Are We Through Coddling Muslims?

Anne Applebaum recommends we stop with the apologies already:

None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

I suppose because that would require a spine. The Pope has thus far shown he has one; when will the others catch up?

Well, in fairness, at least one former Anglican has.

Jonah Goldberg thinks we ought to call Muslims on their hypocrisy:

Before you can discuss the manifest seriousness of the latest controversy involving the pope, you have to acknowledge its hilarity. Pope Benedict XVI, in an austere philosophical address, invoked Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, the 14th-century ruler who offered a harsh assessment of Islam. While the Koran says, “There is no compulsion in religion,” Manuel couldn’t help but notice that Muslims were setting up more franchises in his neighborhood than Starbucks — and they weren’t doing so by selling the best darn Mocha Frappuccinos on his side of the Bosphorus Straits.

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new,” Manuel complained sometime around the siege of Byzantium, “and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Why Pope Benedict quoted Manuel is hotly debated. But one explicit reason was to enunciate the Church’s opposition to using faith to justify violence or intolerance.

And this is where the hilarity comes in. A Pakistani foreign-ministry spokeswoman responded: “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.”

During Friday prayers in Iran, a senior cleric changed his usual script to denounce the pope, but the crowd of worshippers hadn’t seen the memo, so they chanted back the usual refrain: “Death to America! Death to Israel!”

In Turkey, protesters demanded that the justice ministry arrest the pope when he visits there this fall and prosecute him for insulting Islam.

And just this week, clerics in Gaza reportedly suggested that the pope convert to Islam to save his own life.

But let us not dare suggest that even a whiff of intolerance can be detected in the Islamic world. If you say otherwise, I will cut off your head.

I prefer another tactic---if terrorists are going to hide in mosques, mosques are no longer considered hallowed ground. Any Muslim mosque in the U.S. found to have been frequented or provided support or sanctuary to terrorists or terrorist groups should immediately lose its tax exemption and be subjected to the tender mercies of the full IRS and INS finger wave.

Laurent Maurawiec offers some historical context for the Pope's comments:

Hearing pundits and spinmeisters opine that Benedict XVI had not mastered the skills of media management was a reminder that in the world of appearances, papier mâché figures usurp in surface what they lack in depth. Contrary to his detractors, the pope is dealing in the real world.

The leader of the world’s most ancient institution, one with an unbroken continuity that spans over two millennia, and a memory to match, took a stand with his report of the dialogue between Byzantine Emperor Manuel II and an “educated Persian” on he subject of Islam and jihad.

That dialogue occurred in year 1391. There is a context, which only ignoramuses could suspect the pope of not having taken into full account: in those years, the Ottoman Turks crushed and overran the Serbian kingdom, the Muslim warlord Tamerlane broke the back of the Persian empire and occupied it, the empire of Bulgaria was destroyed by the Ottomans and incorporated into their empire.

The Muslim jihad was threatening the whole of Christendom, and was devastating Muslim lands as well, such as the anciently civilized Persia. To broaden the perspective, add that in short order, the Islamicized Mongols were to besiege Moscow, crush a Hungarian-German army in Central Europe, occupy Bosnia, besiege, sack, and slaughter New Delhi, and take Syria — even before the 14the century expired.

Politics is theology diluted. The pope’s admonition to “be obedient to the truth” is the core of the civilization built by Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. His mention of the Muslim doctrinaire of “Zahirism,” Ibn Hazm of Cordova (d. 1064) who, he recalls, went so far as to state “that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry,” ought to be taken seriously — Ibn Hazm, after all, was a noted theorist of jihad.

Contrary to the naïve souls of unbounded cleverness, the pope is not trying to be nice, or to “sell” his doctrine like a Madison Avenue salesman. The dialogue he reports on takes place “in the winter barracks near Ankara.” There is a war going on. It is not a war “on terror,” it is a war on jihad and an Islam that has, for all practical purposes, throw its lot with the jihadis, or at least never clearly and practically distanced itself from jihad. The emperor wrote the dialogue “during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402.” Ideas have consequences. The denial of human reason and the denial of faith go hand in hand to promote inhumanity. The West cannot defend itself if it believes in nothing. “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature,” Benedict XVI reminds us — but what is Al Jazeera doing when it gleefully airs mass consumption snuff movies of jihadis beheading “infidels”? Jihad is the pathology of religion just as Nazism and Bolshevism were the pathologies of reason and modernity.

Muslims are not children. The understand better than we do the danger the jihadists pose---after all, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the rest have not refrained from blowing up innocent Muslims. This is why they tend to prefer jihadists blow themselves up outside the borders of their territories. This is an eminently rational belief, and not the mark of people who don't deal with reality.

That said, they need to be held accountable for breeding and disseminating hordes of latter-day kamikazes. To do that, we must make it clear that when 19 Saudis hijack planes and drive them into American skyscrapers, Prince Bandar no longer gets to play racquetball with Colin Powell.

We could instead follow the British model:

The Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat (proselytizing group) wants to build a mosque in East London for up to 10,000 people as part of an "Islamic Village" in time for the London Olympics of 2012, near the official Olympic stadium at West Ham. Tablighi Jamaat is secretive and publishes little about itself, but it is on the fundamentalist side of the Islamic spectrum and has links with Wahabism. It is based in Pakistan, where for a Muslim to convert to Christianity is a capital offense.

It is planned the Mosque and surrounding buildings will ultimately accommodate 70,000 visitors. What happens after the Olympics is another matter, but what seems on the cards is a permanent Muslim city in the heart of London -- which already has large Muslim areas and a complex of mosques in the Finsbury Park area.

Britain as a whole is already well-supplied with mosques. There were a few in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1980s there were about 150 and by 1996 there were 613. Now there are well over a thousand, many of them converted Anglican churches. The Muslim website "British Muslim Heritage" says: "London probably has more mosques than any other city in the Western World, save Turkey ... the modern Muslim Londoner is spoilt for choice with regard to mosques." There are dozens in contiguous areas like Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney.

Tablight Jamaat's spokesmen have claimed it is a moderate organization. However, it has been accused by the FBI of being a recruiting ground for al Qaeda, and two of the London tube bombers, including the leader, Mohammed Sidque Khan, are believed to have attended mosques run by it. French intelligence is reported by Le Monde to have described it as an "antechamber of fundamentalism."

Of course, the likely outcome of this is nattily-dressed suicide bombers on Saville Row.

Deroy Murdock notes that if we can't beat them, we'll be required to join them:

Throwing olive branches at Islamofascists is beyond futile. This is the War on Terror, not the Summer Olympics on Terror. If America won’t fight this like a war — and win — we might as well cut our losses, hand out the Korans, and start the mass conversions.

Now as much as I might enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing Tim Russert have to mouth Islamic pieties for his Ministry of Propaganda masters or Bill Clinton's frustration at the burqa-clad beauties sunning their eyelids on Florida beaches, I'd much prefer we fight and win this war, preferably with the Blue Staters, but victoriously nonetheless.

America being defeated by the cast-off lunatics of Third World kleptocracies would be a tragedy to rival the fall of Rome, and not solely for the American people.