The first is "Jihad Against Islam, America's right wing is on a witch hunt, and they're tying Muslims to the stake" by Robert Steinback, from Intelligence Report, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It is a summary of how a large number of people in the U.S. believe that all Muslims are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda and that "mainstream Islam advocates violence against non-Muslims". Much of this is being fueled by a "coterie of core activists". Max Blumenthal called it "the Great Islamophobic Crusade." Their complaint about the Islamic center near the World Trade Center gained support from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. The assumption of these modern Crusaders is that the likes of Osama Bin Laden are interpreting the Koran correctly.
The second is "Bollywood's Soft Power, India's hugely popular films wage a cultural war on extremism" by Shikha Dalmia. The article was original published in The Daily. The Utne article is excerpted from Reason, a libertarian magazine.
Bollywood is "India's flamboyant film industry", and its films are shown all over Asia from Indonesia to Dubai. Dalmia likens the effect of Bollywood to extremism to the effect of rock and roll on the demise of the Soviet Union. It wasn't Reagan that brought down the Berlin Wall but the Beatles, and "Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged to Paul McCartney that the Beatles paved the way for perestroika and glasnost".
Bollywood's allure is that it is based on Eastern values and that the actors look like the viewers. Some countries like Dubai embrace Bollywood. Others that are trying to control all aspects of life, like Pakistan, "are trying to purge Bollywood from their soil". The harder they try to limit Bollywood, the greater its popularity.
BTW, Bollywood's "three highest-grossing male leads are Muslims".
These two articles illustrate the old saw about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. And you would think that the intellectuals in the anti-Islam jihad would have learned that all the vinegar (and money and lives) that have been sloshed around in the name of defense of the U.S. would have caught on by now to the fallacy of their approach.
