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Rocky Mountain News - Denver and Colorado's reliable source for breaking news, sports and entertainment: Opinion Columnists For nearly six years now we've been hearing from politicians and pundits about how Sept. 11, 2001 "changed everything." One especially unwelcome change wrought by that day has been that, ever since, large numbers of otherwise sane and sensible people continue to utter the most ridiculous things regarding the subject of terrorism. Consider a column last week by The Washington Post's David Ignatius. Ignatius wonders how the nation would react to a future terrorist attack. "Would the country come together to combat its adversaries," he asks, "or would it pull farther apart?"

London and Glasgow: Worse Than a Crime, a Mistake by Eric Margolis : "Second, the amateur, would-be killers who staged these bungled attacks were not, as many western pundits claim, unlikely to have been driven by some sort of homicidal perversion native to Islam. An entire cottage industry of publicity-seeking anti-Muslim writers is at work seeking to confirm the increasingly popular prejudice that Islam is a sick, demented, homicidal faith. These pundits are merely licking the hand that pays them. There is nothing in Islam that advocates homicidal acts or mass killing. In fact, while it’s popular these days to demonize Islam as a violent faith, we should recall that history’s biggest mass murderers, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao, and Hitler, were not Muslims. Auschwitz and the gulag did not come from Islam. World wars I and II, the most murderous in history, were begun by Christian nations and Japan."

Operation Arrowhead Becomes Fountainhead of Anger - by Ali al-Fadhily : "Shakir said many of his relatives and neighbors were killed by the military while attempting to leave the area. 'I cannot tell you how many people were killed, but bodies of civilians were left in the streets.' 'We all know now that the U.S. military is using the name of al-Qaeda to cover attacks against our national resistance fighters and civilians who wish immediate or scheduled withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq,' Hilmi Saed, an Iraqi journalist from Baghdad, told IPS on the outskirts of Baquba. "

TALES OF IRAQ WAR by LATUFF: UK terrorism (part 4)

Pakistan | The last battle | Economist.com : "The government’s long reluctance to use force at the Lal Masjid had a simple explanation: it wanted to avoid bloodshed. But it has prompted other, less charitable, interpretations. The two brothers and their father, who founded the mosque, had close connections with Pakistan’s powerful intelligence services. As a reminder of the extremist danger, the Lal Masjid helped bolster General Musharraf’s image as a bastion of “enlightened moderation” in Islam. So too, without belittling General Musharraf’s undoubted courage, did the latest attempt on his life, by machine-guns aiming at his distant helicopter."