APPARENTLY, I’M INSUFFICIENTLY PRO-WAR, according to a reader from, of all places, Canada:

Tell your readers why the following can’t impact on your Bush-spin sotted brain: respect for freedom of conscience does not negate contempt for the unconscionable. Islam is the most perfected form of tyranny ever concocted. You have learned to write off people like me, who would turn Mecca and Medina and Qom and Karbala into charcoal. Why don’t you focus your hate – and it really is Western self-loathing, in deference to Eastern savages – on the mortal enemy of our way of life?

Impartially, objectively and properly: you are a pathetic pollyanna, who is incapable of discerning pure evil. And you are in the way.

Sigh. This is a rather inaccurate and ahistorical view of Islam. As was noted here shortly after 9/11, many American mistake Wahhabism for Islam, when Wahhabism is in fact a rather out-of-the-mainstream variety. The Saudis would like to encourage that mistake, and Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke a major religious war (though I don’t think he understood the likely outcome), but I’d prefer to see neither get their way.

UPDATE: Adding to my bemusement is this email from reader John Mendenhall:

Re your reader who accused you of being of an insufficiently discerning take on Islam and the threat Islam, as a polity, poses to Western life:

A very simple, if no particularly elegant, thought exercise will isslustrate what he means. If, say, renegade Lutherans were suddenly to take to the airways, blow up big buildings in Malaysia, behead Muslim hostages, sink (what–dhows owned by Muslim governments) with maximal casualties, blow up as many innoncent Muslims as they could get their hands on–

Would the Western response be to:

a: send them money
b: build them schools
c: march enthusiastically in the streets with each fresh atrocity
d: publish blood libels in the national press, or
e: stop them in their tracks right now right away first thing this afternoon whatever it took.

If you chose any answer but (e) the reader is right is assessing your dhimmitude. Though the reader didn’t say so as well as others might have, the dhimmitude of Europe and its cousin the dhimmitude of American liberalism is the Chamberlainism of our time. Except there were not very many Nazis and there are billions of Muslims.

(I am married into a Minnesota family and am keenly aware that the words “renegade” and “Lutheran” don’t work so well together these last five hundred years.)

But wouldn’t what the reader above suggests be the equivalent of blowing up Pentecostals and Catholics for the actions of those Lutherans?

Sorry, but being called a soft-on-terror liberal is just hard for me to take seriously. I guess I’m just one of those peace-and-love-addled Wolfowitzian idealists.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Geoff Matthews has it right, I think:

Your Canadian reader has it all wrong. The War on Terror (current phase) is being waged so we don’t have to bomb Mecca. Right now, radical Islam is not a terrible threat. But because it is a threat, and has the potential to become a terrible threat, we need the War on Terror. While radical Islam has been given a pass, at best, or supported, at worse, in Islamic countries, the whole point of the War on Terror is to change that. Basically, we need to reduce the credibility of the radical elements of Islam to the same level as white supremacists in the U.S. (ie, less than zero). The democratization of Iraq will improve the lives of more Arabs than anything Islam has done, much less the radical elements of Islam. That, more than anything, will undermine these radical elements of Islam. Young men who are building homes, programming in Java or designing Linux networks have better things to do than martyrdom.

However, if radical Islam becomes the ‘norm’ in the middle east (or at least wields enough power to be the perceived norm), then bombing Mecca may be an option. But we aren’t there yet, and given the War on Terror, and how things are developing, I don’t see it happening.

But, if the USSR won the cold war and 9/11 happened to them, would their response have been as reasoned as the coalition of the willing? Every day Muslims should be grateful that Reagan won the cold war.

Yes. And these considerations explain why I’ve supported the Wolfowitzian project.

“COURAGE!”

HERE’S MORE ON KYRGYZSTAN, where the OSCE folks aren’t getting good reviews.

JOHN SAMPLES, IN REASON:

Bloggers were one of the big political successes of the 2004 election. This motley group of opinionated writers used their cyber soapboxes to attack and defend the presidential campaigns and the two major parties. Their websites offered a fresh look at politics and implicitly undermined the Establishment media that so many Americans have come to distrust. In other words, bloggers used freedom of speech to improve American democracy.

Naturally the federal government is about to come down hard on bloggers.

We have the word of two Senators that this isn’t true.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey lacks confidence in these reassurances.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon thinks that politicians aren’t dumb enough to go after bloggers.

DAN RATHER IS LEAVING, but his legacy remains. Heh.

HERE’S VIDEO of Jeff Jarvis’s blog roundup on MSNBC’s Connected Coast to Coast. Among other things, he notes the left/right agreement that the bankruptcy bill is bad.

