"We'll nuke you back" is a threat we probably would never carry out. Charles Johnson points out this news story of the Bush administration's threat to retaliate with atomic weapons against states that use them against us.

The threat was contained in a White House document, called the "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction," to be delivered to Congress on Wednesday.

The six-page statement underscores long-standing policy that the United States "reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force — including through resort to all of our options — to the use of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) against the United States, our forces abroad and friends and allies."

This is a threat that is necessary to make; as the article points out, it is intended to deter hostile regimes. But it's probably not a threat that we would or should make good.

During the Cold War the US always said it stood ready to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if the situation warranted. But the US and USSR were approximately evenly matched, and both were colossi; there could be no limited war between them because they could each escalate so rapidly to the level of inflicting total destruction on the other. Mutual Assured Destruction was a fact, and both sides knew it. Just as importantly, the struggle between the US and USSR was never primarily military anyway; it was a war of ideas. What the Soviets wanted to do was convert the world to communism, not destroy it. Having come to power through revolution, Stalin and successors wanted to foment similar revolutions in other countries. Yet successful revolutions are mass movements. They require masses of people to be converted, emotionally, to the revolutionary side, either actively to participate or passively support it. Persuasion, not destruction, was always the linchpin of the Soviet export of Marxism-Leninism to other lands. Not everyone in a country needed to be converted, but a large enough number had to be so that without a "critical mass" of True Believers, communism could not be established except as a fringe movement. (Of course, the Cold War was violent, but only on the peripheries of the US and USSR.)

But today there is no Mutual Assured Destruction between the US and any hostile state. There is the threat that Iraq, Iran and North Korea could develop WMDs that could be used against the US proper or its forces overseas, but none of the potential threats measure up to the total destructive potential of the old USSR. So these nations will someday be able to hurt us badly, but not destroy us. We, on the other hand, can destroy them utterly.

That's the calculus that the administration's is hoping that hostile regimes will figure: that any WMD attack against the US or US forces would assure their destruction, not their victory. But will it actually deter them?

Leave aside atomic weapons; of the three countries of the Axis of Evil, only North Korea has any (so it claims). Iraq has been working desperately to build one or more, but almost certainly has not succeeded. Iran's emphasis has been long range rocketry, not atomic warheads, although the nation is technically capable of producing them if it could obtain the specialized equipment and atomic material.

Hence we are left with the threat of chemical and biological weapons. This probably leaves out North Korea, which has pursued atomic weapons to gain great power status. North Korea's ideology has always called for its communist government to rule over a unified Korean peninsula; it wants to conquer South Korea, not destroy it. Bioweapons are too dangerous to use because they could backfire against the North. Just as daunting, they could propagate into neighboring China, which North Korea simply cannot afford. Chemical weapons the North may have, but there is no point using them unless someone invades the North, and no one is about to do that anytime. North Korea is the arms factory of the Axis, but not its combatant.

Iran's leaders, even the extremists, would certainly prefer that Iran not be destroyed even if the alternative was conquest by the US, which is not a prospect being discussed anyway. So Assured Destruction will deter them provided they find the threat of it credible. Besides, the US is not saber rattling at Iran, so the mullahs surely know that their best chance to stay in power is not to so something stupid, like attack the US.

That leaves Iraq. We know from the previous years of UN inspections that Iraq has developed both biological and chemical weapons and was nearing success in obtaining atomic weapons. The US is already committed to regime change there. So to save his skin and power, Saddam would resort to using WMDs if necessary. But our threats to use nukes as retaliation against Iraq is not credible. We are not making war against the Iraqi people, whom we have already declared are in need of liberation, not conquest.

Using atomic weapons against Iraq would accrue to the US no strategic or tactical benefit. Conventional weapons are now so destructive that nukes are not necessary just to destroy enemy formations and installations. The idea that we would nuke cities is repulsive: our objective is not to destroy Iraq but to liberate its people from murderous repression.

I discussed this subject in detail in my Nov. 15 posting, "Why the US cannot retaliate against Iraq if Iraq uses WMDs." Also, I discussed in detail why using WMDs against US troops is a no lose move for Saddam.

Some famous apologies are compared to Trent Lott's recent weasel words by Jesus Gil. He compares the RC Act of Contrition with Lots's pseudo-apology for his racism-tinged praised of Strom Thurmond, then offers other apologies examples from Saddam Hussein, Jerry Falwell, Bill Clinton and Cardinal Bernard Law. Then he asks, "do any of the above apologies meet the criteria for a true apology?"

Here's more on the Scud missiles seized at sea yesterday.

