And Speaking of the Murdering Swine...

It seems they're not that far away.

A Coptic Christian family of four in New Jersey were found dead in their home Friday morning -- murdered, each bound with his throat slit. Frighteningly, early speculation is that Islamic nut-jobs targeted them because of exchanges on a religious chat website. (See the whole story at Free Republic.)

The most ironic passage of the story is this:

"We are not a bloody people," said Ahmed Shedeed, director of the Islamic Center of Jersey City. "This is not from the Quran. This is not from Islam at all."

Asked about passages in the Quran that may suggest murdering non-believers in a manner that resembles the family's deaths, he replied, "The Quran talks about people fighting in the battle of war. It's not talking about people who live next to you. ...This has nothing to do with our community at all."

I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Sheheed is a fine man, and speaks what he believes is the truth of his religion. But until people like him come to to terms with what Islam is becoming across the world -- a cult of death, power, and backwardness the world hasn't seen for centuries -- and begin helping the isolate and weed out the rabid nutcases that tar Islam as a whole, such stories will only become more and more commonplace. Remember Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands? Well, such things are not so far away now. September 11 should have been our wake-up call here in America. Unfortunately, it seems many of us just hit the "snooze."