Very 'broadly', Richard. You know better than to mis-cite like that, you naughty boy. Lose 3 housepoints.

"Poisonous" was your word, not mine: not one I should have dreamed of using. I wouldn't say it shouldn't be 'permitted', either. In the indispensable locution of President Lincoln, 'those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like'; and it will obviously be 'permitted; wherever it happens to be traditionally based. But I certainly do not think its members should be encouraged, even by passivity, to settle in large numbers in parts of the world where it is not the indigenous system, bearing in mind the injunctions of its Prophet to convert by all means at disposal the entire kafir; liable, to put it at its lowest, to cause maybe a few bad feelings both ways, wouldn't you say?

And even if you wouldn't, I would. And I'll say it again if you like.

So I did mean Islam, not merely Islamism. I am an atheist, but that doesn't mean that I can't regard one religion as more alien to my way of thinking than another; so why shouldnt I 'single it out for greater criticism than other religions'? I think a religion whose adherents, where they hold sway, up to this very day, administer the sort of punishments, capital, amputatory, and corporal, on its citizens, often for offences which aren't even illegal elsewhere, could do with a bit of criticism. Are you happy that there is a country where a teenage girl recently publicly received 100 strokes of the cane on her bare buttocks for the dire offence of having been the victim of a gang-rape and thus being 'impure'? Doesn't a religion that goes in for that sort of thing, with that insufferably self-righteous air of thus somehow proving itself better than the rest of you believers, lay itself open to more criticism than, say, Swedish Lutheranism?

So don't be silly, Richard. Please...

But thanks for kind words about my writing [even if you wrote 'is' when you meant 'in' - its these litte ½p-orth of tar lapses of attention that detract & distract...]. One does one's best!

~M~