Saddam's rope-a-dope of the inspectors has a new angle now. Glenn Reynolds reports that Saddam is sending his nuclear scientists to Syria, Libya and Sudan and putting low-level techs in their places. Glenn concludes, "The whole thing is a charade, and everyone knows it. Soon, even Hans Blix will figure it out."

Blix, figure it out? There is nothing for Blix to figure out - as I wrote earlier, "Blix is acting openly in opposition to the interests of the United States and indeed to the interests of the UN Security Council. IMO, Blix is way past being a useful idiot for Saddam is is in fact actually, deliberately allied with him."

Why pro-choice must mean weaker government. Fred McMahon writes in Canada's National Post that prosperity starts with economic freedom. Observing that the wealthiest Canadian province, Ontario, is poorer than all US states except West Virginia, Montana and Mississippi, Fred says that for prosperity to come later, economic freedom must come now.

Economic freedom is about personal choice -- the right to spend the money you earn as you wish without onerous taxation or regulation, the right of individuals through free markets to determine what is produced without government meddling, and the right to work for or employ someone through mutual agreement without government interference. The study measures these factors by examining size of government, taxation and labour market freedom.

Why is freedom important? Any freely negotiated transaction must benefit both parties. If not, the disadvantaged party would kill the deal. This has consequences throughout the economy. Consumers only choose products with superior quality or price. That forces producers to seek constant improvements. Billions of mutually beneficial transactions power the dynamic that spurs productivity growth and increasing prosperity in free economies.

Restrictions on freedom prevent people from making mutually beneficial transactions. Such transactions are replaced by government action, marked by coercion and lack of choice. Instead of gains for both parties, citizens pay their taxes and accept whatever service is offered. Government attempts to "plan" economic growth have disastrous results.

Clergyman says Santa's reindeer would burn up from atmospheric friction if they flew as fast as would be required to makes Santa's rounds, Richard Heddleson reports.

Youngsters at a Christmas carol service were devastated when the Reverend Lee Rayfield told them Santa Claus was dead.

Even parents at the service in Maidenhead, Berkshire, were shocked to hear Mr Rayfield say it was scientifically impossible for Father Christmas to deliver so many presents so quickly. . . .

Mr Rayfield also told the youngsters that reindeer would burst into flames if they had to travel at the speeds necessary.

Mr Rayfield, whose comments came from an internet story on how scientific research could dispel the myth of Santa, is now writing a letter to parents apologising for the blunder.

What an idiot! While he has obviously been taking a little too good care of the communion wine, he has failed to stay current on the scientific research into Santa Claus.

Here is the old, disproven skeptical theory about Santa Claus, and the modern rebuttal to it:

No known species of reindeer can fly.

There are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children in the world. But since Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

However, Canadian Jim Mantle responds that this supposition depends on -

"a uniform distribution of children across homes. Toronto/Yorkville, or Toronto/Cabbagetown, or other yuppie nieghborhoods, have probably less than the average (and don't forget DINK and SINK homes (Double Income No Kids, Single Income No Kids)), while families with 748 starving children that they keep showing on Vision TV while trying to pick my pocket would skew that 15% of homes down a few percent.

Back to the old theory:

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 mile per household, a total trip of 75,000,000 miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds each. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull 10 times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. For comparison - this is four times the weight of SS Queen Elizabeth.

353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to acceleration forces 17,500 times greater than gravity, or 17,500 g's. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead, unfortunately.

But Jim Mantle takes care of all that, too:

I just barely passed Physics and only read Stephen Hawking's book once, but I recall that there is some Einsteinian Theory that says time does strange things as you move faster. In fact, when you go faster than the speed of light, time runs backward, if you do a straight line projection, connect the dots and just ignore any singularity you might find right at the speed of light. And don't say you can't go faster than the speed of light because I've seen it done on TV. Jean-Luc doesn't have reindeer but he does have matter-antimatter warp engines and a holodeck and that's good enough for me.

So Santa could go faster than the speed of light, visit all the good children which are not uniformly distributed by either concentration in each home or by number of children per household, and get home before he left so he can digest all those stale cookies and warm milk. Yech!

Aha, you say. Jean-Luc has matter-antimatter warp engines, Santa only has reindeer. Where does he get the power to move that fast? The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. This is an ample supply of energy for the maneuvering, acceleration, etc., that would be required of the loaded sleigh. The reindeer don't evaporate or incinerate because of this energy, they accelerate. What do you think they have antlers for, fighting over females? Think of antlers as furry solar arrays panels.

