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"The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence... the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn't tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, Baa.

"Until the wolf shows up." -- LTC Dave Grossman, Killology, author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War"

"Our enemy is denial. Denial is a big, white, fluffy blanket we pull up over our eyes and pretend the bad men will never come."

(Also see what Grossman has to say about children and violent video games.)

On June 24, 2012, I asked here:

I'm looking for research or statistics or even anecdotal information collected on North American women demonstrating that not having had access to an abortion has harmed women's lives. I'm not looking for theoretical sociological stuff, or evidence about how having children interferes with women's careers (we know that), but evidence with regard to the effects on and regrets of individual women of not having been able to have an abortion they thought they might have wanted. This claim is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the pro-choice argument, but I've never seen any actual research backing it up. Have you?

There are really only a couple or few important questions, and they still await answers:

(1) Are you sorry that instead of having an abortion you have the child you now have? The Turnaway Study hasn't been following the women long enough to get a definitive answer and, of course, it suffers from having women (with a variety of personal issues) who mostly sought and were turned away from having an abortion because they waited too long into their pregnancies. (Some had increasingly bad issues with abusive partners. Others struggled with whether to abort a fetus with birth defects. Etc.) However, even with these issues confounding the methodology, the rather astonishing findings "to date" made no headlines -- 95% of the women were happy that they had had their child. (All of these women also apparently faced all of the same issues that every parent faces with regard to "stress" or "work" or "finances" -- and there apparently is no comparison underway or planned that I am aware of comparing these women with "all women" who become parents". It might be presumed that many of them also faced more difficult circumstances while pregnant than "all women".)

(2) Later in life, how many women who had abortions who did not have any children, have regrets? This would be "later in life" than one week or one year. A corollary question would be: how many young women who were childless when they had their abortions and then later had children, experienced changed feelings about their earlier abortions -- not necessarily regrets, or depression, but more nuanced opinions informed with the benefit of experience and hindsight -- and what are those opinions?

Books by historian Thomas F. Madden. Get one. Read it. Don't be an ignoramus. Madden writes:

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common.

The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins.

For variation on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades?...

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression -- an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them... When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt -- once the most heavily Christian areas in the world -- quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades.

...a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world.

Is it just me, or is there suddenly a whole lot of transgenderizing going on? Mostly male-to-female. D'ya think, maybe, that it's the estrogens in the plastic water bottles? (Why not, if it does it to alligators in the Everglades.) Yet another "backlash" against "women's rights" by dilution and obfuscation (the same sort of process that transformed "wife beating" into "interpersonal violence" of various physical and sundry emotional degrees, and "rape" into the Title IX nonsense we're now seeing on college campuses) -- now even to the point of obscuring the definition of "woman"? The popularity of the victimology diversity identity bandwagon? Not talking here about the medical amelioration of ambiguous sexuality -- a birth defect, but the fairly recent surge of a highly political and trendy extreme transvestitism. Great article at takimag.com -- Feminists to Trannies: Stay Off Our TERf. A few snips:

Male-to-female transsexuals -- who, as luck would have it, have always constituted the vast majority of those who feel they were born wearing the wrong genital costume -- have recently emerged as perhaps the most rabidly militant of all identity groups strung along the vast fractured progressive rainbow. In their manic quest to force the world into parroting the obvious lie that they are women, they have stumbled upon an unexpected foe -- radical feminists who have real, God-given vaginas...

The TERFs argue that for men to pretend they're women is insulting to real women. To them, it is a genital form of blackface...

Since "gender" is a social construct and "femininity" is a patriarchal imposition, transsexuals are merely reinforcing anti-female memes by aping sexist stereotypes of how women should behave...

I'd say that TERFs are merely alleging that "trans women" are men who are merely pretending to be women, no matter what "gender identity" they claim, how many hormone injections they receive, or surgeries they undergo. Until presented with evidence that convinces me otherwise, I will agree with them on this point...

Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield) has the answer for you: it's casually killing other Muslims. This is the definition of "radical" or "extremist" from the Muslim supremacy point of view -- the one that's been stupidly adopted by government officials throughout the western world, not realizing what it means. More from Greenfield:

It can't be beheading people in public.

Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz commemoration.

It can't be terrorism either. Not when the US funds the PLO and three successive administrations invested massive amounts of political capital into turning the terrorist group into a state. While the US and the EU fund the Palestinian Authority's homicidal kleptocracy, its media urges stabbing Jews. Clearly that's not Islamic extremism either. At least it's not too extreme for Obama...

From a Muslim perspective, ISIS is radical because it declared a Caliphate and is casual about declaring other Muslims infidels. That's a serious issue for Muslims and when we distinguish between radicals and moderates based not on their treatment of people, but their treatment of Muslims, we define radicalism from the perspective of Islamic supremacism, rather than our own American values.

The position that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and Al Qaeda is extreme because the Brotherhood kills Christians and Jews while Al Qaeda kills Muslims is Islamic Supremacism.

The idea of the moderate Muslim places the lives of Muslims over those of every other human being on earth...

Read his article, The Imaginary Islamic Radical. PDF
In fact, read his entire blog; he nails the issues and pulls no punches.

There are two entirely different kinds of complexity, that of thought and that of expression. Ph.D. illiterates hope that we'll forget this distinction. They'd like us to see difficult, even totally obscure, expression and think: hey, this must be deep thought. Usually it's deep fraud...

What alarms me is that we seem to be creating a particularly sloppy and boneless language. And in turn we'll find that our thinking and talking and writing will become as spineless as jellyfish pulsing in shadowy seas. What better setting can there be for the sly propagation of unstated premises, unfounded theories, malicious nonsense, and outright lies?...

A healthy, strong democracy requires a healthy, strong language. I think each of us has a responsibility -- and the greater the education, the greater the responsibility -- to protect and refine our language precisely because we may need it to save our skins.

Those who have little to say, or evil to hide, will seek the friendly camouflage of fog-bound language. But let those who are confident of their contribution speak clearly.

-- from "In Praise of Stark Lucidity", improve-education.org

Four combat tours, including Operation Iraqi Freedom. Two Silver Stars. Five Bronze Stars with Valor. Two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals. Navy & Marine Corps Commendation. Chief instructor for training, Naval Special Warfare Sniper & Counter-Sniper teams. Authored the Naval Special Warfare Sniper Doctrine, the first Navy SEAL sniper manual. President of Craft International, a world-class leader in training & security. Married father who ultimately left a job we needed him in to be with his wife and children. Volunteer helping disabled veterans. Highest kill rate in ever U.S. military history. And did it with pins and screws in one of his arms from a pre-military injury.

Let's clear up the semantic confusion and doubletalk, paradigm switching,
question rephrasing, ignorant assumptions, wishful thinking and "contextualizations":

Muslims who are peaceful are peaceful
IN SPITE of Islam, not BECAUSE of Islam.

* Not unless your definition of "peace" is being used to further a conjob, disguising a specious equivocation.

Also: It's not "Islamism" -- it's "Islam". And it's not "Islamist" -- it's "Muslim". Stop with the newspeak euphemisms! Moreover, none of this is analogous to the Crusades. The Bible does not contain numerous repeated calls to Christians to fight, shun, tax, enslave, lie to, and slaughter non-Christians (even assuming, arguendo, that the Turks hadn't first invaded and "occupied" Byzantium and other parts of Europe.) Finally, is there something dementedly primitive about Islam that in the day and age of electronic information and global economies, it's only now attaining the emotional maturity of an illiterate 12th Century? (Is the Mormon Church going through these similar growing pains?) Stop with the apologia and cognitive dissonance!

Bill Clinton on "the world's greatest double standard":

The Life of Muhammad:
An Inconvenient Truth

Timeline of Muhammad's Life (A.D)

