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.