You really don't get it. We are not talking about someone hurting someone's feelings. We are talking about how dangerous the situation is when people are not allowed to freely criticize a religion. Your freedom has been taken from you. You now live under dhimmitude.

Islam dominates this country. People are afraid to say anything negative about it because people like you start screaming racism and accusing people of hate speech. It's like living in Nazi Germany and criticizing Wagner. Also people are afraid of Muslims primarily for the reason Peretz says. Muslims will not categorically repudiate terrorism, degradation of women, and racism.

If Hagee ever advocated violence against those who do not follow Christianity do you think any Christian in this country would support him? Hell no, he'd be talking to an empty church the next day or out on his keister looking for a new job. A preacher is nothing like an imam. Preachers are ordained and then a church body elects them. The body of the church can dismiss a preacher in NY second if they don't like what he says.

Why don't Muslims condemn racism, homophobia, and terrorism?

A man draws a cartoon of Mohamed and his life is in jeopardy. Did Muslims come to his rescue and support his first amendment rights? No they murdered a Nun.

A man makes a movie about the evil way women are treated in barbaric muslim cultures. He is cut down in broad daylight. Do Muslims condemn his murderer and distance themselves from him. No in fact they support him and call him a hero.

That is the difference.

Meanwhile leftists can fund an artist with taxpayer money to put a statue of Jesus into a bottle of piss and put it on display. How many people did Christians kill? 0

The left is authoritarian and despises individual freedom, just like Muslims. The left has no regard for life, same as Muslims. The left is militantly anti-Christian and anti-Jew, same as Muslims.

There is nothing "conservative" about the Muslim culture. It is a barbaric system that has no regard for women, the sanctity of human life, or the principle of God-given individual liberty-all founding principles of true Americans.

Conservatives do not hate gays, they just don't consider them superior. Conservatives value and cherish women and especially motherhood and family.

Well said. Although I wonder if your reasoning only applies to Muslims. Don't leftists and Muslims share the same goals? They both regard Christians and Jews as evil. They both share authoritarian tendencies and despise individual liberty, self-reliance, and true forms of tolerance. They both have a disregard for human life. And most importantly both groups see themselves as oppressed victims. I think Peretz just stopped drinking the kool aid and came to his senses.

I think Ann is wrong on this one and I can’t believe I just wrote that. I am a big fan of hers. The difference between Clinton and Obama is ideology. When it came to a choice between principles or staying in power, Clinton chose power every time. Not so with Obama.

When Clinton was President, he supported many leftist ideas and shared their contempt for the family values of the bourgeois. Yet he was incredibly pragmatic. He actually said in a speech after the 1994 revolution that he probably had raised taxes too much. He signed the 1997 Taxpayer’s Relief Act which started a legitimate housing boom since it eliminated capital gains taxes on primary home sales below 500,000. He supported and signed welfare reform. He supported and signed NAFTA. He spearheaded an air campaign against Sadaam-operation Firefox. And he did these things all the while hated by conservatives because he touted the woman's right to abortion and the acceptance of the gay lifestyle as normal. All this unprincipled duplicity endeared him to independents and so he won re-election and staved off a near conviction for his Monica Lewinsky affair. Had Clinton not been so popular, I seriously doubt Rehnquist would have ruled in his favor. I admit that a lot of the legislation he signed he did so with a hand to his nose, but he still signed the laws.

Then irony of it all is that Clinton's legacy is more conservative than Bush II. Bush outspent Clinton ten to one on Aids to Africa. He introduced the Medicare Prescription Bill, Amnesty to illegals, and No Child Left Behind. Legislation that was at first lauded by liberal Democrats (Ted Kennedy was the co-sponsor of NCLB.) even though they later denounced him for not doing enough. Bush was a better environmentalist as well. He set aside more land for conservation than Clinton and he created the largest marine sanctuary in US History. Yet he was hated by liberals because he went to war against the Butcher of Baghdad and most of all, he was a professing Bible believing Christian.

Bush aside, Obama could never betray his core beliefs they way Clinton did. He would have to be coerced by a loaded gun to his head to support a tax cut or a reduction in spending. In your wildest dreams, can you ever imagine Obama signing a welfare reform bill? It just isn't in him to do that regardless of the consequences.

Evidence for this assertion is the last four months of Obama throwing his own party under the bus, especially on the issues of illegals and the ground zero Mosque. He doesn't know how to play the big game the way Clinton did. He is a Chicago fundraiser who uses favors and privilege as a means to get what he wants. He can't compromise and see the big picture the way slick Willie did. He’s a bully. But he can’t bully the public. Even Nero couldn’t do that.

