Jacob Christensen

If you read German, I would recommend Ulrich Speck’s latest post in Die Zeit’s Kosmoblog where he discusses the dangers emanating from islamist terrorists.It has become popular to compare islamism with fascism and nazism – giving us the concept islamofascism – and alarmist writers such as the Danish twosome Karen Jespersen and Ralf Pittelkow have adopted the perspective.Linking islamism and fascism of cause also has an added attraction: It gives authors and politicians the opportunity to paint everyone who do not readily accept the draconian anti-terrorism (and sometimes anti-Muslim) measures as Chamberlain-like appeasers.In any event – Speck is skeptical and points to some relatively obvious facts:

We are dealing with a terrorist threat, not a threat from a movement which has the control over real resources and which promises an alternative modernity that would be able to question the secular Liberal order in any fundamental way.

Without the support of Saudi Arabia, militant Islamism would be much weaker than it is at the moment and the comparison with Fascism is faulty because European Fascism in many ways embraced modernity.Update: See also Speck’s discussion of Justin Vaisse and Jonathan Laurence’s: Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. Available at Amazon.

If you have an e-mail address, you know by now that an effective spam filter is an absolute must – let me recommend the open source mail client Thunderbird – if you don’t want to be flooded by “offers” of different kinds of medication, questionable investment advice and so on.

Less well known is the fact that the comment functions in weblog software are also open to abuse by spammers. But that’s the way it is and if you have a blog you should 1) turn on moderation to catch spam comments and 2) install some kind of spam filter.

Fortunately, WordPress includes a service known as Akismet which is a very effective spam killer and which lets me delete comment spam by the click on a button – or by simply forgetting about it and letting it disappear without trace.

I just wanted to let you guys in Thailand know about that.

Oh, and while we’re at it: Spam is not just a nuisance. We also know that spammers are usually criminals and rather nasty characters. They and their “messages” belong in the trash bin.