Stardate 20020214.0930

(On Screen): Suppose that the leader of a group announced that the members of his group had a moral obligation to shoot and kill a certain person. The members of the group then vow to carry that threat out. Isn't that "conspiracy to commit murder"? In the US, home of the First Amendment, that would not be considered protected speech and those making such threats could be prosecuted and jailed for it. And it wouldn't matter who it was, either.

Would that it were thus in the Islamic world. Salmon Rushdie still has a target painted on his chest because of his book The Satanic Verses and a group in Iran has, on the 13th anniversary of the original fatwa against him, renewed its vows to kill him.

It is yet another example of the cancer of radical Islam. Speaking as a secular humanist, I do not object to religion as long as its practitioners are tolerant of alternative beliefs. But I think that all fundamentalism is deeply harmful, and in the long run it will have to be stamped out if we are to make the world a better place.

We are not in a war with Islam. But this shows yet again that the "root cause" of our current war is radical Islamic fundamentalism. Its power must be broken.