Of course, this causes a problem for the Americans here who like to say of course they favored toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan--it is only Iraq that is a mistake and causing the enemy to fight. Sadly for these types, our enemy won't cooperate. They lump the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" war in Iraq. As Victor Hanson put it:
So here we are. Even though the killers profess revenge equally for Afghanistan (the so-called “right” war), they expect Westerners to scream “Iraq.”
Both are reasons to kill anybody who opposes them. And there are many other reasons, too, as Hitchens writes so well:
We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.
The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.
FOR a few moments yesterday, Londoners received a taste of what life is like for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose Muslim faith does not protect them from slaughter at the hands of those who think they are not Muslim enough, or are the wrong Muslim.
It is a big mistake to believe this is an assault on "our" values or "our" way of life. It is, rather, an assault on all civilisation. I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush.
Our cause is actually saved by the ridiculous catalog of "crimes" and grievances that our enemies profess to fight over. Even if our appeasers could shamefully enact their policies of treating these childish rants of Islamists as real claims, our enemies would not accept the surrender. I'd like to think that even Jimmy Carter would recoil from swathing his daughter in a burqa. I'd like to think that even Sean Penn would refuse to stone a homosexual and cry "Enough!" Hitchens continues after ridiculing the link between Iraq and London:
Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?
The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose. They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.
So we must fight by default. Even those who would appease would find in the end that there is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.
But these same people continue to make it more difficult for us to fight our Islamist jihadi enemies. Hanson addresses this point:
To criticize Islamic fascism is supposedly to be unfair to Islam, so we allow on our own shores mullahs and madrassas to spread hatred and intolerance, as part of our illiberal acceptance of “not offending Islam.”
It is not that we don’t believe in Western values as much as we don’t even know what they are anymore. The London bombings were only a reification of what goes on daily with impunity blocks away in the mosques and Islamist schools of London.
The enemy knows that and thrives on it. That refuge in religion is why imams shout that “Islam doesn’t condone such things” — even as bin Laden has become a folk hero on the Arab Street. Jihadists sense that even here at home more Americans are more concerned about a flushed Koran at Guantanamo Bay than five Americans fighting for the Iraqi jihadists or Taliban sympathizers in Lodi, California.
As long as there is not any price to be paid for Islamism, either by governments abroad or purveyors of its hatred in the West, the propaganda works and the killing will go on. But when a renegade Saudi Prince, Pakistani general, London imam, or Lodi mosque leader screams out to the jihadist, “Stop that before those crazy Americans really do go to war,” the war, in fact, will be over and won.
This is not and should not be a war against Islam. It is a war against Islamist jihadis who claim to fight in all Islam's name. But our Left's refusal to admit that Islamist jihadis are our enemy for fear of implying all Islam is our enemy just makes it more likely that our people will eventually think just that. If hunting down and killing beheaders and suicide bombers who slaughter civilians offends Islam generally as our Left says, why shouldn't the logical conclusion be that all Islam is guilty? If not, why would Moslems be offended that we are killing terrorists?
And this isn't just our problem to solve, of course. Avoiding the destruction of Islam is not just a matter of morality for us but of survival for Islam. The clear majority of Moslems who would not slaughter innocents but who are at best uneasily quiet about it have a duty to join our fight against Islamist jihadis. Friedman actually gets it quite right when he writes:
Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.
And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village.
One way or the other, we will win this. As Hitchens writes, losing is not an option that our enemies will allow--only our death or total submission are options as far as they are concerned.
Yet we still have a choice of how to win. We either win by killing and discrediting a narrow subset of Islam and free Islam generally from the guilt of association with these terrorists; or we mistakenly defend the honor of Islam by refusing to see that only a part of Islam is our enemy. Since more Moslems die at the hands of the jihadis, it seems impossible to fail to recognize this difference. But if we refuse to see the difference, since surrender is not an option in the end, we will have to destroy all of Islam to avoid death and defeat.
Is this what the Left wants to see happen? Mecca and Medina slags of glass and ethnic cleansing in the West of all Moslems because we shrink from even identifying our enemy?
We have to ruthlessly kill the terrorists while siding with the wider Moslem world to enlist their aid in killing the terrorists.
