I stand corrected. Thanks.

Wasn't coffee from South America?

In Islam, apostasy is punishable by death.

Is Islam a cult?

[quote]
The Hindu caste system [wikipedia.org]. This system exists and is operational in many parts of india.
[/quote]

The article lead states:

There is also another article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_among_Indian_Christians/

SO nice bit of selective obscurantism there. Also see "Curse of Ham"

Eratosthenes' measurement was more accurate, was several centuries prior to al-Batani's, and was also made in the Middle East (by riding on horseback from Aswan to Alexandria in Egypt during the summer solstice, actually).

His name wasn't "Al-Jabr". His name was al-Khwarzim (as in "the guy from Khwarzim, the Persian kingdom that Chengiz Khan pwned some decades later)

Al'Jabr is from the title of his book (al-Kitaab fi Hisaab al-jabr wa'l Muqabla).

Al-Khwarzim may have written the Hisaab-Kitaab for algebra, but Aryabhata in India had discovered many of those results long before Al-Khwarzim had.

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata[/url]

Hey, history gets written by those on top at any point, which at the time were the Arab imperialists who stole India's numeral system and called it "Arabic".

Compared to the hundreds of millions that the Muslims have butchered over the centuries in Africa, Afghanistan, India, Indonesia?

Not as a matter of state law. One of those "serfs" was India's president.

Most of Israel is not orthodox, or religious for that matter. Israel has open gay bars, and is the only middle eastern country with full LGBT rights. These guys sound "orthodox" to you? The primary conflicts there are nationalistic, with religion playing only a periphereal role.

You Americans have some bizarre orientalist ideas that everything in Asia is motivated by religion. Simply not true.

Sucks to be them, for sure. Still, the death toll is hardly in the millions there. Compare with the 1971 Bangladesh genocide by Muslims (3 million dead for that one alone).

Fair enough. However, you make the classic fallacy of moral equivalence here. All religions are indeed bad but they are not equally bad. Some are worse than others.

You're not seeing the bigger picture. This whole voluntary Sharia Law thing is just a wedge to be used to muscle in more Sharia law, eventually culminating in an ever-expanding Islamic ghetto in the UK where Islamic law abrogates British law. It has happened countless times in other countries and at other times.

People who immigrate to other countries should conform to the laws of that country, not bring their backward cultural and religious baggage with them. It's just the rank arrogance of the Islamic leadership and aggressive collectivist ethnocentrism of the Muslim world that makes them do this.

Try being an immigrant in the UAE and claiming that you want to follow secular laws instead of their Islamic Sharia+Feudal monarchy and your hand will be cut off.

BTW are these guys still around? I read somewhere that they split up. Is the larger Islamofascist Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan supporting them with expat funds? I haven't been following Afghanistan much these last few months (too busy with Pakistan, where the Taliban seem to have moved and set up shop), but I do remember that the Afghan-Tajik tailor in my old neighbourhood loved to diss the Jamiat-Islami some years back. They kidnapped his son and forcibly recruited him into their rural death squads (killing people they thought were Soviet Collaborators etc.).

Not the same thing. While Jewish law and Islamic law may have some nominal similarities, the main difference is that Jewish law only applies to Jews, not gentiles, whereas Islamic Sharia Law is a strategy created specifically to oppress non-Muslims in Islamic land quite brutally.

Issues with Jewish courts are best left within the Jewish community for the orthodox and reformist Jews to hash out. It doesn't affect any of the rest of us per se.

There is more chicken tikka masala in Austin than there is in London.

Having lived in both cities...

Extremely unlikely. Most of the Chinese students at my University are ferociously ethnocentric about their government, and immunize it from criticism using some pretty nasty hesperophobic bile.

In fact, their justifications for China's deprivations in Tibet are astoundingly similar to 19th century European Orientalism and Colonialism (apparently, the Tibetans are "uncivilized savages who eat people and drink blood" and the Chinese are only trying to "civilize them" by taking away their land, ethnically cleansing them in droves and bilking their natural resources to feed the Chinese economy).

They do say these things. Amaresh Misra, a major ideologue for the Communist Party, even published this ludicrously anti-Indian/antisemitic conspiracy theory in Communist party mouthpiece:

http://www.countercurrents.org/misra031208.htm

Sorry, I got the chronology wrong. My mistake. However, her government and several of her boy-toys in said government were indicted by the courts over the years, going back to the Allahabad High Court in 1975 itself (though they couldn't do much about it when the women effectively seized power).

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Chawla_was_indicted_for_Emergency_excesses/rssarticleshow/4058011.cms
http://www.boloji.com/plainspeak/015.htm