India is 80% Hindu.

Whoops, sorry, missed your self-correction.

What do they WANT? These bigots who long ago decided they hate Muslims, and now look for any justification for that hatred, what is their goal? I mean, if you reach a conclusion, it should lead to a course of action. Just as I frequently challenge people who say that diplomatic engagement with Iran has failed to then come out and SAY what they think the course of action resulting from that determination should be, if you have decided that this nutjob shooting his fellow soldiers represents all muslims and their nefarious plans to outlaw abortion and force prayer into our public schools, what then is the recommendation? Concentration camps? Deportation? Martial law?

They seem to wish for some kind of open conflict, but they never seem willing to actually SAY it. As Spencer says, this tells us a great deal more about them than it does about anyone else…

mikey

India has the second largest Muslim population (150M) behind Indonesia (200M).

Indonesia has a really free press now in terms of politics in the Newspapers and Magazines (they still have a bit of an issue with nudity)…much better than the MSM which leans much more towards one or other Party lines…particularly corporatist positions.

Their major problem is access to records so that they can discover government corruption. There have been some major exposes of corrupt judges, and expropriation of land, pollution, etc.

Also the TV news still hoes a pretty narrow furrow, and most people get their information from the TV.

But people are mainly concerned about pocket-book concerns of daily life…rather than ideology. The Islamist parties have become increasingly marginalized (down from about 25% of the vote in 2002 to about 5% today) and their efforts at instigating nationalist or wars of “ummah” are the laughingstock of the public. Last year there was a big campaign by extremists to “attack Malaysians for stealing our Malay culture”. Most Indonesians simply scratched their heads and said “what bodohs (idiots)”.

What a day, indeed.

Religion is frequently responsible for people following through with bad ideas, but bad ideas are consistently human in origin.

I don’t get how these people don’t understand how analogies work either. Muslim (despised minority) is part of a larger organization (Armed Forces) in which he is also a minority.

Christian shooting gay folks. Christian (dominant majority) shoots gay folk (hated minority). There is no way to discuss anything at this point. We just went down a dead end street and drove into a ditch.

A working analogy would go something like this. Rural farmer joins the Urban League, gets fed up with all the red neck jokes, and decides to shoot up the place. Urbanites immediately declare that famers are not to be trusted: search them, restrict their rights, require psychological profiling of all people wearing trucker hats before they are allowed to enter the city.

But then, that wouldn’t happen…

It is my job to adjudicate between what is valid and what is base; and between what is intelligent and what is extremely motherfucking stupid, venal and, yes, bigoted.

You do a damn good job at your job, Spencer.

Hate mail can be a bitch — been there, read that, for some twenty years. Hang in there, dude.

(Hey, if Digby thinks your work is “quite illuminating,” you must be doing something right.)

Our social system is beset by psychodramatic conflict for which there is little likelihood of resolution.

People strive to maintain the continuity of their points of view with nearly the same intensity as the struggle for biological survival. That is just the way consciousness works.

This article is worth a look-see. It shows the process in good detail with good examples.

Investor psychology: Fear turns people into sheep

Fear turns people into sheep. Once they are sheep, they will strive mightily to justify the actions of their “leaders” – whether those leaders gave trillions of dollars in bailouts or got us into war, and even if the leaders’ justifications were false.

To which I say: Keep the light of truth in your heart. It shines for the multitudes who seek it.

What Peterr said.

I am willing to bet that the guy that murdered the Amish schoolgirls recently was a Christian. I do not know for sure because, rightly, it was not an issue at the time. He was mentally ill. Evidently, there are mentally ill Muslims,also.

See below (edit erased formatting).

Same deal again. I’ll get it right this time.

I’m a big fan of the blog, and it’s a main web destination for me (fantastic postseason baseball chat in addition to the timeliest and sharpest of nat’l sec. analysis! An obvious go-to.), so I’m going to speak freely now. I live in Madison, Wi. Two of the dead and three more injured were amoung a regiment from here just sent down to Kileen to be processed for deployment. You could say this thing hit home here.

I agree fully that the reaction in some quarters has been disgusting. Spencer’s push-back is utterly necessary. Among other things, it is his way of paying respect to the tragedy. These cretins need to be shamed into silence. It is bad enough that they choose to spend this day of mourning using tragedy to slander an entire culture, and nothing need be added to that to complete the picture of depravity they present simply on the face of their vile statements and insinuations. But I want to add something to what has been said about them. At the same time that they debase our national remembrance of this tragedy with their bigotry, they also distract from both the human tragedy and the epic heroism.

I realize this has been publicized nationally by now, but I just want to offer an opportunity to pause to get our heads around this. Yesterday a 19-year old girl (I’d say she’s a woman now, though) from Random Lake, Wis. named Amber Bahr, who joined the Reserves at 17 and now serves as a cook, found herself in the middle one of the most shocking incidents of violence (because of its setting) to occur in this country in recent years. Blood, murder, and chaos spun around her as she saw her friends and coworkers gunned down one after the next. Like any good Wisonsinite, her first thought was apparently not for her own safety but instead to determine what she could do to help. It is reported that she tore up her blouse (blouse? That’s the report…) to use as a tourniquet to aid a fellow wounded soldier, and carried another to get medical attention before she realized she herself had been shot in the back and was leaking blood from an exit wound in her abdomen. [This story was drawn from AP and Wisconsin State Journal accounts and was been dramatized, but given the facts we know it can't be all that much so...].