And as the saying goes, “You can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

That is exactly right, well said. Look at the drubbing any conservative gets if they make an innocent mistake like Dr. Laura. They pounced on her like wolves. And what about Sarah Palin, they mock her down syndrome child. They have no shame, no sense of decency. I read today in the London Times about the Republican party in 2006 having had problems with corruption. They mentioned Delay was indicted for paying off a lobbyist, but never convicted. They never mention that the Democrat liberal scum Attorney General who had to form twenty grand juries to get the indictment. Wasted millions of Texas taxpayers money and then never got the conviction. Doesn't matter, Delay's career was ruined and everybody keeps repeating the lie over and over that Delay was crooked.

"And some intelligence experts now say that the backlash could also bolster extremists abroad, who wish to portray the United States as anti-Islam."

Are these the same intelligence experts who stopped the 224 Marines in Beirut from being taken out by a suicide bomber? Or the same experts who stopped the WTC from being bombed in 1993? Or the same experts who warned us about the Khobar Towers and the USS Cole? and finally alerted us with their expertise about 9/11? Are these the same experts who ran the State Department and allowed the 19 hijackers to have student visas even though they weren't actually students in an accredited University? We have no intelligence experts in the US, thanks to the laws passed by the knee jerk, anti-American, Democrats under Carter.

Why doesn't Amanpour mention the Imam's refusal to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization? Probably because she doesn't consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization.

I can't believe how irrational these Chomsky-ite propagandists like Amanpour are and yet are lauded as brave and free thinking intellectuals. The psychotic reasoning here is the same as before the war -let's not make the Muslims who are killing us angry and upset or they might kill us.

The Chomsky-ites get upset by whatever the US does in order to protect its sovereignty or the safety of its citizens against murderous Muslim terrorists. Then they call people like me Islamophobes because we fear them. A phobia is an irrational fear, there is nothing irrational about fearing Muslims.

There is nothing irrational about fearing a group of people who do not denounce and condemn the people who commit acts of terrorism in the name of their religion.Their silence is an act of approval, period.

If a group of Christians formed a group and starting killing innocent people I would be out in the street as fast as you could say "Apostate" protesting and condemning the groups actions every chance I could. If that Imam and his followers did the same, I would believe him and be the first one in line to defend his right to build a Mosque. But neither he nor his followers condemn the terrorists, so all I can do is assume he supports them. That's why I fear him and his religion.

There is only one reason I can tell that the Muslims are angry with us- we haven't converted to their religion. We have three choices, convert, submit, or die. I guess right now we are submitting by letting them spit in our faces and faces of the victims of 9/11.

The gzero mosque is nothing less than a shrine to the Muslim hijackers who rammed the planes into the twin towers.

I guess this is life under dhimmitude so we better get used to it. Next our wives and daughters will all be wearing burquas and we'll all be answering the call to prayer five times a day. Good thing we won the war, huh?

It's amazing, but I watch a lot of old movies from the sixties and seventies. Three films, the Odessa File-1974 and starring none other than John Voight the outspoken critic of Islam, Khartoum-1966, and Baader Meinhoff 2008 about events that happened in the seventies, all three talk about in great detail about the ideology that drives the Muslim to act as he does.

Very enlightening, because when I was kid, I was told that all the trouble in the Mideast was just a squabble between the Jews and the Muslims. Now I know, they are after all of us.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stated the following in relation to atheism:
“ Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."[58]

"I’m not going to argue the merits of Judge Walker’s decision on Constitutional grounds, because in my view this is beside the point."

I couldn't disagree more. This is exactly the point. The judge's over-ruling of the will of the people by edict on this issue will spread to other issues. In fact, it was only a few years ago that the ninth circuit overturned proposition 264, a law very similar to the Arizona law of today. This usurpation of authority goes to heart of the problem in the US and why the left will continue to gain power. They know if they can dilute the meaning of the constitution and appoint judges to do their bidding, they don't need to win elections and they don't need to persuade people to vote for them. They can just have their activist judges issue an edict.

The institution of marriage is a major obstacle in left's path to establishing a socialist state. If they can destroy marriage, they can destroy the family, and replace parental authority with the authority of the state. A large portion of this goal has already been achieved. This is just one more step in the direction of serfdom.

It's sad to see that libertarians like Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Koenig (Of whom I hold the greatest respect.) are so eager compromise on this important point and to minimize the impact of this grievous ruling.

Read the leaks. It's mostly a "Blame Bush" litany probably leaked by Obama officials and friends. It's all about how disorganized the Afghan war was until Hilliary and Obama took over and straightened it all out with the "surge". And of course they always knew the PAKs were double dealing. Probably because they helped them out. The Obama Admin didn't even ask the journolistos not to print the leaks. They only asked that the anointed ministers of truth, i.e., the NY times, washpo, etc. redact information which could be harmful to soldiers in the field.

Wow, I bet that works about as good as raising taxes to create jobs. Nobody's going to jail. A lot of good soldiers could get killed from the leaked info, but nobody's going to jail. Leftists don't have to obey the law, the only people who have to obey the law are conservatives.