Great
commentary piece by Diane West about the Islamic terrorism situation. Nails it on the head. Some excerpts:
" Alas, there are no 'terms' to come to. Literally. We are experiencing a civilization-wide failure, even three years after September 11, to define the terrorism born of Islam's core medieval precepts: violent jihad and dehumanizing dhimmitude. We see the same kind of terrorism in Russia that we see in Israel, Sudan and Iraq. We've seen it in Spain and we've seen it in Bali, and we've certainly seen it in the United States. We see it, but maybe we don't believe it -- a failure that could ultimately be our undoing.
...The war we wage, the United States and its coalition of friends, is not a war on generic 'terrorism,' but on Islamic jihad -- the spread of Islam by violent means. We wage it not against generic 'terrorists,' but against Islamic jihadists who dream of death and destruction, not to mention a caliphate, in their religion's name.
In our religion's name -- the postmodern 'religion' of tolerance the pluralistic West publicly enforces and enshrines -- we torture ourselves over whether jihadists are just a minuscule minority of 'extremists.' We nudge along a lagging conviction that terrorists who maim and kill in the name of Allah constitute some far-out sect that will some day be denounced, ostracized and neutralized by a robust Muslim mainstream. ...But we must also wonder how fringy the Islamic 'death cult' can be given the doctrinal primacy of jihad and dhimmitude in the Muslim world.
Writing in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, the general manager of Al-Arabiya News Channel offers a genuinely fringe view: 'It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims,' Abdel Rahman Al-Rashed writes. 'We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise -- an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.' Mr. Al-Rashed doesn't explain the basis of this 'monopoly' -- which includes the central precepts of jihad and dhimmitude -- and he glosses over Islam's bloody centuries of conquest and subjugation. But he does call for 'an end to a history of denial,' which is a promising start. 'Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession,' he writes. 'We should then run after our terrorist sons, the sour grapes of a deformed culture.'"