570 - Born in Mecca
576 - Orphaned upon death of mother
595 - Marries Kadijah - older, wealthy widow
610 - Reports first revelations from angel at age of 40
619 - Protector uncle dies
622 - Emigrates from Mecca to Medina (the Hijra)
623 - Orders raids on Meccan caravans
624 - Battle of Badr (victory)
624 - Evicts Qaynuqa Jews from Medina
624 - Orders the assassination of Abu Afak
624 - Orders the assassination of Asma bint Marwan
624 - Orders the assassination of Ka'b al-Ashraf
625 - Battle of Uhud (defeat)
625 - Evicts Nadir Jews
627 - Battle of the Trench (victory)
627 - Massacre of the Qurayza Jews
628 - Signing of the Treaty of Hudaibiya with Mecca
628 - Destruction and subjugation of the Khaybar Jews
629 - Orders first raid into Christian lands at Muta (defeat)
630 - Conquers Mecca by surprise (along with other tribes)
631 - Leads second raid into Christian territory at Tabuk (no battle)
632 - Dies

"Muhammad is a narcissist, a pedophile, a mass murderer, a terrorist, a misogynist, a lecher, a cult leader, a madman, a rapist, a torturer, an assassin and a looter."
-- Former Muslim Ali Sina offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove otherwise based on Islamic texts. The reward has gone unclaimed.

..."Would it really validate the message of any such cult leader if his followers did successfully kill and seize the property of anyone who dared disagree? What if they gradually expanded their power and numbers in such fashion that eventually they were enough to be recognized as a major world religion? Would that make the cult leader's claims about himself true? Would it really change the fact that what they believe ultimately sprang from the imagination of a narcissist?

"In 610, an Arab salesman with a commanding personality attracted a small cult of credulous fanatics by claiming to be a prophet. Though his "revelations" were self-referential and occasionally contradicting, he was successful in manipulating his followers with promises of heavenly reward and threat of divine wrath. The god heard only by him told them to lie and steal for him, to give their children to him for sexual pleasure and, eventually, to gruesomely murder his detractors..."

---
Islam existed for only ten years during Muhammad's lifetime, during which his spoutings about God and religion were for purposes of aggrandizing himself, and then later, law-making and consolidating the territorial power of the cult he ruled, the "umma" -- his household, followers, army and servants who went with him to Medina -- after he was effectively thrown out of Mecca. (His delusional ravings involved political and economic trouble-making. This was not about "religious beliefs" in the then-multicultural Mecca.) By that time he was a wealthy merchant who had got that way by marrying, at age 25, the much-older widow of a wealthy merchant. The gratuitous criminality and violence all commenced with Mohammed, was continuous during his post-"revelations" lifetime, expanded to include Muslim in-fighting virtually immediately upon his death, and has been continuous ever since.

A "religion" is not merely some persons' retrospective ideas of what the beliefs and practices "should be" -- or, in the strained metaphorical interpretations of some (often self-styled) "scholars", "could be", or, in the case of Islam, should or could HAVE BEEN. It is what those beliefs and practices IN FACT ARE. What they are is dismal. Proof: look at the laws and lives of the people in every single Muslim-controlled country on earth.

Okay, so let's see... If a handful of men disguised in white hoods placed a burning cross on the front lawn of a black family's home, or carried out a lynching, would we expect top officials in the United States to make statements such as "These are just lone wolves" or "These are just disturbed criminals" or "These are only 'extremists' within the peaceful ideology of white supremacism" or "These terrorists cannot be KKK'ers because KKK'ers are law-abiding citizens"?

Is irreverent depiction or mocking of Muhammad not a crime in every Muslim country on earth? (Not even going into the myriad other idiotic and oppressive laws and customs.) So what is this -- merely a peaceful, harmless, anti-freedom "belief" system? A religion that's okay so long as its adherents don't "really" follow it, don't pay attention to what the crackpot imams have to say, and just don't believe in it too much?

Dorothy Rabinowitz had an excellent comment in the Wall Street Journal two days ago, A City of Mourning and Demonized Police", which aptly transports to Muslim terrorism:

The idea that deranged individuals with, say, a history of disturbed relationships and a tendency to violence shouldn't be seen as genuine representatives of a cause, an ideology, is decidedly odd if not itself a kind of deranged thinking. When the cause itself is a grab bag of pathologies, it isn't surprising that it attracts the disturbed.

[LIZNOTE UPDATE: Let's also stop with the specious disproving of red herrings. Muhammad is depicted as an exalted prophet in a relatively paltry number of mostly older Arabic artistic works. "All" depictions of mostly everything are not banned. However, mockery is banned, as are depictions that could be misused for mockery or for idol worship.]

...from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man
again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."