this is a battle that must be fought on many fronts...physical...intellectual...and emotional...in time, we (the rational) will win...

short term is difficult...the islamic fanatics will have nuclear weapons shortly...they will not hesitate to use them on american soil for mass murder...the resolve needed to deal with them is not there with current or president-elect leaders...

stay safe my friends...

Bernard Lewis, the primary American scholar on things middle eastern believes that the problems the west faces regarding Islam can only be fixed by Islam itself. One of his books "What Went Wrong" provides back round for his thinking and conclusion.

lol. Nice.

Mars is too good for them. I understand that one of the moons of Saturn has possibilities using heat from inside and changing from oxygen breathers to methane.
But to be a tiny bit more realistic it is more likely to be populated by rich Objectivist proto-humans.(Now there's a plot for a SF novel.)

All throughout history we have evidence of groups of people attempting to separate themselves from others to pursue their own ideologies. We had it with the Puritans and others who left the religious oppression of Europe to come to America. We have society doing it by making their outcasts and criminals populate Australia. Even the notion of Atlantis is the same idea of separation from others to pursue a goal of self-government. The problem is that there simply isn't any place on this planet where there can any longer be separation from others. And with the advancements in technology and economy, that divide has disappeared almost completely. So part of the problem is that now we have no choice but to interact with those who think differently - even oppose what we choose to believe. And conflicts arise where one (or both) of the parties is intolerant. I see that coming to a head very soon, and it doesn't look pretty.

Maybe we can invest in space travel and export all the Muslims to a place that seems to fit them: Mars...

Yes, I am appalled, too, at how many of the writers here are actually advocating genocide. 1.6 billion people? Is that the Objectivist ethics? Really? If even Ayn Rand advocated that, by whatever rationalization, I'll have no part in such insanity.

Racism is only a progressive invention to cover their own sense of being better than everyone else.
The fact is...they are not better than anyone.

no. I am not. and I am appalled at this thread

well, in here we refer to people as individuals. read my post. We think of muslims as a group and ex-muslims as individuals? so every child raised in an islamic household is NOT HUMAN? crazy talk

Sorry k; Not sure where my mind was on this one. =(

My guess is that your being sarcastic..but even to that, I will say, no he's not...unless of course he is referring to the parasitical humanoids whom posses no conscience. Which of course, is the only true division in society.

Which is why we basically need to destroy Islam

I see the merit in your post.
I mulled it.
I chewed on it.
I hate to say it, but it makes me feel better about being 82. I see the conflicts stretching down the century with no end in sight. I tried to promulgate a relatively quick solution, but I can see there is none. Lust for power taking advantage of fools by using religion. I was right about one thing. Plus I'll add a second thing. Immaturity and ignorance. It may be the proof that the only way to foster the continuation of humanity is to figure out a way to form a separate society -- with all the problems that will incur.

While I understand the argument, who do you think is funding ISIS? It's primarily Iran at the moment, but every radical group has been funded by some major Islamic government: al Qaeda by the Saudis, Hezbollah by Syria, etc. It's just like Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian terrortories: one is the "face" of Islam, the other the sword-wielding arm. They are in actuality part of the same body, and until the Western World is willing to recognize that fact and deal with both on the same terms, there will be no progress. We have to stop treating the varying Muslim organizations as if they have different goals. They in fact do not. They just attack on different fronts. If we want to go after the military wing because it is more justifiable and easier to defend from a policy-perspective, I understand the idea, I just think it is a never-ending battle. If we want to win the war, we have to go after the political face of Islam just as much as the fanatic militants.

The problem in defeating Islamic terrorism is that most of that part of the world is a pre-modern society. How are going to be brought into the the 21st century? Changing their philosophy is not the answer. Your dealing with a religious belief system that has been taught in that part of the world and that has been in aggressive conflict with others for 500 years. So, tell me that changing their philosophy will do the trick over time? I think not!
Just in Christianity has it's own internal conflicts & external disagreements , but in today's world it hasn't lead to bloodshed. I wish the the Gnostic Christians would have won the day way back when, the world might be a better place. On top of that I see Yeshua ben David (Jesus) not as a divine being but as a teacher of a way of life. Which the his followers(except for a few) misunderstood him. Then later on the orthodox leaders who won out against the Gnostics,then elevated Yeshua to godhood to control the the uneducated masses.
Maybe some day the Gnostic's will come to the fore-front of Christianity and set it on a new path.

