over the heads of the thief.

IDF spokesmen stated they know nothing of the incident and that Israeli soldiers were not in the area.

The Nation: Give terrorists a chance

Occasionally I make a quick foray to the Left and get really, really scared.

In an article just posted at The Nation, Stephen Glain waxes poetic about the wonderful Muslim Brotherhood:

Kemal Helbawy is a founding member of the Muslim Association of Britain and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian-based Islamist movement with chapters throughout the Islamic world, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories. It comprises the largest opposition bloc in the Egyptian parliament, with eighty-eight seats, and it administers a network of social services that is far more efficient and responsive than those provided by the state. Brotherhood leaders have been at the vanguard of Egypt's grassroots push for political reform, consistent with the Bush Administration's policy of democratizing the Middle East.
But on October 18, Helbawy found out what all that hard work and credibility is worth, at least as far as the White House is concerned. The London-based religious scholar was tightly buckled into his aisle seat on an American Airlines flight bound for New York, where he was to be the lead speaker at a conference on the Muslim Brotherhood. Within minutes after leaving the gate, the flight captain announced a departure delay and the aircraft was towed back. Helbaway was asked to come forward, where he was met by an official of the US Department of Homeland Security and informed he had been rendered inadmissible for entry to the United States without a visa issued by the US embassy in London.

It didn't matter to the agent that, as a British citizen, the 80-year-old Helbawy did not require a visa, nor that Helbawy had traveled frequently to the United States a decade ago as part of a university lecture series. Orders were orders, and Helbawy was escorted off the plane.

Now, what reason could the evil Bush administration possibly have for not wanting a member of this social-services organization to visit the US?

The State Department would not say why Helbawy was barred from the United States. Increasingly, however, the Bush Administration is using broad interpretation of the USA Patriot Act to keep out foreign scholars critical of White House policies. According to State Department documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the act's "ideological exclusion" provision may apply to anyone who "endorses or espouses" terrorism or who voices "irresponsible expressions of opinions."

Of course - it is because the Bush administration is fascist and does not allow people like Glain to make their opinions known!

Nothing to do with the fact that every major terror group is descended from the Muslim Brotherhood. Nothing to do with the fact that the "moderation" that Glain imagines the Brotherhood espouses is only in relation to people who explicitly call for genocide of Jews, while the Brotherhood is only implicit. Nothing to do with the fact that these Islamists want to establish a world under Shari'a law where Glaim's wife will be forced to cover up, where Christians and Jews pay a poll tax and where Israel will not exist.

In taking on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Bush Administration has aligned itself against the most powerful and authentic political movement in the Arab world. Established in 1928 in opposition to foreign occupation and Zionism, the Brotherhood is the closest thing to an established, centrist party in an Arab world that over the years has shifted rightward on a riptide of outrage. Egyptians are drawn in by the group's message of moderation and tolerance and by their contempt for US Middle East policy, which includes support of Hosni Mubarak, the country's brutal, secular president. The group renounced violence decades ago and has condemned Osama bin Laden and his acolytes as apostates. It is not on the US list of terrorist organizations and gets high praise from many Egyptians--secular as well as religious, Christian as well as Muslim--for its civic-mindedness.

No one is arguing that the Egyptian government is not corrupt, but to pretend that the Brotherhood is truly interested in democracy is absurd - shari'a is not compatible with democracy as we know it, but for Islamists to use it as a means to gain power is fine with them.

Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda are all ideological descendents of the Brotherhood, and to willfully ignore that in order to pretend that the MB is a progressive, democratic movement is shortsighted and dangerous. It is also a little hypocritical to argue for "realpolitik" in dealing with the Brotherhood but to toss off the actual current leader of Egypt Mubarak as an evil despot that should not be spoken to. And the naivete involved in believing the MB when they say they are moderate is breathtaking.

To think that the mainstream Left in the US has these beliefs is more than frightening.

Evil settlers do another horrendous crime

The worst possible thing has happened to the PalArab cause:

Jews stepped in and bought ambulance supplies for a Palestinian Arab town in the territories that needed them desperately.

Not only that, but they did it when the Palestinian Arab so-called "leadership" told them that they can't help them and need to "find another donor."

Not only that, but the Jews who bought the equipment are "ultra-Orthodox."

