What He Said

Australian PM John Howard is getting a lot of good press (from the right, anyway) just for speaking a few fairly obvious truths. But he's not the only Australian with two neurons to fire consecutively. From Ted Lapkin :

Our enemies go by such names as al Qaeda, Jamaa Islamiya, Hamas, and Hezbollah. They belong to a global jihadist movement that considers it a religious duty to wage holy Islamic war against the infidels of the West.

This is a war that we did not start, but that we dare not leave unfinished. We dare not because our foes are fanatics who strap explosives to their bodies and fly airliners into office buildings. We dare not leave it unfinished because our antagonists see the destruction of our civilization as a necessary precursor to the expansion of their own culture.

Our jihadist enemies are fighting to create an ideal society that looks a lot like Afghanistan under the Taliban. And this is a vision that is repugnant to the foundational ideals of free people everywhere. Women forced to be barefoot, burka-clad, illiterate, and unemployed. Christians and Jews barely tolerated as second-class dhimmicitizens. No art, no science. Societies dominated by poverty, oppression, backwardness, and ignorance.

In the world according to radical Islam it’s the jihadist way or the highway, and these 7th-century dogmas represent the only acceptable outcome to al Qaeda.

But the far-left views the world through a political prism that distorts this essential reality. Fixated by a knee-jerk hostility towards all things American, the likes of Ali, Fisk, and Galloway refuse to recognize the existence of this conflict, much less the stakes that are involved. Their primal instinct is to appease bin Laden and his cohorts rather than oppose them.

But Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as “someone who feeds the crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last.” The sooner we accept the fact that this is a war; then the sooner we can get about the task of winning it.

Only one area I disagree with him on : he paints with too broad a brush when he describes the "Far Left". Just go read My Favourite Marxist, Norm Geras, or RadFem Hak Mao, or any of a number of other Far Lefties who have never stopped fighting Fascism, even though their fellow-travellers have lost their way.