Holy War

President Obama talks about Islam often, and he never fails to label terrorist attacks as terrorism. He avoids using the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” however, as many on the right demand he do. I’m with Obama on that. Too many Americans have decided the Muslim faith — its prophet, its holy book, its madrassas, its imams, […]

Friday Bag ‘o Tribalism

Watching NBC and MSNBC reports on the Charlie Hebdo terror killings in Paris, I see very few depictions of the magazine’s cartoons. In print and web-based media, though, the cartoons … even the really offensive ones … are everywhere. You’d have to be a cloistered monk not to have seen them, which makes me wonder why our TV […]

Strategery

Over the span of my life, Islam has been a consistently destructive force. Sure, religious fanatics in other parts of the world have started wars, but for pure hate-driven evil nothing tops the Muslims. Islam turns much of its destructive force inward against fellow Muslims; still, it has plenty left over to direct against Israel, and with the 9/11 terror attacks in the USA and subsequent […]

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Me

I remember, as a kid, reading a science fiction story about a future in which working adults are forced to buy, use, wear out, and replace enormous amounts of material goods, their lives an exhausting cycle of consumption imposed on them by the government in order to keep the nation’s economic engine going.  Older people, […]