Ending tolerance of Islamism

In his National Review Online column, Center for Security Policy Academic Council Member Victor Davis Hanson observes that "the genius of bin Ladenism is that to either applause or silent approval it promulgates lies that make Hitler’s best perfidies seem mild. And such untruths do seem to galvanize an Arab world that is increasingly guilty of an inability to sort truth from fiction. The receptive Arab Street lives in a perpetual world of asymmetrical thinking – nursing fantasies, inventing false grievances, and above all demanding from the West what it would never offer to others. But, after all, the Middle East once was furious at Baghdad Bob not because he lied daily but because his lies were proven ludicrous and then humiliating on the world stage by the U.S. military."

Hanson goes on to note, however, that "the American message of religious tolerance, equality of women, democracy, and secularism is too well known – and it is no more welcome to Islamicists than the idea of tolerating Jews was to an SS Panzer division. Yet, like Hitler’s young minions, the masked men in bathrobes and machetes have not yet learned to fear the power of Western democracy that could, if it so wished – as the 10,000 resting at St. Avold have so proved – put a stop to their cowardly murdering rather quickly and thus end the Arab tolerance of these beheading fanatics."

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