In Muslim countries, teaching of Christianity is punishable by death. Conversion of a Muslim to another religion is punishable by death.
In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims encourage children to become suicide bombers --CHILDREN ! As if it wasn't bad enough that adults would commit suicide bombings.
As a Jewish official said to ted Koppel on Nightline a few months ago: "They hate us more than they love their own children." I believe that is the very definition of fanaticism.
A vast percentage of Muslims are sympathetic to terrorism and openly endorse it. As I quoted earlier from a Washington Post article, 30% to 50% of the population in most Muslim nations began boycotting American products and businesses after 9/11. If that's not an endorsement of 9/11 terrorism, I don't know what is.
Even in the United States, so-called "moderate" Muslims, probably the most moderate Muslims in the world, when interviewed on 60 Minutes (in a story titled "Young, Muslim and American"), endorse suicide bombings as honorable, and that if one dies martyring themselves in the cause of Allah, they are assured a place in heaven. One 15-year-old Muslim girl from the New York City area volunteered: "Like, if I were to blow myself up to destroy an American military base... I would go to heaven."
At which point I began to wonder why ANY Muslims are allowed to stay in the United States.
Muslim hate of Westerners, particularly Americans, is so burning that just two weeks ago, an SUV carrying Americans (who were on a mission to recruit Palestinians for scholarships to a U.S. university) was blown up with a radio-controlled explosive buried under the road as they traveled into Gaza from the Israeli border. When other foreign reporters came to the shattered SUV to help, they were attacked by a Palestinian crowd, who clearly would have beaten the reporters to death if they didn't narrowly escape.
This incident is considered the shape of things to come, for potentially more violence against Americans in the area, and a direct result of the vitriolic anti-American rhetoric and news coverage in West bank and Gaza.
An estimated 90% of residents in the West Bank and Gaza were cheering in the streets at the news of the terror against the U.S. on 9/11/2001. After that, Israel could turn the West bank and Gaza into a smoking nuclear crater, and I wouldn't condemn it. These are people so indoctrinated in hate that no agreement could ever neutralize their thirst for Israeli blood.
In Saudi Arabia, a woman cannot leave the country without her husband's permission. A woman is property, who can be beaten into submission. And has no protection from this by Islamic law. A woman cannot DRIVE A CAR in Saudi Arabia.
If a woman divorces her husband, the husband has exclusive rights to the children. I have a friend from Turkey (a more civilized Muslim country, and still...) She has two children she has not seen since the divorce. She told me of one occasion when she flew from Florida to Istanbul, and stood outside her former home. She was still not allowed to see her children.
The movie Not Without My daughter describes the situation where many individual American and European women who have married Muslim men and reside in Muslim countries, are unable to leave. And if they DO manage to get out, they forever lose any contact with their children. (Thanks for the movie recommendation, batwomanamy!)
"Honor killing": the right of a Muslim man to murder a woman, wife or other female family member, if they feel that this woman has brought disgrace on their family.
I've heard many stories of women in Islamic countries being beaten, disfigured, or (frequently) scarred with acid, when a man's advances are refused.
A friend of mine, Kaivan, served in the Iraqi army during the 1980-1989 Iran/Iraq war. He described teaching of the Imams (Muslim clerics). They would send out children into the battlefield in front of the advancing army, to blow up the mines. The children were told that if they die for Allah (martyrdom), they are assured a place in heaven. Kaivan is adamantly non-Muslim as a result of his disgust for this, and other things he saw.
Multiple examples of Palestinian civilians lynching their own fellow citizems, for collaborating with Israelis, voicing ideas of negotiating peace with the Israelis, or being suspected of cooperating with the Israelis. Lynchings are common. I saw footage of one incident where the bodies of the collaborators were hung for several days in a public square of a town's city hall, as a warning to others.
A few examples I can think of off the top of my head, of how "misunderstood" Islam is. Misunderstood by misguidedly sympathetic press, for not being exactly as dangerous a belief system as these examples make clear.
