"can you let me know if you have any issue with the Moslem population of the world in general or just with it's radical factions."
.,,.
A very fair question indeed, Dave. I shall endeavour to answer it honestly, and hope that I will be able to do so with sufficient clarity to protect me from at least some of the flak that may come my way from some who don't even wish to hear what my reply might consist of.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that many people who are well-meaning and of strong principles will sometimes let these principles blind them to the way that things are, rather than the way these principles lead them to think they ought to be. I must regretfully say that I do not think Islam a faith that can readily and happily co-exist in close proximity in any numbers with another, because, from its very inception, it was not meant to do so. Its Prophet declared it from the outset to be the only true path, whose followers have the duty to reject all others, and to bend every endeavour to bring believers in any other (the 'infidel' -- what a word; think about it) to see the truth. This message persists to a greater or lesser extent to present-day followers ~~ Eliza' recently encountered acquaintance, about whom there appears to be little disagreement here [why Don & I are in agreement!] being an extreme but, I fear, not entirely a-typical instance. Even those who are content to wish to co-exist, whom I mentioned in my last long post as quoted just above, must somehow find means to reconcile their consciences to departing in such a fashion from their Prophet's teachings and injunctions.

Now, surely it follows that Muslims who settle in a land where another faith is, or other faiths are, the norm, are bound to suffer from conflicts. Are they not forbidden, by the sacred duties enjoined on them by the Prophet they so revere, to moderate their own ways, or to compromise with the expectations of the alien societies into which they have chosen to move?

So I feel bound to conclude that an attempt to bring these two incompatible sets of expectations ~~ the religiously free society which is today the norm in the West, and the society bound by sacred injunction to but one True Faith, as in the Islamic world, is ~~ let us say, potentially injudicious. I should say that it is by its nature 'asking for trouble'. And a good bit of trouble is what we seem to me to be getting.

I respect the views of many who would wish it were not so. That some modus vivendi which would accord with their principle of peaceful coexistence on the part of all who happened to live in proximity. But it is, I reiterate, the principles of the incomers in this instance which must make this so hard to achieve.

It is nothing so simple as my indulging in the dreaded R-word. If only it were so uncomplicated! It would, I agree with all these fine principled people who at this moment are metaphorically sharpening their pens or pouring acid in their keyboards or whatever, in preparation to get me, be so much better if things in this particular were other than what they are.

But, as that wise man Bertram Wooster observes somewhere within his own sacred œuvre, other than what they are is what things are not.

~Michael~