Dean's World

I don't often link to Victor Davis Hanson. I respect him but I often think there's a sort of "preaching to the choir" effect from his stuff--and besides which, so many other webloggers link him I'm hardly needed to join in. Still, once in a while he says something so perfect I can't help but notice:

Failed states in the Middle East — autocratic, statist, unfree, intolerant of women and other religions — blame the West for their self-inflicted miseries. Sometimes they are theocratic, like the late Taliban or the current Iranian mullahs. But more often they are dictatorial like the Syrians, Pakistanis, Saudis, or Egyptians, who all, in varying degrees and in lieu of reform, have come to accommodations with the terrorists to shift popular anguish onto the West and the Jews.

That is the Petri dish of Islamic fascism, an evil that will only disappear when the dictatorships that allow it or nourish it do as well. Whether the jihadists are in Iraq, the United States, or Europe, they all share a sick notion that someone else (the decadent Western oppressor and unbeliever) is responsible for their own poverty and backwardness rather than the fundamentalism, corruption, bias, and intolerance endemic to the Middle East.

In WWII we didn’t care much whether in fighting Bushido some thought we were in a war against Buddhists. We weren’t, and that was enough.

We knew the enemy were Nazis, not simply Germans, and didn’t froth and whine to prove that distinction.

But not now.

To criticize Islamic fascism is supposedly to be unfair to Islam, so we allow on our own shores mullahs and madrassas to spread hatred and intolerance, as part of our illiberal acceptance of "not offending Islam."

It is not that we don’t believe in Western values as much as we don’t even know what they are anymore. The London bombings were only a reification of what goes on daily with impunity blocks away in the mosques and Islamist schools of London.

The enemy knows that and thrives on it. That refuge in religion is why imams shout that “Islam doesn’t condone such things” — even as bin Laden has become a folk hero on the Arab Street. Jihadists sense that even here at home more Americans are more concerned about a flushed Koran at Guantanamo Bay than five Americans fighting for the Iraqi jihadists or Taliban sympathizers in Lodi, California.

As long as there is not any price to be paid for Islamism, either by governments abroad or purveyors of its hatred in the West, the propaganda works and the killing will go on. But when a renegade Saudi Prince, Pakistani general, London imam, or Lodi mosque leader screams out to the jihadist, “Stop that before those crazy Americans really do go to war,” the war, in fact, will be over and won.

I think Hanson's on to something here that hints at something I've tried to say before: "liberal" (or what rightly calls illiberal) acceptance of Islamic fascism has led many here in the West to equate Islamic fascism with Islam itself: the so-called "liberals" accept this murderous fascism as somehow the legitimate face of islam, and so do many conservatives; the "liberals" conclude we should be apologizing while the "conservatives" want to just say "screw it" and declare war on the entire faith.

Muslim and arab voices who refuse to equivocate on fascist terrorism have--as I have noted here on Dean's World a number of times lately--been growing louder and more insistent this last year. This is good. Now we just need honorable and reasonable peole on the left to stop with the same kind of equivocating. Fascism is fascism, and making excuses for it is exactly that: making excuses for fascism.