Three Years Later

Three years after three thousand died (including three personal friends), NRO's Victor Davis Hanson takes stock of radical Islam:

The perversion not of religion per se, but of Islam; the singular method of suicide bombing rarely found elsewhere; the frequent resort to the unique grotesquery of beheading; the now-common display of abject incompetence on the battlefield coupled with craven slaughter of the noncombatant and civilian aid worker. At some point, the leaders of the Western world (if there are any left besides George W. Bush and Tony Blair) are going to look at all this madness worldwide and come to the bitter conclusion that there is a disgusting pattern: Not every Muslim is a fascist terrorist, but almost every fascist terrorist is a Muslim.

Hanson also excoriates the terror apologists' excuse "of course the Palestinians (or Chechens or Iraqis) use terror--that's all they have."

If the Estonians can break away from post-Soviet oppression and free themselves from Russian authoritarianism without slaughtering schoolchildren and blowing up airplanes, then the Chechens can as well — but only if they wish to create democracy rather than an Islamic fascist state.

Finally, Hanson shows why even appeasing the radical Muslim demand de jour (more West Bank land, French "insensitivity" to Islamic pride, building a reactor in Iran, a semi-autonomous Chechnya) won't stop terrorism:

[These issues] in theory could be discussed, argued about, and adjudicated through democratic dialogue.

But that is impossible. For you see, the real problem is the democratic dialogue itself — unknown in the Arab Middle East and much of the Islamic world, and a hindrance to both sharia and the pan-Arabist thug with epaulettes and sunglasses.

Read the whole thing.