Amber at the time of the incident had not seen her mother since May; I presume she is now recovering with her by her side.

Andrew Sullivan wrote this morning that there is no silver lining to this incident. In terms of the effect on our society and discourse, that may well be true. In that case, however, I am not sure what to make of Amber’s story.

Scoundrels will be scoundrels. They prey on the weak: the weak in society, and the weak of mind. Let them be chased into the shadows whence they came, as is being done here. Let that be so in order that we not terrorize a peace-loving and essential part of our own nation. But let it also be so in order to preserve our ability to remember with dignity at moments like this both those lost, and to celebrate those, like Amber Bahr, who at critical times rise to show us the best of what we humans can be.

Peace.

I meant to provide some links. The Times has (not entirely accurate) profiles of those among the dead whose names have been released: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/05/us/20091105-fort-hood.html?hp

For the Wisconsin angle, here’s the WSJ write-up of the impact here: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt_and_politics/article_c023f4c2-caff-11de-864f-001cc4c03286.html

To be clear, I don’t know any of these five; my condolences to any readers who may be closer to one of the victims than I.

For the record, the countries with the largest Muslim populations are 1. Indonesia, 2. Pakistan, 3. India, and 4 Bangladesh. These are followed by Nigeria, Iran, Turkey and Egypt, which all have about the same number of Muslims.

Also for the record, Lebanon is a Muslim-majority country, and there are 17 officially recognized sects here, including Judaism, Druze, Copts and Alawites, not to mention Catholicism, the Maronite Church, Greek Orthodox, Sunni, Shi’a and Protestantism. The synagogue in downtown Beirut is currently being renovated.

As for the attack, it’s a tragedy, and as soon as I saw that he had a Muslim name, I new the xenophobic right was going to come out in force. Of course, nothing about the religion or race of the Columbine kids was considered very important, nor in similar instances, like VA Tech. But these days, Muslims and Arabs are held up to a higher bar than most other groups in the west, so that if one person from that background does something terrible, the entire group is held to blame.

Imagine if someone were to say that because that one guy who was trafficking in black market organs was Orthodox Jewish, Judaism was somehow to blame. Whoever made such a remark would be immediately rebuked as an anti-semite, and rightfully so.

For some reason, the same standards don’t apply when it comes to blatantly racist remarks about Muslims or Arabs. That sort of shit is not only tolerated but has become commonplace.

Thanks for that story and for your sentiments.

One more, to Liz Robbins’ moving review of the fallen: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07victims.html?_r=1&hp. The other Times link was to the thumbnail sketches they have up.

Lastly: thanks to Spencer for what he does and for the forum he (and FDL) provides. Drink up, buddy. The whole country’s drinking.

Thanks, mac.

It’s 7 am here, and I haven’t had my coffee yet, so please disregard the typos.

Invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world.

Three points.

1) Nothing can ever be deduced, generalized, explained, illustrated, or predicted from anything that a crazy person does.

2) Your correspondent has an emotional compulsion to subjugate people by group identity. Before the pretext of Fort Hood arose, he had some other. After it loses its salience, he will have some other. If even his target loses its salience, he will find some other.

3) This emotional compulsion is wired into the human brain. It is the purpose of civilization and education to equip individuals to overcome it and to clearly signpost the transcendent moral obligation to overcome it.

Oh, they have an agenda, all right. If you go to Gates of Vienna, you will find my charming fellow norwegian Fjordman, who acts as a ideologue for much of the anti-muslim front over at Pajamas Media. While folks like Victor David Hanson and Bruce Bawer try to walk the line and never make any recommendations, Fjordman says it openly: They want ethnic cleansing of Europe and the US, deportation of all muslims and making islam illegal. Its the Gert Wilders pose: Fascism in yet another mask.

Over here we now have former neo-nazis supporting Israel, Serbian communists, gayrights and the republican party. Its a strange combo, fueled by hatred for islam only.

Mike, with your permission, I’d like to put this up as its own post. It’s beautiful and eloquent in a time of crisis.

hear, hear.

He put it in the comments to be read, Spencer. If you bump it up to get more visibility, I don’t think that’s a problem.

(Now if it was an email that you received on deep background from a high-ranking “senior administration official” then you might have problems . . . .)

Spencer,

Absolutely, go for it. Stick a ‘c’ in ‘Wisonsinite’ (“Like any good Wis…”) for me if you could.

The email you received was a Talking Point, uttered almost verbatim by a righty caller to Thom Hartmann’s radio show on Friday morning. In other words, that genius thought was cooked up, disseminated, and mindlessly parroted all over as though it were the keenest insight in the world. Bigotry sells these days, and lots of people are buying.