And, as there is a farm across the road, I know what it smells like, too.

Who is this Dreher person, exactly? A columnist for the New York Post? So this entitles him to his opinion. That and $.50 will buy you a cup of coffee.

If you were to take Oprah's show as your guide to Islam, you would think Muslims were basically Episcopalians in veils and turbans.

And some of them are. And some of them are Presbyterians in veils and turbans. Baptists, Lutherans, Brethren, even >gasp< Catholics and Mormons -- all Christian groups. Are they all Christian? Yes. Are they all the same? No. Are some of them fundamentalists? Yes. Do they fight among each other and disagree? Hell, yes!

What a crummy argument! Millions of adherents and there are crackpot denominations: who'da thunk it? They must all be like that! At least, while we're not looking. My Protestant classmates were convinced the Catholics kept rifles in the churches waiting for the Pope to "give the word", too. Bah.

If that's [honor killing of a woman as a non-Islamic act] true, then why have pre-Islamic Arabic tribal customs been taken up and spread throughout the Muslim world?

"Throughout the Muslim world"? Oh, everywhere? Could we see the numbers, please? (His "very many", later in the paragraph, doesn't count.) Does the word "pre-Islamic" -- as in "before Islam" -- indicate a basic flaw in this remark anyway?

Queen Rania's dismissal of Muslim behavior that brings discredit upon Islam as un-Islamic brings to mind the bankrupt apologies leftists made during the Cold War for Communism. When the wickedness of the Soviets, or other Communist forces, could not be denied, it was claimed that these people did not represent "true" Communism. They may have actually believed that, but those who would be victims of real Communists, not theoretical Communists, didn't have that luxury.

Ah, here we go: this is the essence. We are looking for something new to hate. Let's try to fill in the bare and empty space left by the demise of Communism with a new philosophy, one which has the additional cachet of being non-Western and therefore outside of our psychological model. It's not enough to hate our enemies; we must have a culture to hate as well.

Mr. Dreher would do well to apply the standards he uses to judge Islam to Christianity and see whether he still smells the incense of truth or if the pungency of his own rhetoric becomes more discernible. Violent history? Hipocritical practitioners? Extremist movements? Military applications? Sex descrimination? Persecution of the heathen? Christianity has done all this, but has had the great good fortune to be defanged by a secular society, so some distance can be put between politics and theology. Islam is still grappling with this problem.

Are some Islamic charities fronts for financing terrorists? Sure. Are they all? I suggest to everyone that there have been Catholic churches in this country of a certain ethnic persuasion that have fronted money to the IRA. Does this make Catholic Charities and the Catholic Youth Organization terrorist fronts? Hardly. Does this make all the Irish terrorists?

Thank you for posting this link, Phil. It has given me a lot to think about. Principally that hate-mongering is still going on, and that to look non-Western is a dangerous way to look.

It is always possible that the "Christian Arabs" mentioned in this article refused to be quoted by name not because they were afraid of their Muslim neighbors, but because they didn't want to be identified as Arabs in the press, to receive the hate mail that could be the result of this article. An Arab is an Arab is an Arab...

For excitement, this was a very good article. For content, this one is more thorough, useful, and substantiated.

Women had property rights under the law of Islam during its Golden Age, when women in Europe were property. This interpretation continues in numerous Islamic societies. Diversity is not just an American phenomenon.

The Koran is not a rule book, but a religious work. Think "Bible", not "Constitution". You can justify anything with the Bible. Including being condemned as unclean for wearing cotton-polyester blend clothing.

Mary Anne