Only from GWB and the rest of the white house, and CNNABCNBCMSNBC, et al...
I have been saying this all along, Im glad that someone finally gets it.
Sorry to bust everyone's bubble, but the United States CANNOT ever win the "War on Terrorism" until they understand the TRUE nature of Islam.
Does anyone know, is this a real number? Does anyone have a source or a link?
Thanks in advance.
Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The Gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other, -- beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.
In our politically correct, multicultural rush to be tolerant of all religions, we are stumbling on the central irreconcilable conflict between Islam and Western civilization -- Islam is a political agenda as well as a religion and the example of its founder and its sacred book justify holy war to impose religious rule against unbelievers. There is no getting around this fact. This is the answer to all the pundits questions about why political and individual freedom is virtually absent from the Islamic world and why democracy makes little progress there. All religions are not equal -- they differ greatly, in De Tocqueville's words, " in the nature of the belief they inculcate, on the external forms they assume, and on the obligations they impose."
However tolerant we wish to appear, September 11th should have made it clear to everyone the lengths that Islamic jihadists will go to in order to impose their religio-political views on the world. It does no good for our leaders to pretend that this central conflict does not exist or that there is some "true" Islam out there that has been hijacked. Osama Bin Laden's Islam is as legitimate in their own tradition as is Turkeys brand of "moderate" Islam. Islam is moderate in Turkey only because the government has imposed strict restrictions on religious practice and there is a constant struggle against Islamic fundamentalism even there.
The West coexisted peacefully with Islam in the past only because Islamic countries were isolated, poor and powerless. Now that oil wealth has funded Islamic extremism all over the world and open borders policies have allowed large numbers of Islamic people to settle in the West, I fear that we can co-exist only to the extent that Islam's adherents reject that part of their own tradition and religious doctrines that advocate jihad and religious totalitarianism (merging of state and religion) and accept Western notions of political, religious and individual freedom.
This means the West must defend its own tradition of freedom and must require its Islamic citizens to accept and observe our own political creed of separation of church and state and constitutional principles. When public opinion polls show Muslim immigrants would vote for and impose religious law on America we know that we have lost this battle. Mumbling about Islam as a "religion of peace" and the refusal of political and media elites to publicly confront and expose the growing number of Islamic political activists whose preachings and teachings exhibit a betrayal of American political values will not get us there. That just convinces Muslims all over the world that our belief in our own principles is not strong enough to withstand jihad. All nations of the Western tradition -- if they value their own traditions of political and religious freedom -- must attack and discredit what has been called Islamo-fascism with as much passion as we attacked Communism and Nazism. We must go after the ideas, including the so-called "religious" ones, that justify holy war as well as going after the terrorists who implement the ideas.
Political correctness now stands in the way of this effort to defend Western political values as well as our very lives. When American political leaders and the media attempt to prevent any public discussion and criticism of Islamic doctrines by telling us at the outset that Islam is a "religion of peace" and the only problem is the amorphous, disconnected "terrorists;" when they imply that all those who point out problems with Islamic doctrine are "bigots" and cannot be trusted to refrain from mob violence; and when they try to spin the facts of real events to downplay the role of Islamic motivations then they stand in the way of our own defense and they obstruct the process of discrediting the religious ideas and beliefs that give rise to this very same "terrorism."
Amazingly, political correctness amounts to the adoption by American political and media eliltes of the Islamic "fatwa" system of suppressing free thought and inquiry -- thou shalt not think or speak such! It is an outright rejection of our Western tradition of encouraging free debate and discussion of all topics, religious and political. And, of course, we impose no such politically correct "fatwas" against the criticism of our own Christian or Jewish traditions. That is how we as citizens go about self-government, through public deliberation and discussion. It is what makes and keeps us a free people. To the extent that our political leaders believe that we cannot be trusted with the truth, much less with the responsibility of debating this issue in a civilized manner, then they have rejected the core of the American experiment -- self-government. Political correctness is a craven capitulation to totalitarianism and is as much if not more of a danger to our freedom as that posed by Islamo-fascism.