Mark Steyn as usual gets the point right out in front of even the dullards. The problem for President Bush and Company right now isn’t that they are losing the left, the left has been gone. No the problem and what the polls are showing is that the President and company are losing the right. We don’t buy that Islam is the Religion of Peace crap. We might have bought it 4 years ago but since then the evidence has been all one sided away from believing Islam is compatible with Liberal Democratic Ideas without some wholesale changes to mainstream Islam. And that doesn’t look like it is going to happen. Some can go on forever bending numbers and statements to match their beliefs that Islam means peace but the evidence before us gives lie to those fables.
Don’t deny that some Muslims are hot for jihad: “But there are two kinds of persons objecting to the war: There’s a shriveled Sheehan-Sheen left that’s in effect urging on American failure in Iraq, and there’s a potentially far larger group to their right that’s increasingly wary of the official conception of the war. The latter don’t want America to lose, they want to win — decisively. And on the day’s headlines — on everything from the Danish cartoon jihad to the Afghan facing death for apostasy — the fainthearted response of ‘public diplomacy’ is in danger of sounding only marginally less nutty than Charlie Sheen.
The line here is ‘respect.’ Everybody’s busy professing their ‘respect’: We all ‘respect’ Islam; presidents and prime ministers and foreign ministers, lapsing so routinely into the deep-respect-for-the-religion-of-peace routine they forget that cumulatively it begins to sound less like ‘Let’s roll!’ and too often like ‘Let’s roll over!’
Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, gave a typical Western government official’s speech the other day explaining that ‘a large number of Muslims in this country were — understandably — upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomized the learned, peaceful religion of Islam.’
‘The learned, peaceful religion of Islam’? And that would be the guys marching through London with placards reading ‘BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM’ and ‘FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS WESTERN TERRORISM’ and promising to rain down a new Holocaust on Europe? “
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Technorati: Iran Wafa Sultan Islam Clash of Civilizations Danish cartoons Denmark Cartoons Bush
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