If that's not enough, wathc the news on the 24th at 11 o'clock. NORAD (which may be one of the few government agencies with more than 3 initials in it's name and therefore it must be more trustworthy than the rest) tracks Santa every year and I've seen radar shots of him approaching my house from the direction of the North Pole. They haven't bombarded him yet, so they must believe too, right?

The final proof: How do you otherwise account for all the presents every Christmas morning? Huh?

I rest my case.

A world without international law would be a jungle, said former Labour Member of Parliament Tony Benn, in response to a suit filed by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England, urging the UK's High Court, "to declare it against international law for the UK to go to war against Iraq without a fresh UN resolution."

The case marks the first time a government has been challenged in the courts over the possibility of a declaration of war.

Mr Singh told the court: "We intend to submit that it does not authorise the use of armed force against Iraq in the event of its breach."

There was a "general principle of international law" prohibiting force unless it was in self-defence or specifically authorised by the Security Council, which was not the situation in the Iraq case.

Outside court, veteran former Labour MP Tony Benn, a long-time peace campaigner, said of today's challenge: "This has to be done because a world without international law would be back to the jungle - we simply can't allow that to happen."

Let's see: terrorists fly airliners into American buildings (kill thousands), bomb a nightclub in Bali (kill and injure hundreds), bomb embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (kill hundreds), bomb a hotel in Kenya (kill and injure dozens), fire SAMs at civilian airliners and claim they have the right to kill millions of Americans, and call on all Muslims everywhere to kill Americans wherever they are found.

Nope, no lawlessness here. No jungle, either. Nothing to see, move along, please. Thanks to Tom Cohoe for the link.

Why North Korea is in the Axis of Evil. A cargo ship, tracked since departing from North Korea, was stopped by Spanish and US forces east of the Somali coast. The ship was carrying a dozen Scud missiles. We haven't learned of its intended destination, but gee, let's see: maybe Iraq? Iran?

Update: The Washington Times reports that the missiles were headed for Yemen, and that the ship had been tracked since leaving North Korea several weeks ago. The Spanish warships that stopped it fired shots across its bow when it refused to heed signals to heave to.

An administration official said the Yemeni government had promised the U.S. government that it would not purchase any more Scuds from North Korea, a promise the latest shipment would violate, the official said.

Another official said the cargo may have been intercepted before it reached Yemen to avoid embarrassing the government there. . . . Yemen has been a key supporter of the U.S.-led war against international terrorists. In October, the CIA conducted a missile attack in the country using an unmanned drone aircraft that killed six al Qaeda terrorists.

The media aren't buying the celebrities' war protests, at least that is my impression from scanning a few reports on cable news today. Both Headline News and MSNBC were somewhat less than complimentary in the segments I saw a little while ago.

I no longer try to analyze why people like movie stars make such gestures. They just hate America and freedom is my conclusion.

Jesus' birth to a virgin: Text and Context. Steven Den Beste recently garnered debate about the history and meaning of the Christian doctrine that Jesus' mother, Mary, was still a virgin when she became pregnant with the Christ-child. The genesis of Jesus in Mary's womb is told in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.

What's the difference between the divinity of Jesus and the divinity of, say, Achilles, the tragic hero of the Trojan War? See the rest of this post at my Religious News blog.

Banner waving for Kerry already, The New York Times announced today that its first weekly installment "about the prospective candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination begins with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts."

Get that? The next presidential election is 23 months away and the Times is starting a weekly series about the Democratic prospective candidates. That's about 100 stories. Anyone want to bet that the series will stay only weekly?

Nope, no bias here.

That sounds like an excellent reason to nuke Hanoi and fire Trent Lott! When I was a battery commander in 2d Battalion, 3d Field Artillery Regiment, 3d Armored Division, V Corps, US Army Europe, my first sergeant was an old school Vietnam veteran. If you saw the movie We Were Soldiers and remember the sergeant major, then you have a good idea what my 1st Sgt. was like.

Top had a simple solution to every world problem: nuke Hanoi. No matter what bad thing happened anywhere in the world, his response always was, "Sir, that sounds like an excellent reason to nuke Hanoi." When the Libyans set off a bomb in a Berlin discotheque, killing US soldiers, President Reagan sent Navy and Air Force bombers to civilize Moammar Qhaddafi.

The 1st Sgt's observation the next morning? "The Commander in Chief didn't finish the job the last night. Hanoi is still standing."