AS I KEEP SAYING, democratization is a process, not an event. This post from Iraqi blogger Ali makes that clear.

KOS HAS A LIST OF DEMOCRATS supporting the bankruptcy bill. No point running a list of Republicans who opposed it, as there don’t seem to have been any.

Kevin Drum asks:

The more I read about the bankruptcy bill the more perplexed I get. Liberals don’t like it. Moderate liberals don’t like it (Bill “DLC” Clinton vetoed it the last time it cropped up). Conservatives aren’t really very excited about it. And it’s sponsored by the credit card industry, which is roughly the 21st century equivalent of being sponsored by the German Bund.

So how is it getting such wide support?

Why, indeed?

UPDATE: I’m getting a number of emails like this one:

I thought libertarians were in favor of respecting private property, individual rights, individual responsibilities, freedom of contract, etc. Isn’t present Bankruptcy law (the fundamental purpose of which is to allow a party who freely entered into a contract to repudiate their obligations under the contract) contrary to basic libertarian values? Wouldn’t the present reform proposal help correct the anti-freedom nature of bankruptcy law?

Well, as I wrote earlier, it seems to me that many of the credit-card industry’s come-ons are near-fraudulent. Libertarians aren’t supposed to approve of fraud. And if people are supposed to live with the consequences of their actions, then why shouldn’t credit-card companies live with the consequences of extending credit to poor risks?

At any rate, if bankruptcy law is “anti-freedom.” then what’s pro-freedom? Debtor’s prison?

VITAL ANALYSIS from the folks at InstaPunk.

MIKE KREMPASKY RESPONDS to criticism from Garance Franke-Ruta.

UPDATE: Much more from Chris Nolan.

PUBLIUS HAS A ROUNDUP OF NEWS FROM BOLIVIA: The earlier report that its government had fallen appears to have been wrong.

BLOGGER SUED BY COLUMNIST: Tom Maguire has the scoop.

UPDATE: Okay, the headline above is really wrong. It’s really the publisher. And it’s only a threatened suit yet — one that I strongly doubt will proceed, as I doubt the defendant wants to answer the inevitable discovery requests regarding its marketing practices.

PROTESTERS SET UP A YURT CITY in Kyrgyzstan.

JON HENKE NOTES armor revisionism at The New York Times.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION IS UP: Don’t miss it if you’re interested in education. And you should be.

PUBLIUS HAS NEWS FROM MOLDOVA: From which there hasn’t been much news lately.

MORE THOUGHTS ON LEBANON, here. It also occurs to me that with so much attention being paid to developments there, it would be a good time to do things elsewhere that might escape notice.

IT’S PLEDGE SEASON at Baseball Musings. If you’ve enjoyed his blog, consider donating. It’s good for the environment!

IT’S BEEN IMPOSSIBLE to separate the Insta-Daughter from this book, which she keeps recommending that I read — once she’s finished. I will: It’s kind of cool to have her recommending books to me now.

THE NEW YORK TIMES doesn’t like the Patriot Act (well, neither do I) but it’s interesting that the Times is okay with the idea of depriving people suspected of terror ties of civil rights on a bureaucrat’s say-so under some circumstances.

Maybe they’re just refusing to succumb to “libertarian panic!”

IT’S RAINING BULLETS — SORT OF: Not very impressive. Meanwhile, reader Joseph Fulvio emails with further thoughts on the increasingly dubious Sgrena affair:

Europeans have long been conditioned to assume the worst about Americans. No surprise there. But it’s interesting how quickly the American Left accepted, with little reservation, the word of a politically-blinkered writer who openly crusaded against this war (no bias there!). Yet, it refused to give benefit of doubt, much less a full hearing, to its fellow citizens, members of the most highly trained and disciplined military organization in the world. But don’t question their patriotism – they support the troops™.

Here’s a column by Austin Bay that’s more informed and thoughtful than most of what you’ll read on this. And there’s some more interesting background on Sgrena on his blog.

UPDATE: More photos of the car here. If U.S. troops were firing as much as Sgrena claims, they should all be sent back to the shooting range to requalify.

ANTI-SYRIAN LEBANESE are getting support, and affection, from Iraq.

VIETNAM: THE NEXT IRAQ? Heh. I want bumper stickers that say that.

WELL, THIS HAS GOT TO HURT:

Has Powerline no shame? I can think of nothing more contemptible, really. To think, here they are posing as citizens who happen to be interested in writing their thoughts, when in reality they are Dartmouth-educated attorneys who have written for publications before!

Fortunately, they’ve been “outed” by a real journalist at a nonpartisan publication. The Republic is safe!

IT’S EAT AN ANIMAL FOR PETA DAY: Yum.