I was among a small group of columnists in the Oval Office when President Bush, after running through selected highlights from a long list of Islamic discontents, concluded with an exasperated: "If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons." That'd make a great bumper sticker: It encapsulsates both Islam's inability to move on millennium-in millennium-out, plus the grievance-mongers' utter lack of proportion.
Yes, indeed, what doesn't set them off? If the jihadis keep up their campaign of killing against us for supposed crimes ranging from the Crusades to cartoons, one day the Western public will get so fed up with the utter lack of proportion in the reactions of Islamists that the West will conclude that if the Islamists are going to get violent whether we draw Mohammed or invade Moslem countries to kill jihadis, we might as well just go all in and use maximum force to settle the problem once and for all no matter the price that Moslems pay.
If Moslems are too afraid of--or mildly sympathetic to--the Islamists to clean them up because the thought of innocent Westerners dying in jihadi attacks just isn't that upsetting, Westerners (or Hindus, for that matter) may decide that we don't care enough about innocent Moslems dying to restrain our level of force against the jihadis.
Then we'll have a war between civilizations. Why not, if anything we do is a crime punishable by death? And we won't lose that war.
