[tater]

The "West" is effectively Christian. You can make make a false argument based on tiny subclasses of "fundamentalist" Christians living in compounds someplace, but in actual practice, the West that we know is Christian taken as a whole. Women are free, and equal.

Islam, on the other hand, is absolutely, without question misogynistic, and backwards. Women are not full people. Look at the way they treat homosexuals as well. Islamic society has nothing to recommend it.

Regarding war and subjugation to get the West where it is now, who cares? They are welcome to try, IMHO, and we should fight them the way we fight for real. Again, think WW2. They can attack, that's their prerogative, we should fight back in the style of Curtis LeMay.

I hold them to no special standard.

Keeping them illiterate? I said only that in terms of keeping Muslims less radical, illiteracy is desirable. That is because Islam itself is dangerous. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a debate I saw, as long as the Koran exists, anyone who can read it can resurrect "islamism" by doing no more than reading the qur'an and haddith. It's all there in black and white. Since this will not in fact happen, we can expect a larger and larger % of Muslims to hold what we would call "fundamentalist" beliefs. Note that Judaism and Christianity have large numbers of non-fundamentalist adherents. ALL sects of Islam are fundamentalist by the same standards (literalism).

Christians have certainly been violent, but unlike Islam, violence is actually a perversion of their faith (I'm an atheist, remember, don't think I have a dog in this fight). If Christians acted like their savior, they'd be pacifists. Is Muslims act like their prophet, they are violent, generals, spreading their faith at sword point.

Al Qaida is NOT a perversion of Islam, it is simply Islam.

Islam needs a reformation of some sort, but again, it will only be distanced from its inherit violence and misogyny by choosing not to read it.

You always find that there are no shortages of people willing to attack Christianity, yet defend Islam. Attacking BOTH is just fine, but I always see people giving Islam a pass. Christianity is better than Islam---I say this as an atheist---because in spite of Christianity, Christendom created secular, pluralistic, liberal societies. This is a fact---we are communicating as a direct result of this fact. Islam is regressive.

Skybird makes an excellent post, BTW.

IMHO, the "solution" to Islam is only to debauch them with our culture, and NEVER let them win the fight of "multiculturalism" or political correctness. When they come to the West, they need to assimilate, period. That means that they wear bathing suits to the beach or pool---men and women together--and they get no special mediation of marriages, etc (no sharia, thank you). We cannot stop them being backwards scumbags at home, but we can respond not with proportionate, but disproportionate force to attacks.