I retain hope that Islam can turn away (via Instapundit) from the death wish that the Wahabbis have charted for Moslems. One Moslem woman has bravely challenged the death cultists:
"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.
Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."
Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."
She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."
She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."
Hacking our people apart, lopping hostages' heads off, and crashing planes into our buildings have strangely not inspired our respect for Islam even though the terrorists loudly demand we do so. Instead, we kill jiahdis where we find them and wait in vain for the wider Islamic world to deal with their own. Then Islam would earn our respect.
And we've used only a fraction of our power in this war. I don't want to fight without restraint. But if our enemies keep killing us, we will in time tire of fighting this way. In time, we will settle for destroying our enemies. And that is much simpler than the current path of trying to help the moderates of Islam defeat the jihadis.
As I've said, they have to earn our respect.
And while we're at it, convince a chunk of Westerners that our society deserves to be defended against jihadi whackjobs. I have slightly less hope of that happening.