Not only that, but they are ultra-orthodox settlers.

Here's the whole, sorry episode:

Thursday, residents of the Modeiin Elite settlement donated NIS 30,000 worth of medical equipment to an ambulance from the neighboring Palestinian village of Naleen.

The ambulance itself was purchased by village residents, but they didn't have enough money for equipment inside the ambulance. Resident Husseini Nafar said that they originally appealed to Palestinian Authority sources, who told them to "find another donor".

Their next appeal was made to head of Modeiin Elite's security Shuky Guterman, who remains in constant contact with village residents. "In the current situation, there's not much for the ambulance to do other than hauling dead people," he was told.

The ambulance did not even have a gurney and all of the drugs inside had expired. Town mayor Yakov Guterman, a charity organization, and residents of the settlement immediately took action to rectify the situation.

A ceremony in honor of the donation - coordinated by the IDF's coordination and liaison branch - was held at the Modeiin Elite fire station, which afforded village residents a view across the fence.

A delegation from Naleen, including village mayor Muhammad Srur, was escorted through the nearest crossing by IDF representatives.

Modeiin's mayor, the first speaker at the event, emphasized that "saving lives is important to both faiths and is mentioned both in the Torah and the Quran. We hope that the people in Naleen will have cause to use the ambulance for happy occasions such as births."

"Neither the left or right-wing can create discourse between us and our neighbors, particularly Naleen," Guterman continued, recounting that some thousand village residents work in Modeiin Elite, thus creating a daily connection between the villages.

Husseini Nafar, the leader of one of the village clans, also spoke and asked in his speech "to stop the building of the fence that will disrupt our life. We aren't willing to be separated from Hashmonaim and Modeiin Elite.

So folks who are routinely described as the most evil, racist people on the planet do more to help the PalArab people than their "leaders" do. The evil settlers employ a thousand of them, they give them medicines and medical equipment, and they treat them like respectable human beings.

It is only a matter of time before some PalArab terrorist, suffering from cognitive dissonance, will attempt to blow up the Jews of Modiin Elite for having the audacity to do such a shameful act that offends Arab honor.

If you think I am joking, look at the Fatah attack on the Efrat medical center in March, 2002. Efrat had raised thousands of dollars for its neighboring Arab villages to have decent medical care and was rewarded with a suicide bombing against the very people who helped the Arabs the most:

In January, without warning, Channel One of Moscow filmed footage in the Arab villages near Efrat, expecting to hear stories about the 'Israeli occupation' and tensions between the small Arab village and the 16 expanding Jewish settlements of Efrat and the Etzion bloc. However, the Russian TV crew heard the opposite message. They heard only praise for the people of Efrat and the Etzion bloc of settlements and seething anger against Arafat and the "PLO occupation" of their fellow Palestinian Arab brethren in the Bethlehem region. Family after family in these Arab villages told Russian TV that they were getting the best medical treatment possible from their friends in Efrat, while their families in Bethlehem had to bribe officials just to get the basics of treatment from the PA. They also spoke with pride about the school that Efrat had built for them.

All of this was aired on Russian TV Channel One very recently. It would seem that the PA was watching. The clear purpose of the recent suicide bombing attack was to disrupt the existing, proper relationship between the Jewish city and the nearby Arab villages. Yet, despite the threats to their lives from Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the people of the Arab villages near Efrat gathered in an emergency town meeting to issue a statement denouncing the attack in the strongest of terms.

It surprised nobody in those Arab villages that Arafat's police force took credit for the attacks.

I won!

Thanks to the Watcher's Council for voting for my article "Archaeological Temple Artifacts Drive PalArabs Crazy" as this week's best non-council link!

Thanks also to ShrinkWrapped for nominating me, and allowing me to publicly correct my wrong guess in that matter.

