"Bliss" wrote:

I'm sure I'm not making this up, but I remember at a talk Shaykh Hamza Yusuf saying that the word Kafir or some word with a similar pronunciation to that means farmer in Arabic.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafir]This Wikipedia entry[/url] (including Ya'qub's excerpt) is pretty exhaustive, and has a good list of sources.

Aside from malik's use of the term, which frankly is offensive, I would agree with some of his point - that relations between cultures are not necessarily bad, made worse by the media and the overly PC. Not generally because they're trying to cause problems, but because they report on problems and treat Muslims alternately as dangerous and fragile, which is how some Muslims seem to like it à la Cartoongate. Nevertheless that's a simple analysis.

malik could have expressed his view on how Muslims and non-Muslims should relate to each other, instead of seizing the opportunity for a self-contradictory attack on "kaafir evils news".