Gee, I really appreciate being held up as a paragon of male-female equality. Carol, I prefer to speak for myself and not be misinterpreted. If you are not up on Terrorist Beliefs and Islamic hadiths then you don't have anything relevant to say re my post which so pushed your button.

akenaton you have two positions, with which, if i understand them right, (I am as subject to Carol's ability to misapprehend as s/he is) I disagree:

1) The likelihood that Islamic world has a big edge over the west because of their ability to send suicide squads wheresoever they will. - As I mentioned above, historically these cults of doom do not succeed over the long term. They are not the first to try to influence events this way, and even the Japanese didn't come close to turning the tide of war with Kamikaze attacks, they simply made the cost of victory that much higher for the Allies and themselves.

2) The vapidity of modern western capitalism. - I suggest that if one does nothing but watch cable television channels such as MTV and Home Sales network, you could have feelings along those lines, but there is an extremely broad front to western life of which this is by no means the whole. If you compare this with those wretched little schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan wherein little kids are set to memorizing the Koran (sometimes without understanding the language they are memorizing), doesn't this even make a Nike commercial look intellectual?