>>>>>Anyone care to explain why podheretz's comments are correct?
>>>>>
>>>>>http://www.antiwar.com/orig/sahimi.php?articleid=11762
>>>>
>>>>I don't have time to get into this right now, but I will say Sahimi's article is so off point as to be ludicrous. The short-hand "Islamo-fascism" has been defined very carefully by those who use it. The arguement Sahimi uses by insisting there is a requirement for a dictator and "racism" is a straw-man.
>>>>
>>>>Any study of people like Qutb or Azzam makes the issue a lot clearer. Khomeini, despite being a Shiite, was a hero to Zawahiri and his Al-Jihad movement.
>>>>
>>>>If you actually care about this stuff beyond the political talking points level it would be a good idea to expand your reading beyong DailyKOS, CrooksandLiars and Antiwar.com. ( Right wing websites are just as bad, I'm just saying that serious policy issues are being reduced to political bumper stickers and it gets things so muddied the point gets missed. Whether or not you call it Islamofascism there is a very powerful movement in the Islamic world that is much more mainstream than National Socialism was in 1929. To dismiss it just to take a swat at political opponents is short-sighted - and exactly the weakness that will be exploited. )
>>>
>>>Ludicrous?
>>>Did you read Podheretz's bananas ?
>>>That IS ludicrous.
>>>
>>>Comparing badly microwaved Islam radicals (Al-quaeda) with Nazie movement is ludicrous.
>>>Comparing Ahmadinejad/Iran to Hitler/Nazie Germany is ludicrous.
>>>
>>>Iran as state that does not recognise Israel as state.
>>>Hitler did not recognise Jewish right to life.
>>>
>>>These are fundamentally different things.
>>>
>>>Now, bananas like Podheretz's article try to present these two things as equal. But are they really ?
>>
>>I think if you read the article carefully you'll see that was not the analogy.
>>
>>I am not in complete agreement with all of Podhoretz's points, but I think the characterization of his argument is intellectually false.
>
>I did not try to make 'characterisation' I simply overreacted :)
>But what he wrote in it really does not make any sense to me.

I think he goes to far in some ways, but his points that do make sense :

"But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional values of the West, and even in some instances of the law. Yet rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly giving in to the Muslims’ outrageous demands."

There is no question that there is a culture clash in Europe that Western Culture is not winning because the very people who have complete contempt for Western Culture are using that culture's greatest strengths to destroy it. ( very much in the spirit of Stalin's "usefull idiots" )

This quote from Bernard Lewis is in the article and makes perfectly good sense :

"MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [Iran’s leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights."

The quotes from Khomeini and Rafsanjani that follow it in the article are pretty chilling as well.

My point is that whether or not you disagree with Podhoretz's conclusions, it is just political fist-pumping to kiss the whole thing off as nonsense. He raises questions that need to be asked. If someone has a different conclusion then fine, discuss it in an intelligent way.

There is more to all this than "Bush sucks, Cheney is evil, Apple is cool and Microsoft is the devil!"

And I haven't heard any of the bloggers that dismiss Podhoretz as a madman talk about what they want to do when Israel takes out the Iranian nuclear program. Did you notice the strike in Syria up on the Turkish border?

They aren't kidding.