PalArabic articles of note

Some things that caught my eye as I continue to over-use Google's auto-translate seature:

WAFA reports that A leader of the first intifada, named Alaa Aldali, was assassinated by another PalArab, I think in Khan Younis. Fatah condemned the killing (Fatah is mistranslated as "open", as apparently it is cognate to the Hebrew "P T KH" root which also means "open.")
Al-Quds mentions that another Arab named Ala Swaileh was also shot and killed in Tulkarem on the eve of the Eid celebrations. His friends responded by smashing dozens of shops, although of course that doesnt contribute to the economic crisis in the territories, because that is wholly Israel's fault. (Our count of violently killed PalArabs by PalArabs is now at 126.)
A Falasteen writer is taking notes from the MoveOn crowd, with a classic headline: "Crazy Bush is waging a total war to destroy the world"
Al-Manar points out that Israelis (or, as the headline says, Jews) are investing in Bahrain and getting chummy with the royal family there. Surprisingly, this story is reported straight.

Cultural immaturity of Islam

Muslims for a Safer America took a survey of American Muslims at an Islamic Society of North America convention in September. While this is not a scientific survey, it is probably a good representation of the thoughts of the more committed Muslims of America who are likely to attend these sorts of conventions.

The conclusion one can draw from this survey is that educated, Western Muslims are living in a complete fantasy world, where they are the perpetual victims and have no responsibility for any problems. In their twisted universe, Muslims didn't do any terror attacks, except maybe London; the US routinely lies and goes to extreme lengths to make Muslims look bad, and in fact the US is at war with Islam itself.

These paranoid fantasies do not come out of a vacuum. They are a direct result of the mindset of Islam, where the ascendancy of the West since the Middle Ages is a direct contradiction to the Islamic assumption that its philosophy was inherently superior. The fact that Islam descended into third-world status and irrelevance for centuries is a source of deep anguish and embarrassment. The more recent reinvigoration of Islam due to petrodollars has not seeped into this collective shame, where Andalusia is still mourned. Muslims are thirsty for relevance and evidence that their beliefs are superior to others'.

The US is everything that Islam is not. This is not a completely good thing - there are definite problems in American society, and some aspects of Islam are praiseworthy. But in real terms, the US dominance of the world scene, militarily and culturally and economically, is a focus for Muslim anger (which is simply a manifestation of embarrassment.)

Today's Muslims would rather react with fear, denial and paranoia to the challenges of the modern world symbolized by the US, rather than introspection about how modern Muslims can evolve Islam to meet today's challenges.

In many ways, it is a cultural immaturity. A mature culture is one that is secure in its own beliefs and confident enough that it can hold its own in the marketplace of ideas. An immature culture is fearful of other beliefs and standards and not certain of the validity of its own. The denial, projection and paranoia are all logical outcomes of this core insecurity.

Immature cultures crave relevance. Lately, the Arabic WAFA website has been filled with articles about Mahmoud Abbas taking telephone calls from leaders of some nations, like Spain or Jordan or Zambia. These press releases are a way to shout to the world that Abbas himself is a world leader, in that he can speak to other world leaders as equals. In reality, he looks more like an autograph seeker, basking in the reflected glory of a Tom Cruise. But this obsession is an indication of his desperate quest for relevance, and ironically it is a true indication of his irrelevance.

Terror is just a manifestation of this quest for relevance. It is the equivalent of a temper tantrum from a two-year old with deadly weapons. If you have insulted me, if you have disrespected me, if you have ignored me - then I will make you pay.

Another example of this immaturity: Muslims are rightly concerned with the saturation of sex in American culture. One cannot look at a sitcom nowadays without being barraged with fairly explicit sexual messages. They are offended by this part of American culture, and they have a right to be.

Now, it just so happens that a large number of Christians are equally offended by the same problem. There are far more Christians in the US than Muslims. Why doesn't organized Islam try to reach out to other groups and deal with what is clearly a core issue for them? Mature groups would work together to reach a common goal. But one gets the impression from Muslims that they would never work with others - whether the reason is xenophobia or an unwillingness to compromise on small issues to gain a greater victory, either way it is a result of immaturity.

There is no more pluralistic society than America. People from countless cultures, religions and nations manage to live here and thrive. America doesn't just tolerate diversity, it celebrates it. It isn't perfect but in American culture, success and hard work are rewarded. To think that the US is targeting Islam is the height of delusion. This delusion is not just psychotic but it is dangerous, and ultimately it is more dangerous to Islam than to the West. The unspoken American contract is that you can do your own thing as long as you are one of us, and American Muslims do not consider themselves American nearly as much as they consider themselves Muslim.

Islam needs to grow up, and one way or another it will have to. The question is how many innocent people will die as it struggles through adolescence.