Mark Steyn

Hits it out of the park.

"As always, we come back to the words of Osama bin Laden: ”When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” That’s really the only issue: the Islamists know our side has tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that’s the better bet. Most prominent Western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end".

****

"Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. What can we do? Should governments with troops in Afghanistan pass joint emergency legislation conferring their citizenship on this poor man and declaring him, as much as Karzai, under their protection?

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

”You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, "ghastly."

I read something today (no link, I’d as soon not send him traffic) in which the author said that Western Civilization was no different the Islam in that we used to also kill apostates.

Western civilization also used to own slaves, fight to gain empires and mandate a single religion. Back in my family tree, some of my forebears used to raid and burn villages just to have something to do. Then the settled down.

He sort of misses his own irony - we used to. We grew up.

Are we perfect? Hell no. But we are getting better. I would prefer not to go back to the seventh century.