Column of the Day

Bruce Thornton nails it: Muslims Have Desecrated Bibles and Churches -- So what is all the mob angst over the Koran? (Hat tip: AB.)

. . . what should trouble us is our own response. For the past week high-ranking officials of the United States government have been falling all over themselves assuring the rioters that we really, really do respect their “holy Koran” and would never, never sanction such disrespect. We like their religion, we really do; we respect and honor it and its marvelous contributions to civilization. And what have we received in exchange for all these protestations of respect and esteem? More riots and more contempt.

The jihadists may be irrational, but they are not stupid. . . . They know, for example, that the West has been corrupted by a self-loathing cultural relativism masquerading as cosmopolitan tolerance and respect for the "other." They know too the various psychological springs of this attitude: guilt over a presumed history of colonial and imperial crimes; indifference subsidized by wealth, comfort, and leisure; a sentimental obsession with suffering and wounds to self-esteem; and a spiritual corruption that privileges the material and sensual over the transcendent.

. . . This behavior smacks of the modern version of what Bat Ye'or calls dhimmitude, a psychological submission to Islam that accepts one's own cultural inferiority. If we do not start recognizing the current conflict for what it is, another episode in the 14-century-long jihad against the West, we will end up like Europe, in a state of full-blown psychological dhimmitude characterized by abject submission to hypocritical double-standards that validate Islam's superiority and the West's inferiority. What else explains the Italian judge who indicted journalist Oriana Fallaci for “defaming Islam” in her book The Force of Reason? The quintessential Western political and intellectual good of free inquiry and speech is subordinated to Islamic sensibilities, an action that to the jihadist proves their beliefs are right and ours are wrong.

If we are serious about winning what has been misnamed the “war on terror,” we need to start by renaming it the "war against jihad" and taking seriously the millions and millions of Muslims who have made clear their passionate support for jihad against the West, including those Palestinian Arabs who cloak jihad in the Western camouflage of nationalist aspirations. We need to stop pretending that what we call Islamism is some sort of deformation of Islam instead of the modern expression of its jihadist traditions. We need to take seriously those spiritual motives and their power and stop reducing them all to our own material causes. And we need to understand that only those actions and statements unequivocally displaying our firm belief in the value and superiority of our own culture — the culture that has made us so free and rich that we can afford the luxury of despising it — will help us prevail.

Read it all.