Muslim leaders want to root out "Islamophobia." The suggested means of doing so will increase anti-Islamic sentiment. Unwittingly, or not, anti-discrimination fanatics often stoke what they profess to abhor. It's good for business. "Muslims are being targeted by a campaign of defamation, denigration, stereotyping, intolerance and discrimination," Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, explained to the gathering of his group. "Islamophobia cannot be dealt with only through cultural activities but (through) a robust political engagement." That "robust political engagement" is a euphemism for cross-border censorship by means of legal suits against writers, cartoonists, filmmakers, and others who run afoul of Islamic sensibilities and escape extremist vengence.

If Reagan were in the White House today, would we stand for this? Allow the use of our own systems to let would be social and political oppressors to flaunt frivolous lawsuits and mount an offense against this country?

The reason that Communism fell in Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world was that men like RR knew it was wrong and said so to a fault. Today, we're afraid to be honest and call potential evil what it is. Instead, we cajole and placate the contrarians.

To paraphrase, evil wins when good men do nothing. It's time to stop being politically correct and trying to be nice guys before we lose our country.

I gave the same advice to OJ: If you want to improve your image, STOP MURDERING PEOPLE.

Let's just not go the way of Europe and lay down for these a-holes.

G. Bush is to blame!

You guys are clearly over-reacting, Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance.

You are 100% correct, Dan. This guy Ekmelledin Ihsanoglu is dead wrong about the means for promoting his end. "Robust political engagement" = propagation of abstractions that just stoke the fire. Anyone knows that the only cure for a social "phobia" is personal, i.e., person-to-person contact with the sort of type one fears. (Of course, curing the phobia doesn't mean denying the underlying repugnance of its cause.)

Buzz, you write: "Anyone knows that the only cure for a social 'phobia' is personal, i.e., person-to-person contact with the sort of type one fears." I have come to wonder if the conventional wisdom is true. The people I've come across whose racism most disturbed me were, to a man, people who interacted heavily with the group of people they came to harbor unhealthy prejudices (or perhaps judgments is a more apt term here) about. Your prescription, i.e., personal contact, probably works in this special case, as so many negative opinions about Muslims as a group have been formed in recent years through mass media coverage and not personal contact.

Dan, Maybe the conventional wisdom is preserved if the counterexamples you cite are just "incurables"? Or maybe their judgments are reasonable responses to personal contact with bad individuals (yet still unjust extrapolations)? I don't know.