BLANK OUT

Sorry, I wasn't being clear.
I was referring to ISIS.
Right now, the spearhead of radical Islam is ISIS. If the radicals understand that if they take arms against us or those we protect they will be swiftly dealt with, it should slow their growth considerably. Yes, it's costly in money & lives but we've seen the alternative.

Yes...these creatures need to evolve, need to grow up. It is clear that they have not achieved any sort of self inspection.
A similar situation happened 2400 years ago when the western world no longer had the voices of others to guide them. In order to survive, to gain some sort of understanding...they were faced with no other than... themselves, to observe their own behavior and ask..."how would I like to be treated" and given mankind's underlying mutuality, that on occasion produced empathy for others, the answers were applied to others and so the process of "Conscious introspection" began.

This is a process muslims and their beloved islam has not undergone...and to that point, so too, much of the rest of the world.
The question we must ask?...how do we wake them up.

Makes me think of "collective salvation"...one cannot ascend until all are ready to ascend. In this one instance...maybe this is where the idea came from. Although, the initial premise is false but to the idea of a cooperative global society it has a valid point.
We can't have peace until all have become conscious, control their own behavior, take care of themselves and create value respecting each others property. Only then, we might be able to have unfettered movement and a global citizenship.
That's probably 1000's of years in the future if we survive these times.

from what has happened in the world as a direct result of the muslims what would you or how would you refer to them?

Which head do you want to go after? The Mullahs - the religious heads of the Shia sect? The Saudi Royal Family which controls the Wahab sect? Or do you want to go after the religious underpinnings by attacking Muhammed himself? Do you want to turn Mecca, Medina, and the Dome of the Rock into radioactive wastelands to prevent the Hajj? Islam is the proverbial Hydra.

I agree that militarily, the only times we've been successful are with the scorched earth tactics of Jefferson's Marines. We have to be willing to utterly destroy anything and everything Islam - and that is why our efforts to this point have failed.

Ultimately, every conflict is philosophical. The only way to defeat a philosophy is to replace that philosophy with something else. One of the primary problems is how to replace it, as many in Islam are extremely closed-minded about other ideas, the religion itself teaches closed-mindedness, and the religion itself enforces its closed-mindedness with the death penalty. It is not a rational or tolerant religion by any stretch of the imagination.

Personally, I think that there are only two ways to overturn Islam: one is to utterly wipe them off the face of the earth through military force. With 1.6 billion adherents, that's not only a tall order militarily, but will require a will throughout the grouped nations which I think does not exist right now (except ironically in Russia and China). And by the time such a will might be developed, it will be too late for many of them (see the current European Union). The second is literally divine intervention - some huge massive event that overturns everything Islam and forces them to come to grips with the false premises of that ideology. Other than that, I'm really not seeing much.

Cultural battles are always difficult to combat, as the thinking that initiates the conflict has been "cooking" for generations. Conflict only makes the combatants more rigid in their thinking and motivation, especially if their culture involves "groupthink" rather than individualism.

your comment is racist

A religious based terror organization which fights guerilla style is like and octopus that can regrow its tentacles. In order to defeat it, one must destroy the head. All the fighting in different areas yield only temporary results. It would seem to me that to Concentrate on the headquarters and mop up the outposts is the best strategy. I'm far from a military expert, but I've read a few military books. Doing it as we have been doing it when we were actually doing it seemed like merely playing "footsie" with the enemy.

Religion will always remain a simmering stew of contention and corruption of the values of Objectivism. If you read their 'scriptures' as being a reasonable outline for living you always find where it allows the killing of the infidels (any who are other than themselves) or stealing from them. Their best examples (prophets) and supposedly most beloved by their god are dangerous criminals in any moral society. When those in the religion believe that the dogma is straight from god and must be lived to achieve glory in the afterlife there are plenty of 'reasons' given in the religious dogma for god authorizing murder, theft and violence against all those unbelievers. The state and religion are evil twins born at the beginning of civilization that demand the life, production and the mind of all those it comes in contact with. As the philosopher Lysander Spooner pointed out, "it is not surprising that religion exists, there are many people and many ideas that exist. What is surprising is that so many are taken with it and involve it in their lives to such a degree."