"Listening Wind" - Peter Gabriel
An absolutely beautiful cover of one of the more obscure cuts on Talking Heads' brilliant "Remain in Light." I was trying to come up with something that would be irritating to these clowns.
One can't help but be shaken by these anti-Muslim bigots, who seem to have no sense of what our country is supposed to stand for. Why anyone imagines that taking the 1.2 to 1.5 billion Muslims (thanks Corvus) in the world -- roughly 20-25% of the world's population -- and turning them into enemies is a wise idea is beyond me.
Of course there are strains within Islam that I find abhorrent but I can say the same thing about right wing Christian churches in this country. There seems to be no sense among clowns like Daniel Pipes or Andy McCarthy of the breadth and diversity within the Muslim world -- that we are talking about countries stretching from Nigeria to the Philippines with a multitude of languages, cultures, attitudes, and, hell, forms of Islam. And thus we see indiscriminate attacks on everything from the building of a mosque to Miss USA (who I must say if she constitutes a representative figure, I will happily bow to our new Muslim overlords) by people who seem to have a hard time understanding that there are over 9 million Muslims here in the United States -- many of whom at one time were good Republicans.
But I have had the pleasure of traveling to two Islamic countries -- Turkey and Morocco -- and finding the people in both places exceedingly gracious. I've also worked with several Muslim lawyers over the years, both in my firm and as opponents, and, again, found this very warm and cordial tone to be a common phenomenon.
We can fight and oppose the particular strain of Islamic extremism that confronts us while keeping in mind that is in no way representative of a majority of Muslims in the world and without resorting to hatred, bigotry, and hysteria.
