Know the Enemy (1.3 billion Allah fans can't be wrong)

Nothing gets my blood up in the morning like right-wing talk radio. I actually think, unlike most educated east coast denizens, that talk radio is the most responsive and democratic media in this country; in general it is a good thing, and there is nothing so unappealing as those who castigate democratic media when they disagree with the content.

For example, whatever one thought of the recent immigration bill, talk radio mobilized millions to demand that their elected representatives vote against the bill. Without this absolutely unprecedented outcry from their constituents, Congress would have passed that bill in 10 minutes. Instead, it failed.

Again, regardless of how you feel about immigration, this was democracy in action, an example of an informed citizenry directly swaying their representatives towards their will. This was true republicanism and proactive citizenship of the likes that this country has not witnessed in decades.

The flip-side of talk radio, which self-styled liberals and progressives ceaselessly harp upon, is its demagogic populism. This force, when harnessed by intolerant and provincial men, is the dark side of democracy. I got a taste of that dark side this morning on my way to work, and it pertained to the nature of our enemy in the global and permanent battle to eradicate evil from the universe, or GAPBEEFTU.

The host sternly informed his multitude of listeners that it is suicidal to assume that any given Muslim is not a terrorist, that in World War II any German would have been presumed to be a Nazi unless he met the burden of proving otherwise, and that our wish not to offend people will be our ultimate undoing. He ended this historically illiterate and strategically retarded soliloquy with the coup de grace: "If all the Muslims on Earth disappeared tomorrow, 90% of the violence on Earth would cease".

Fair enough. This is actually a sentiment that a good number of Americans, perhaps the majority, would not disagree with. Partly this is a function of their ignorance and jingoism, and partly it is a function of the liberal and progressive elite's exaltation of "tolerance" above all else.

Most Muslims, like most people in general, have no interest in killing anybody. While they take their religion seriously, they do not seek to impose or castigate; they simply want to live in peace with their families, to be human.

However, let's be honest: when someone walks onto a bus and blows themselves up along with twenty other people, including infants in their mothers' arms, do you ever pause and think, "gee, I wonder what religion that terrorist was"?

How about a controlled experiment, complete with dependent and independent variables: Palestinians have been brutalized, humiliated, and abandoned by Israelis and their Arab "brothers" for sixty years. One out of every five Palestinians is Christian. How many Palestinian suicide bombers are Christian? To ask the question is to answer it.

There is a stateless group of men who would do anything in their power to kill Americans. All of these men are Muslims. There are Latin Americans, Southeast Asians, and others who harbor legitimate greivances and simmering ill-will towards the United States, but they are not flying planes into buildings. To acknowledge that all of the terrorists we currently face are Muslims is not to be "intolerant" of anything other than being intolerant of having our heads up our collective ass.

Furthermore, to insist that this unfortunate truth is somehow coincidental rather than causal is absurd. The Prime Minister of Great Britain recently informed the media that terrorists should not be described as Muslim or Islamic. Being a Muslim is not a secondary attribute, like being tall or having green eyes, or having a last name that starts with R or S. If it were, it would indeed be unfair to stress it. But it's not.

To say that Islam is irrelevant to the terrorism that we face is a total abdication of logic. Islam is not the same as Christianity or Judaism, and the Koran does contain very unambiguous language about what should be done with infidels (The wideness of that net is matched only by the brutality of the recommened prescription).

Let me put it this way: if Islamic terrorists carry out their acts in the name of Islam, couch all of ther greivances and goals in religious terms, and cry out "God is Great" in the commission of their murderous acts, who the hell are we to then say, "oh, they're not really driven by their religon, their acts have nothing to do with Islam"?

What could be more presumptuous and, in fact, racist? Many in the West, up to and including national leaders, insist that these killers did not act for the reasons they explicitly claimed to. So Muslims are not capable of accurately assessing and articulating their feelings? So if they tell us they kill in the name of their God, we politely inform them that they don't know what they're talking about? That they've got Islam all wrong, and that we in the West will inform them of Islam's true and tolerant nature? What presumption. What racism.

Islamic terrorists act because they are very, very religious. They believe, with a faith that few in the West can understand, that their religion is under attack and that their divine mission is to slaughter those they perceive as infidel interlopers. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.

The reasons that Islam is suffering this curse, this civil war between radicals and the always-elusive "moderates", are many. Colonialism was one curse. Oil is another. The lack of an Islamic Reformation is, in my opinion, the biggest problem. Only one out of six Muslims is Arab, yet the Koran is forbidden to be related in any language other than classical Arabic.

What if the Bible could only be transmitted, even in the United States, in ancient Latin? I'm not talking about just reading Catholic mass in Latin; I'm talking about a situation in which every Christian is a Catholic and owning a Bible written in English would be punishable by death. And what if most Christian nations were poor, largely illiterate and recently colonized? It would not be very hard to manipulate Christians under such conditions into doing some pretty psychotic things.

So, Islamic terrorism is Islamic. This is not because Islam is destined to be the most violent monotheism. The Old Testament is by far the most violent of the monotheistic religious books (I hesitate to call them "holy"). The reason that Jews don't go around killing each other and everyone else is that they are largely secular, educated, wealthy, and physically secure. No Muslim nation can say this for itself. Poverty, ignorance, abuse, and despair breed violence. Throw religion into the mix and you've got a time bomb. Or a suicide bomb.

As for the claim that erasing Muslims from Earth would erase violence from the same, there can be no splitting hairs. It's bullshit. If we had erased all the Christians from Europe at any time between 1400 and 1945, we could have similarly cut down on global violence. If we removed all capitalists, or all males, similar paradise could be achieved. From what I undestand of human history between 10,000 B.C. and 730 A.D., men found ways to kill before Islam.

While hyperbole such as the "if the Muslims disappeared" garbage must be rejected out of hand, we must not replace it with insipid relativism and the solipsistic insistence that we know why they kill and that it has nothing to do with their religon. Listen to what the terrorists say. Respect them, for if you do not, you do so at your own peril. These people are not confused; they are not stupid. You have to be smart to be so profficient and creative at killing.