So now I hear a rumor that the new-again Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (D-Miss - the "D" not meaning Democrat here, but dumb), made a comment that a lot of people think opposes the integration of the races since World War II. I have no idea what Lott said. I don't really care. I'm calling for his resignation from the Senate Majority Leadership slot anyway.

I have an attitude toward Lott that my old 1st Sgt. would understand. I don't care what happened, when, where, to whom, or why. I just want Lott to step down. Did it snow in DC last week? Lott must resign! Did the Redskins lose? Lott must go! Did the sun come up in the east or is water still wet? Lott, hit the road!

For those of us who have zero confidence in Lott's leadership of the Senate Republicans, any reason for him to step down is a good one.

Understatement of the week: "The West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not," James Q. Wilson, professor of political science at Pepperdine University. Cite.

Who sank the Bismarck? A few days ago CPO Sparkey had a posting about who sank the German battleship Bismarck. Seems a Discovery Channel show reopened an old debate about whether it was sent to the bottom by British shells or by the Germans scuttling it.

As I write this, the History Channel's show on the ship's one and only battle cruise is ending. It said that in the final battle between Bismarck and the British fleet, the Brits fired 2,900 shells at their enemy, almost all of them eight inchers or bigger - very many were much bigger. Four hundred of them hit. By the time the German crew abandoned the battleship, it was in flames from bow to stern.

HMS Dorsetshire was ordered to fire torpedoes at the flaming hulk. The Brits were determined that Bismarck must rest on the ocean's bottom. Dorsetshir fired three torpedoes, but while they were enroute Bismarck capsized, according to the men who were there.

Scuttled ships do not capsize. Like all warships, Bismarck had wheels and pipes designed to enable the crew to sink the ship rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands. This system floods the ship from the keel upward. If the ship capsizes air can be trapped in the hull, which is steel plate with no hatches, keeping the ship afloat. It can't be sailed like that, obviously, but an enemy could exploit the wreck for intelligence secrets - codebooks and crypto and the like.

So the fact that Bismarck capsized mitigates against it being scuttled. But some surviving Bismarck crewmen insist that they did open the seacocks to flood the ship before they dived into the ocean.

So what happened? My guess is that the damage to the ship by the 400 British hits was sufficient to sink it. The Germans did open the seacocks before abandoning the wreck. But either the flooding from battle damage was enough to capsize it, or the combination of battle damage and scuttling actions did the trick.

In any case, one German survivor who said he had personally opened some of the seacocks said it he had no doubt who sank the ship - the British did.

BTW, the Discovery Channel will rebroadcast the James Cameron special about exploring the sunken Bismarck Dec. 8 at 9 p.m. EDT.

Update: Cameron's show says that Bismarck capsized after being hit by Dorsetshire's three torpedoes. The History Channel said it was before.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullhockey. Iraq has turned in its report on its weapons programs, titled, "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations." It's 12,000 pages long.

Saddam's latest tactic is simply to bury us in paperwork.

What happens after today with Iraq is discussed by David Warren.

As I write this, Mr. Blix has announced that he intends to conceal the most interesting parts of the document from the United States and other Security Council members until he has had time to consider them. This will add another dimension to the confusion. The U.N. bureaucracy has further announced that it will also take the time to carefully collate the Iraqi declaration with more than a million pages it has accumulated from previous U.N. weapons inspections, pausing to ask for clarifications as they go along.

David also exposes Hans Blix for the fool that he is; his mishandling of his assigned work is so serious that it cannot be mere ineptitude. Blix is acting openly in opposition to the interests of the United States and indeed to the interests of the UN Security Council. IMO, Blix is way past being a useful idiot for Saddam is is in fact actually, deliberately allied with him. But, says David,

If the United States and allies cannot eliminate so obvious a malefactor as Saddam, the "war on terror" is over, and we lost. The future of state-sponsored terrorism is secure, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will accelerate, their use in blackmail becomes inevitable, the check on their actual use is relaxed, the annihilation of the people of Israel can be safely predicted, and the rest of us must learn to live our lives under the threat of smallpox, anthrax, nerve gas, Scuds, and radiation.

The reader may not think it can be that simple, and there would seem to be majorities in Canada and Europe who crave a more complicated view. But as Winston Churchill spent the later 1930s trying to explain to the smug, and the intellectually sophisticated, it IS that simple.

The essay is quite good, so read it all.

The US Constitution is not a "living document" and Eugene Volokh shows why it isn't (link via Instapundit). Writing on interpreting the Second Amendment through a lens of "evolving standards," Eugene shows that such an exegesis actually serves to buttress, rather than weaken, the argument that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, but it's still the wrong way to apply the Constitution.

