National Review's Warren Bell disagrees with Reverend Paul Hawkins of London's Saint Pancras. Hawkins spoke plainly to his flock today, telling them that "There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists."
Metaphysically, Hawkins has a point. Someone who trains and conspires for months or years to kill as many targeted innocents as possible has a claim to neither grievance nor sanity, let alone one to following the instructions of the prophet Mohammed. Islam has trouble with interpretative passages but if the problem were Islam itself, rather than the tyrannical culture wrapped around Islam's home neighborhood, that which has rewritten many other doctrines to service its squarely bestial aims, every Muslim would be armed and on the warpath.
The objective here — perhaps unintentionally furthered by Reverend Hawkins — is to confiscate from our enemy any reputation for devotion or piety, which is what he is and has been regularly granted by an international leftist elite working to define him for us (and, really, for themselves) as something other than, something more than, a murderer with a head empty save for delusion. Drivers can be dangerous even when they are dumb. William Shirer did well to examine in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the Teutonic-Hegelian-Nietzschean mish-mash behind Mein Kampf and Nazi Germany, and show for every reader what fourth-rate nonsense it was.
What cannot be lost on outward appearances is the uncomplicated and elementally indistinguishable evil that feeds authoritarians.
FROM THE TERROR CAPITAL: Via Glenn Reynolds, a podcasting democratist in Tehran explains to a reactionary Westerner why strongmen and state dictators, not the convenient channel of Islam, are the common enemy of good men — free or in tyrants' bonds.
ANOTHER FROM REYNOLDS: A Bahraini, part of a candlelight vigil outside the British embassy, made a point.
