n Washington, they are practically praying for a Christian terrorist. At a breakfast in January, President Obama reached all the way back to the Crusades for an example of violence purportedly motivated by Christian extremism. Days later, when three Muslims were murdered in Chapel Hill, social media erupted with demands that Christians be called upon to condemn the attacks in the same way that Muslims are called upon to condemn acts of Islamic terrorism, and the disappointment was palpable when the man charged with those murders turned out to be a militant atheist and Rachel Maddow fan who was angry about a parking dispute.
State Department flack Marie Harf, fresh off her jobs-for-jihadis bit, offered up Joseph Kony — a practitioner of Ancholi mystical traditions with 88 wives, a flair for Biblical apocalypticism, and, if we take him at his word, 13 spirits (one of them Chinese) dwelling within him — as an example of “Christian militant” terrorism. This isn’t new: Timothy McVeigh (agnostic) and John Salvi (a schizophrenic who believed himself to be one of the thieves crucified with Jesus and who obsessed over an imaginary scheme in which the Vatican would issue its own currency) have been presented from time to time as evidence that the violent jihadist tendency is not limited to the religion of which jihad is a central tenet.
I will never say that Christians can't be violent. Our prisons say otherwise. But if you are talking about organized violence for sectarian purposes, going with violent forces within Islam rather than Christianity this century would be the way to bet.
And even if we finally get one of those long-awaited "backlash" attacks, it really won't excuse the long stream of attacks from the Islamo-fascist side that the rest of the world has endured from the Islamist terrorists.
No, we're not at war with Islam. But we sure are suffering collateral damage in the Islamic Civil War that is seeking to define what Islam should be.
And if the jihadis win that Islamic Civil War, by definition we will be at war with Islam, no?
And have no doubt, then the "backlash" will arrive.