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights," Justice Jackson wrote in the 1943 flag-salute case, "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." Words to live by, it seems to me.

But there is another major reason the Constitution should not be seen as liable to trendy interpretation - it can be amended.

The fact that the Constitution can be amended means that it can indeed be "evolved" - through a legally prescribed manner. When judges "look not to the Framers, not to the 1868 Ratifiers, not to state constitutions, and not even to polls ? but only to what they think is right, or perhaps to what the social class to which they belong (elite urban lawyers) thinks is right," then they are shorting the procedure for how the Constitution truly can evolve. That shows contempt for the Constitution, not respect.

I have scooped the Washington Post by a day in pointing out the gross contradictions between what Bill Clinton said about confronting Iraq now compared to what he said when he was president. Now a WaPo editorial today makes the same point, but unlike me, gives reasons Clinton (and some other Democrats) have "settled on a weaselly third way: to criticize almost everything Mr. Bush does in his Iraq policy without actually opposing war."

That way, if anything goes wrong, they will have presciently warned the country; but if war comes and is a success, they will not face the same kind of second-guessing as occurred after 1991, when most Democrats had voted against the Persian Gulf War. . . .

But the nexus of the weaselly way is this:

What's so striking about this is not the characteristically calculated positioning but the contrast to Mr. Clinton's own views as president -- or what he said were his own views. There was a time when Mr. Clinton seemed to understand that Saddam Hussein and terrorists were not separate problems at all. In 1998 he called Iraq a "rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed."

Congrats to the Post for an eloquent editorial, but advantage . . . One Hand Clapping!

Towards an Islamic Reformation I still think that Islam needs its own version of a Reformation. Some Muslim voices think so, too, such as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, an Egyptian university professor, whose book on the subject is explicitly titled: Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law. An-Naim says that Islam simply must reform because, according to reviewer Farish A. Noor, a Malaysian political scientist . . .

Muslims today no longer find themselves living in homogeneous societies that are cut off from the outside world. Factors such as globalisation, migration, the legacy of colonial rule and others have brought Muslims into close proximity with the non-Muslim world. Yet the ulama still rely on a body of historically dated shari'ah laws to rationalise, guide and police the relations between Muslims and others until today. . . .

For `as long as Muslims continue to adhere to the framework of historical shari'ah, they will never achieve the necessary degree of reform which would make Islamic public law workable today' (p. 34).

What does this reformation entail for An-Na'im? For a start, it must be pointed out that it does not entail a rejection of Islam per se or Islamic ethics in particular. On the contrary, An-Na'im insists that the Islamic principles of tolerance and the rule of reciprocity should play a central part in any attempt to revise and expand the shari'ah in the present day. The most pressing need is for Muslims to develop an ethnics of engagement with the Other, both in terms of differences within the community as well as learning to cope with differences without.

On the need for the recognition of pluralism within the Islamic world itself, An-Na'im is clear: "The toleration of unorthodoxy and dissent is vital for the spiritual and intellectual benefit of Islam itself."

Ironically, it is Islamist terrorists themselves who may be forcing the rest of Islam toward liberalization and reformation.

"Is Islam a violent religion?" is a question that is neither sensible nor relevant, says Charles Krauthammer.

The question is absurd. It is like asking whether Christianity is a religion of peace. Well, there is Francis of Assisi. And there is the Thirty Years' War. Which do you choose? . . .

The real issue is . . . the actions of actual Muslims in the world today. [But] this says nothing about inherent violence; most Muslims are obviously peaceful people living within the rules of civilized behavior.

He lists a summary of Muslim violence against other religions from Africa to the Far East, then quotes Salman Rushdie,

"The Islamic world today is being held prisoner," writes Salman Rushdie, "not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open." And "the majority remains silent."

As I wrote last Aug.7:

Islam is what Muslims do.

There are definitely enough Jew- and Christian-hating Muslims in the world, especially including in America and Europe, to make me seriously ponder whether the hatred spewed forth by mullahs and Muslim editorialists is in fact the real McCoy of what Muhammed started. True, there was a 500-year period or so when the Islamic eastern Mediterranean was the flower of the world's civilizations, but that went away by the European Renaissance. Only the Ottoman Empire retained its legacy, and they were gone a hundred years ago.

If what we are experiencing is not the real Islam, then the rest of the Muslims need to get the Islamic house in order. They need to understand that the present crisis is not just that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not tow their line.

Hey you -- you "moderate" or "non-radical" Muslims! You're next. Better choose sides, because either side that wins will remember.