YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING! An interview by nationally syndicated talk radio host Rusty Humphries with British Muslim leader Abu Saif resulted in the following exchange:

"There's nothing we can do to be friends?" Humphries asked.

Abu Saif replied: "There is something you can do to be friends. You can become Muslim."

Is converting to Islam really a guarentee of friendship? Granted that a non-Muslim would no longer be regarded as an infidel, but history clearly shows that Muslims are not show about killing each other either.

Raphael Patai, in an updated chapter in his book The Arab Mind has his own list of Arab conflicts--not including Israel--taking into account just the years from 1970 to 1983:

1. Intermittent disputes involving border warfare and assassinations between South Yemen on the one hand, and North Yemen and Saudi Arabia, on the other since the early 1970's. A brief but fierce border war between the two Yemens took place as recently as March, 1979.

2. A major and bloody, albeit brief, conflict between Jordan and Palestinian guerrillas in 1970, complicated by Syrian intervention.

3. Fighting between the Kurds and the Iraqis, which lasted several years.

4. A bloody conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan, 1956-1972.

5. Clashes between South Yemen and Oman, linked to the Dhofar rebellion, 1972-1976.

6. A tripartite conflict between Algeria on the one hand and Morocco and Mauritania, on the other, over the control of the former Spanish Sahara, beginning in 1976 and subsequently transformed into guerrilla warfare against Morocco by the Polisario, the freedom fighters of the Western Sahara, supported by Algeria and Libya, which was still in progress in 1982.

7. Intermittent hostility, and actual border fighting, including air attacks, between Egypt and Libya in 1977.

8. The Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, involving two outside parties, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization, still unresolved in early 1982.

9. The invasion of Chad by Libya in 1980.

10. The war between Iraq and Iran, which began in the fall of 1980, in which Iraq is supported by Jordan and Iran by Syria, making it in effect, an inter-Arab conflict. It was still in progress in early 1982.

11. In February, 1982, a conflict flared up between the Syrian government and Muslim fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama, in which several thousands were killed and major parts of Hama were destroyed. [p.357-358]

This of course is nothing new; the infighting among Muslims started after the death of Mohammed and is still going strong--as is clear from the Sunni-Shiite fighting in Iraq, not to mention the murder of Moslems by Moslems in Iraq. Also today we have the machinations of Iran in Lebanon, not to mention the blind eye given towards the massacre of fellow Muslims in the Sudan.

Even if we can assume the global attacks on 8,840 non-Muslims since 9/11 would come to an end, the long violent history of Muslim on Muslim violence and outright indifference to the suffering of fellow Muslims continues to go strong.

No thanks Mr. Saif--these days, until you guys get your act together, it's still safer to be a non-Muslim.

[Hat tip: Hot Air]

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