How NOT to confront militant Islam
Reader comment on item: When Osama bin Laden becomes PC

Submitted by Joshua Truax (United States), Jan 28, 2004 at 20:34

It seems that Britain has joined the United States and France in providing a different, yet just as dubious, case study in how NOT to effectively confront militant Islam.

The U.S. has declared a general "war on terrorism" which has produced positive results, but fails to recognize America's principal enemy or the fact that terrorism is far from the only means they employ toward the end of a militant Islamist world order. As a result America remains vulnerable to Islamists, even if not to terrorism itself.

France is trying to ban religious attire in its public schools, a move that theoretically applies to everyone but was clearly crafted with Muslims in mind. Not even America's notoriously ultra-PC public schools have ever gone this far. If its aim is to bring about the assimilation of French Muslims, it may backfire in a big way by alienating them, and may even end up putting France right up there with the U.S. on al Qaeda's hit list.

Now Britain has resorted to old-fashioned political correctness, not just with the case of this prison official but also with one of its most venerable thespians, John Rhys-Davies (perhaps best known as Gimli from the "Lord of the Rings" movies), who in the past week has been roasted by British politicians, leftist activists and the media as a bigot after daring to suggest that Islamists pose a serious threat to Western civilization. The trouble is, of course, that he may be right.

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