I figured this would be a good 'teachable moment.'

I was in the middle of a typical, if heated, debate over the seperation of church and state, over at AI Jane (right wing board; I'm b5d) when a guy I hadn't seen before came into the debate basically agreeing with me, claiming to post from Thailand and displaying an avatar that looked disturbingly like Osama Bin Laden. This is just about the worst thing that can happen in a political debate. You have to make it absolutely clear that nothing you say is to be used for any anti-American ideology before you can hopefully go back and salvage what's left of the original debate.

The basic strategy here is to realize that most of the sins of the American right are multiplied one thousand fold with the Islamists. So I simply applied my argument to the Muslim world rather than the Christian US.

Stroll's entrance reminds me that I actually haven't been making my own case as strongly as I could be.

Muslims, like many cultures, are very particular about their greetings. You can be as friendly as you like here, before you get to your more substantial points.

Just look at the poor folks in the Muslim world...they're bearing the worst consequences of politics based from religion.

Charity...also a concept integral to Islam.

Now they find themselves in a collective suicide mission against the world's superpower,

The suicide bomber is one of the most powerful images in Muslim popular culture. Juxtaposing that with the idea of collectivism can help Muslims understand why this concept is so reviled in the rest of the world. The idea is supposed to be that an individual makes a sacrifice for the whole; but when even the living forget why they're living, it becomes harder to draw such a distinction. In that light, a suicide mission represents less of a sacrifice than a total indifference to life, with religion painted on simply as a superficial veneer of normalcy. But any true religion recognizes the sanctity of human life, and stays away from the government, since the association harms religion as much as it does reasoned political debates.

This was what I was arguing in the thread in question, using issues like abortion, before the mysterious newcomer came in and disrupted all of that. Anyway, there was just one more thing I wanted to say about the actual post:

with no apparent way out.

Again, another important notion in Islam is to always give people a chance to convert. There was a bit of a fuss about this with Bin Laden's tapes, and 'domestic' pressure eventually forced him to offer such an opening in one of his tapes.

Stroll's entrance reminds me that I actually haven't been making my own case as strongly as I could be. Just look at the poor folks in the Muslim world...they're bearing the worst consequences of politics based from religion. Now they find themselves in a collective suicide mission against the world's superpower, with no apparent way out.

If that comes off with a little bit of a swagger...well, it does. The basic idea is to copy all of their communication tactics, and use them against them, substituting our content of course. As Churchill famously noted, "To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war." If we can learn to talk like they do, then hopefully we can avoid learning to fight like they do.