Klaatu Verada Islam.

Dean Barnett has an FAQ post on his views about Islam. Mine are much the same. I'm starting to view Muslims as a large number of peaceful people being held hostage by a small group of outlaws.

CAIR in the meantime has announced a new brand identity and logo, but their home page still gives you the feeling that there's a pack of wolves watching you from the dark just outside the firelight.

And, as if to emphasize how alien their thinking is to ours, "Al Qaida in Iraq warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that its war against Christianity and the West will go on until Islam takes over the world, and Iran's supreme leader called for more protests over the pontiff's remarks on Islam." Westerners all seem to note the irony of the violent response to the Pope's observations about the unreason of using violence to convert people to your faith, but in a world where reality is defined by a superstitious idolatry of the Koran and the Prophet.

I think there's an alien kind of thinking on the left these days, as well. They occupy a world where true evil is Republican while terrorists are merely boogiemen conjured by the right to frighten voters. The statements of various Democrat leaders are becoming more and more at odds with what people can see with their own eyes, like the claim that we are no safer now that we're actively pursuing the terrorists and have the whole nation on alert for new attacks than we were before 9/11. When I look at Iraq, I see things pretty much happening the way the president predicted. Yes, there's sectarian violence, but that's hardly the disaster or failure that Bush's opponents want us to believe. The war has been second-guessed by every pundit in sight, as well as a bunch of disgruntled leakers within the government, but the plan is going forward more like it was laid out from the beginnin than the way the left has tried ot spin it.