You’ve got me by a couple of years (not much!) and my monsters are still in high school so I hope they don’t decide to make me a granddad for a couple more years. I was teasing Cynapse, nothing more.

Experience is a relative thing. I know young people who’ve packed more into their few years than most and oldsters who did nothing.

Secondly, there is no “dancing with delight” happening here, there is only the simply mocking of Islamopobes – if you’re not one of don’t worry.

I’m with Cynapse and I’m way more worried about the threat posed by the uber-authoritarians among us and white supremisists than I am about some guy hiding in a cave somewhere.

@Jack: Friends always argue, some of my most heated arguments have taken place with my best friends

@Mac (again): I’m not sure about your experience (or that of Cynapse) but I’m 50 years old, have seen a whole lot of things, met a whole lot of people, raised 4 kids, and am now bouncing the grandkids on my knee — what sort of experience were you talking aining anyway?

Hope you feel better now, Jack. See, it’s all part of the game … Different experiences, different views. No reason not to post an article.

Let’s be honest.  This story is about a pair of fruitcakes.  They exist in every community and rave and howl about anything which pisses them off.  It’s just noise unless they act out their stupidity (I’m thinking McVeigh). 

I posted this story in the wrong area.

It was meant as an alert and nothing more but I was in a hurry because I had yardwork to do and wanted to get it done before it warmed up to +10c.

Sorry about that.

It is quite logical to point out the very well documented history of white supremacist terrorism, whose incidents cannot be counted on 2 hands, and has many covert sympathizers. Why these fears are dismissed as emotional and paranoid will have to be explained by you, because even 2 minutes on Google should bury you in hits ranging from the formation of the KKK to the Holocaust to Alabama Church bombing to the Oklahoma riots, etc etc. Frankly I’m starting wonder whether public education was ever good.

I have no problem displaying my disdain for redneck bigots, and only a fool would question why I’d want to. The central point though is that while you and those from your privileged strata scour the world looking for anyone who talks out of turn, most human beings in the world have real enemies and real threats:
-Threats who can form national parties
-Threats who have made actual attempts at extinction
-Threats who spew the same vitriol as designated terrorists and fly completely under the radar for belonging to a favoured group
-Threats who commit murders and never get prosecuted because of their social ties to the “moral” community
-Threats who have so much money they can simply buy the government and not risk trouble no matter how much mayhem they cause
-Threats who are indistinguishable from the government

You, as a first class North American citizen, have no such threats. I, as a sometimes first-class North American citizen (depending on where I live) have very few threats, but very few is more than none, which is why your imagined Muslim scenarios based on a few unfortunate attacks fail to resonate. What you have on your hands is a self-destructive “popular revolt” with strong religious undertones, targeted mostly at the revolutionaries’ own corrupt governments with you understood to be the ultimate source.

As for taking it personally, this is basically your fault since nothing here was addressed to you personally. You took it upon yourself to respond.

Like abortion doctor killings, white supremacist plots do happen… but the numbers of such incidents are tiny and the media attention and self-congratulatory blogging “outrage” is huge.

Since you jumped immediately to comparing the white supremacist plot to Muslims, would you like to compare the number of white supremacist attacks to those committed by Muslims? No? Tell you what… since the numbers of actual attacks by white supremacists are so tiny as to be negligible, let’s add the interrupted plots in as well… so go ahead and compare all white supremacist attacks and interrupted plots to Muslim attacks… I wonder what the ratio will be… 1 to 1000? 1 to 10,000? Yep, phantom threat, indeed.

I’m sure you have many references to white folks around the world crying in disappointment for the arrested guys and demonstrating in the streets demanding their release? What? No placards calling for the assassination of political leaders and threatening genocide for visible minorities?

Has there been a disquieting silence from the white supremacists’ ethic group or have their fellow caucasians expressed shock and disgust at their plot?

Once again, you falsely ascribe characteristics and crusades to me. I don’t have an anti-Muslim crusade (I’m not silly enough to imagine Islam is a monolithic religion) and it’s particularly ironic for you to be using the word “logic” whatsoever since you seem to depend on personal attacks and emotional arguments fraught with paranoid fears…

My point is that I don’t have to make up phantom threats 1/2 a world away.  They’ve always been right in my backyard.  So why should I join your anti-Muslim crusade when your crusades are supported by my real-world threats?  That logic will apply for a lot of people which is why you are having trouble selling this eternal war.