the weird thing with the khartoum protest is that it was engineered by the sudanese government as a way to deflect attention from darfur–as the NYT reported almost everyone on the street were government employees who were instructed to attend. it's rightwing blogs like this one who have been played by the sudanese government.

The "N" in NOW stands for "National" (i.e. throughout all the US states). Many groups don't have international arms. I tend to look to wider human rights groups like Amnesty Int'l and Human Rights Watch, which have, indeed, been on the case for years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world/africa/01…

I would also like to see a less authoritarian Islamic culture, for all of our sakes, but we disagree on tactics. I think condemnation of Islam is exactly what the fear-mongering Imams of the world want to hear from the United States. Nothing will prop them up in the eyes of their followers more than the sense that they are locked in a life-or-death struggle with the U.S.

As evidence look at our President's poll numbers after September 11th. I'm not condemning the President, just saying that almost everyone was behind him because he was representing us against attackers. We all appreciated that.

My sense is that donations to a technical education program in the Sudan would do far more to spurn economic growth, and hurt fear-mongering Imams, than every single American banding together to tell Sudanese Muslims that their religion is evil.

Please, you have got to be kidding me. A teacher lets her students name a teddy bear, and people call for her death. An artist puts a crucifix in a jar of piss, throws feces on a picture of the virgin Mary, and last I checked, they're still alive.

Gay in Iran? You'll get your head chopped off? Gang raped? You'll get lashed and thrown in prison. Have sex outside of marriage? Off with your head. And heaven forbid a woman shows something other than her eyes.

It is not only lazy, but EXTREMELY ignorant to even begin to try and compare Middle East and Western values. Is Islam an "evil" religion. Quite frankly, I don't know at this point. Until I see the massive uprising take place to make me think otherwise, I'll go with a tentative yes.

But you avoided the question I asked. Where are all the civil liberties groups? Why aren't they being more vocal? Maybe they're just afraid of having a fatwa placed on them. But they shouldn't be afraid, should they? After all, Islam IS the religion of peace, right?

The fact is that no country run by Muslims has anything close to the individual rights our country, or most other Western countries, enjoy. You can not be openly gay in a country where Sharia enjoys any serious legal consideration. Your daughter could not so much as defend herself from being gang-raped without suffering punishment that, here in the United States, would cause a deafening uproar. That is simply the way it is.

I condemn Islam not to wipe it from the face of the Earth, as most Islamic political and religious leaders wish to do with the various Christian religions. I condemn Islam in the hope that the one billion Muslims will decide that crushing gay people under walls and throwing them off of tall buildings is unacceptable. I hope that Muslims all over world will throw off their oppressors, who they outnumber greatly, and take the risks that our forefathers took to guarantee freedom and prosperity for their children and grandchildren.

I would hope that my fellow Americans here would put away their reflexive shame and work toward the same goal.