Dear Bashir Goth, I don't have much to say about your article. Just one word: FANTASTIC! Please continue this way, the world needs people like you!

Courageous stuff. We have little difficulty seeing that Bashir Goth's society can benefit from dissenters like he, who critique and challange the flaws and weaknesses in his own society, even under grave threats.

Yet look at the scorn reserved for dissenters in our own culture. In the current public debate, anybody who suggests there might be a need to critically evaluate our own actions, attitudes or policies is hastily dismissed as a relativist who blames the West for everything. Yet the strength and dynamism of so much in Western culture arises from centuries of fostering and incorporating the ideas of even our strongest critics - from within. Are we now to cut off the very source of that strength by blocking our ears to the dissenters among us?

That's just silly, Mercurius. People in our culture who ‘[suggest] there might be a need to critically evaluate our own actions’ aren’t dismissed as relativists.

They’re dismissed as post-modernists.

Ahh but Mercurious, having been one of the relativists accused of blaming the west for everything...

I'm told we need to take more account of the fact that our society is so free to express these ideas and there is no valid comparison between the west and heinous regimes.

This of course dismisses the fact you pointed out, that our society was built upon critical evaluation, but opponents argue that in the face of such a hostile united enemy we need to adopt similar fortitude, which equates to an insularity from enemy ideals, which brutal as they may be, again, we are not allowed to evaluate in context of western flaws... apparently to do so is to show less than unanimous support for our own peoples.

In other words it's an issue of 'your for us or against us' which always comes to the fore in times of conflict.

This is a great article, I love it. Keep up the good work.

I wonder if our communities were free from experiencing external prejudicial persecution we would be as self conscience as we are required to be today. I know that if I lived in a vacuum, and my audience did not perceive me as a representative of some group or another, I would feel better about saying what I really think. Most of my community members pressure me to stop saying what I say, not because they do not like it, but because they do not want everyone to think I am speaking on their behalf.

Well if they did not lay the mines in the first place then there would never be a need to tiptoe through the mine fields; But whilst on the subject of Mine fields it would be poignant to note that the Ayatollah Khomeini, had Iranian children as young as eight years, rap them selves up in carpet and roll over the mine fields so as to protect his Army, the carpet was only so their body parts remained within the confines. How many people know that?
You should have chosen a more appropriate title for your compilation, like poor hard done by Moslems are persecuted by Infidels; Although International Demographic fact finding strongly suggests otherwise, it is a mine field Islam created, so please , Watch your step. The power supply for the mine detector is rapidly depleting, just from the political mines our useless idiots have set for us.