We are in a war to the death – craven concessions won't win it
Last I heard, a single US nuclear submarine has sufficient firepower to destroy 150 cities. So why do we act like Muslim junk states are in a position of strength? Our restraint is or weakness.
Because we'd prefer not to fry a substantial portion of the world. We need to live in the world afterwards. That seems obvious to at least some of us.
Who would have thought it? Half of Europe – the half that was so smug about having buried God several generations ago – is waiting in real trepidation for the outcome of a theological argument. When Pope Benedict XVI flies to Turkey tomorrow, he will embody the most potentially incendiary confrontation between Islam and the West since the defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 brought an end to Islamic conquest in Europe.
The Pope will take with him an understanding that at the root of our problems in dealing with the Islamist death cult, there is a fundamental debate to be had about the role of human reason in political affairs.
The remarks he made in a lecture in Regensburg, Germany, which implied that Islam rejected rationality while Christianity saw it as essential to faith were contentious (and almost certainly designed to be so), but they raised a question that almost no Western government has the courage to ask, let alone answer. How is a liberal democracy to deal with an illiberal religious minority in its midst?
| By declaring that there are limits to our tolerance. We won't tolerate intolerance, and we'll apply that to Islam (instead of just conservatives and evangelical Christians). Muslims who wish to live in a liberal, western society have to abide by the founding tenets of that society: freedom of expression and religion, freedom to offend, equal rights for all including those one's religious faith might despise, pluralism, personal liberty, and the rule of a single, secular law. If you can't do that, don't come here. |
To understand the life-or-death significance of what the Pope does and says when he arrives in Istanbul, it is necessary to see this confrontation for what it is. This will involve some traumatic re-adjustment for most of the opinion-forming class in Britain. The first assumption that will have to go is the premise that Islamist terrorism can be understood in pragmatic, politically rational terms: in other words, that it can be addressed with the usual mechanisms of negotiation, concession and amended policy.
| Light dawns. Indeed one can't negotiate with those who have a fixed stance; one can't concede partially, but only completely, to those who refuse to concede anything; and one can't amend those policies that are at the root core of a liberal, secular society. |
The most readily accepted version of this is that a change to our policy in the Middle East will remove the grievances that "fuel" Muslim terrorism. The Cabinet has apparently been advised that all foreign policy decisions over the next decade should have the goal of thwarting terrorism in Britain and that this should involve "a significant reduction in the number and intensity of the regional conflicts that fuel terror activity". So Britain is contemplating constructing a foreign policy, specifically in the Middle East, that is designed to give in to terrorist blackmail...
| One could 'solve' the Middle East 'crisis' by acquiescing to the destruction of Israel and the removal of Western influence from the region. That would not solve a thing: it would not abate anger, it would not assuage inferiority, and it would not stop war. There is the world of Islam and the world of war. It's a binary condition. |
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