warning

about ten minutes before we entered umm al-fahm, pg informed me of the protests in sinai and a few other regions.

then we stopped at a traffic light lined with protestors jumping up and down, their signs almost all in arabic and not a policeman to be seen. i prayed that no stones would be thrown... or worse...

at the time, serj tankian was playing. i suddenly remembered my dismay at discovering that he, too, has picked a side without uncovering the whole of our story. if a man that smart can fall prey to palestinian propaganda, then the israelis have no chance at all.

and here's the thing: the west is tolerant of islam, and that's great. but it's so tolerant that it blatantly ignores the issues because recognizing them might lead the west to hypocrisy. and that hypocrisy is in defending itself from a world-view entirely intolerant of the western ideals of freedom and equality.

you can make outrageous claims such as "the problem is the extremists, the moderates are okay". i, personally, know enough muslims to know that being muslim doesn't stop someone from being kind and caring, nor from being interested in the same things i am nor even from having the same ideals. but being a muslim means submitting to allah's will, and if allah wills the destruction of the infidel then it doesn't matter who the person is "on the inside", they must support the action or at the very least not interfere. even if they don't believe in it, because the penalty for going against allah's will is death.

that, i'm truly sorry to say, makes all muslims the enemies of the free world.

so, umm... western world? be warned. the day will come, pretty soon, when you will have to choose between your own submission to allah's will. or face destruction from within, or the shame of having to set aside your tolerant ideals in order to deal with that which threatens the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.

islam does not respect freedom of speech, nor freedom of religion, nor freedom of thought. each and every muslim, religious or secular, implicitly agrees with the fundamental tenets of islam. do you know what those are, before you accept them? are you willing to submit? because if you're not, you're in trouble.