I had toyed with giving this post the title, "Americans (and the new Obama administration) fail to take hatred against us seriously." No doubt that would have served equally well as the heading I eventually chose. Thomas Sowell has written a serious column which I think should be required reading. One small excerpt:
Even killing us will not be enough, just as killing Jews was not enough for the Nazis, who first had to subject them to soul-scarring humiliations and dehumanization in their death camps.
This kind of hatred may not be familiar to most Americans but what happened on 9/11 should give us a clue — and a warning. [Read the whole thing.]
Sowell includes a telling quote from Theodore Dalrymple, whom he refers to as "a very shrewd observer of the deterioration of Western societies": “This mental flabbiness is decadence, and at the same time a manifestation of the arrogant assumption that nothing can destroy us.”
See also Daniel Pipes' article, "Still Asleep After Mumbai." It's a chilling account of the
unwillingness of the West to hold Islam and Islamist terrorists to account. We refuse to take seriously such things as the survey conducted in spring 2006 by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other." Its poll of about one thousand persons in each of ten Muslim populations found a perilously high proportion of Muslims who, on occasion, justify suicide bombing: 13 percent in Germany, 22 percent in Pakistan, 26 percent in Turkey, and 69 percent in Nigeria. On it goes . . . the West lives in denial of the undeniable.
Sad to say, to me at least, a strain of evangelicalism currently exhibits naive pacifist-leaning notions. See Mark Tooley's recent post evaluating the "The Matthew 5:21-26 Project: Evangelicals for National Security through International Cooperation."