Just come back to this thread - can't believe CarolC is still in her flower-scented dream-world re. the Muslims are no more disposed to violent fundamentalism than anyone else - oh pleeeeze Carol, wake up or shut up (fat chance I know). Do me one favour - travel as a solo woman in a Muslim country and then see if your attitudes don't change. My mother, a very unbigoted 58 year old woman who has been to India 15 times, including long spells as a nurse, was completely disgusted by the behaviour - violent, sexual, disrespectful - she encountered in Turkey, a very moderate Muslim country. She had no such problems in Greece, another nation of similar status in the same region noted for its machismo.

On the other hand I support Carol against that raving lunatic Gibson re Israel. I used to be passionately pro Israel out of sympathy over the holocaust and a visceral hatred of the Hamas-type Muslim loonies who would like to kill every person in the country, but now I regard it with deep disgust, despite not being in the least anti-Jewish - indeed I've met very few Jews. When young educated women start blowing up other women and children on buses something really stinks - they have been turned into monsters, and it was Israel's appalling repression and land-stealing that did it. Too bad that the macho Muslim culture can't bring itself to put away its guns and bombs and practise Gandhi-style civil disobedience - if these young Palestinian men are brave enough to blow themselves up you'd think they would be brave enough to sit in front of tanks - a few wet crunches on the TV, and the world would be firmly on their side. As it is Israeli aggression and colonisation by stealth can hide under the smoke-screen of a response to Muslim fanaticism.