9/11 wasn’t planned by people capable of destroying the fabric of a society. It was planned by people who were frustrated that Americans weren’t dying violent deaths, and thought they could indulge in a little shock and awe. They are now on the run all over the world.

While you talk about failed American leadership, you offer little more than additional adjectives in the way of substantiation. You also use the tired phrase “clash of civilizations,” you don’t offer much evidence that there is one.

It is natural that a majority of the handful of Americans who have attempted to indulge in acts of mass slaughter are Muslim, because the primary ideology advocating such acts right now bases itself on Islam. What is more relevant though is that most of the Muslims in America do not view these characters as holy warriors fighting for the umma. President Obama is doing an effective job of hunting down those who think they are.

We don’t particularly need “liberal” Muslim leaders. (Why is it that conservatives hate liberals with a passion, except when it comes to Islam, and then salivate over every “liberal” Muslim they can conjure up?) All we really need is Muslim leaders who are too busy making a prosperous life for themselves and their family in America, to be bothered with blowing the place up. Also, we need Muslim leaders who are confident of their own Muslim identity, and don’t feel a need to rant on TV that they are too Muslim.

America has real problems — starting with the fact that most Americans don’t have a clue about American history — but they have little to do with Islam or Islamists.

Shamrak takes a comforting set of tribal myths, blithely ignores several million human beings who live on the land he is talking about, and offers an emotional tirade signifying very little.

I’ve always thought the emigration of Jewish people to the Holy Land and the emergence of Israel was a good thing. I have to wonder about that a little… King Abdullah’s appeal to the American readership in 1949 was a moderate document that made some unavoidable points. How can any people claim to displace those who have lived for thirteen centuries or more from their own land, on the grounds that “my ancestors lived here 1900 years ago”?

Well, we hardly need to settle that question. It is an unalterable fact that several million of the world’s Jewish population do live there, have lived there for four or seven generations, and really have no place to “go back” to. They are a factor on the ground, and driving them into the sea is not an acceptable option.

But there are other people living there. The reasons these people claim the West Bank as the land for their own nation include:

1) Many of them live there, and have lived there for centuries.

2) Many of the rest used to live in what is now Israel, and since it is not realistic that they will return to their ancestral homes, this is the next closest territory, where people they are closely related to already live.

3) Treaties Israel has already entered into promise that they can have their own nation there, at some unspecified future time, under some undeveloped future diplomatic conditions.

It may be true that, given unlimited choice, a majority of Palestinians would chose to dispossess the Israelis and take over the entire former British Mandate of Palestine. But, being realists, most realize that isn’t going to happen. So, the best way for Israel to obtain peace is to arrange for their immediate neighbors in the West Bank to be able to get on with building their own government and economy. There is nothing like a thriving prosperous economy to make people forget that they had considered blowing themselves up just for the satisfaction of taking twenty of “the enemy” with them.

If Israel is guided by the loony fixations expressed in this article, then the rest of the world should abandon Israel to defend its misguided policies, and pay the price for them, without subsidies, without entangling ourselves diplomatically in the hard-headed irresponsibility of the Israeli government. Yes, Israel is a sovereign nation, and can make its own choices. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to pay for those choices.

The fundamental point is that the tenets of Islam, per se, call for charitable giving, whether zakat or sadaqa, not for funding acts of terror. Beyond that, like any of the world’s great religions, or even the world’s minor religions, there are a variety of individuals ways that professed adherents practice, or stray from, the teachings of their faith, or argue over the difference.

What do you think of the Christian evangelist who deliberately invaded a community celebration in Dearborn, where he KNEW the participants were mainly Muslim, then had himself filmed to show how intolerant Muslims are? (Gary Fouse featured it). I think I would have responded the same way the crowd did, not matter what my religion was. Hey, we’re trying to have a nice time and you’re spewing all this deliberate provocation…

But it’s not too late to open your eyes and observe without prejudice, instead of blindly repeating whatever the fanatics and mullahs tell you.