Daphne at Jaded Haven has a remarkable post called Scheherazade Needs A New Tale where she sums up the feelings of many Westerners (and quite a few Middle Easterners I suspect) concerning the erstwhile Religion of Peace and their latest foray into murder and mayhem:

I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no choices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs. Praying towards Mecca – a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs.

I don’t believe Mohamed was holy or a prophet. I think he was evil incarnate carrying the words of Satan himself to a crew of desert simpletons. Islam is a barbaric, unpeaceful, vile, unthinking distortion of worship. The fact that the majority of its adherents can’t even read the Koran smacks of mindless ignorance. I see no enlightenment elevating individual singularity or acknowledging gifted greatness in this corner of archaic darkness. My lip curls at their love of theocracies, a willingness to subjugate themselves to the whims of dissolute rulers along side an ancient text they can’t even begin to comprehend, subsuming their divine individuality to a tide of dogmatic mandates. I have no use, or respect, for the people who follow this religion. I’m past tired of their bombing, shooting, acid throwing, coup d’etat loving, rioting asses and it looks like the rest of the world could stand a break from these murdering bastards, too. According to a website that does nothing but track worldwide Islamic terrorism, there have been 12,328 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. Don’t tell me this isn’t an Islamic issue, the rest of us aren’t practicing murder on a worldwide scale in the name of religion.

To which many observers of the world would no doubt hardily agree. But there is another group of mainly North American and European handwringers who will label this “Islamophobia” (though they never seem to brand Jihadists Christophobes or Hinduphobes) then begin to yet again spread that insidious lie that the one religion on earth that can claim credit for more murders than Nazism and Communism combined is the “Religion of Peace.” While the smoke had yet to clear on 9/11, when the train platforms still smoldered in Spain, while the British pulled bodies out of the twisted wreckage of double deckers, miseducated windbags from a thousand liberal Arts colleges were wagging their fingers at the rest of us for daring to think the inspiration for the holy war Muslims are waging comes from their “holy” book and the religion which spawned it.

And even now while the streets of Mumbai are awash in innocent blood there are those who cling to the delusion of peaceful coexistence with a religion designed to make peaceful coexistence impossible. Islam is not a “Religion of Peace” and Islam in fact means something closer to “submission” than peace. It is submission to Islam from the non-Muslim world that Muslims seek; to me this seems far from a peaceful goal. The West must decide if it will abandon thousands of years of social progress and embrace the depravity of Militant Islam or stand up and fight a foe more determined than any we have faced in the last 200 years. It is a delusion to think otherwise.

Muslims riot and burn churches and we do nothing. Muslims raised money for the Mumbai attacks in British mosques and Britain will do nothing. American Muslims are celebrating the attacks and we will do nothing. There is an “epidemic” of Muslim taxi drivers in England raping women fares, and England attacked the mother of a young girl who wanted to ensure her daughter’s safety rather than stop the rapes. Europe is allowing Islamic polygamy all in the vain hope that such wild accommodation will calm the excitable Muslim street and then we can finally get on with living together in harmony with our friends in the “Religion of Peace.”

Miguel de Cervantes fought bravely at the Battle of Lepanto and was later held for years as a slave by Muslim Turks, an episode in his life he used to craft The Captive Captain’s Tale, which I consider one of the most rewarding sections of Don Quixote. Cervantes was no “Islamophobe” by anyone’s measure yet he fought hard to keep the Muslims from conquering the West and related the plight of Christian slaves without rose tinting in his work.

In the early part of the 20th century Robert E. Howard wrote a story called The Footfalls Within featuring his undeservedly little known hero Solomon Kane who runs afoul of Muslim slavers in Africa. In it Howard describes “Militant Islam” as an arrogant, imperialistic creed that sought to deny the rights of others in its quest for world domination. In the story Kane the Westerner is disgusted by the treatment of Black Africans by the Arab Muslims, in scenes that eerily presage the Western world’s disgust with the genocide in Darfur. But where Kane leapt into the fray to save the slaves, the West does nothing.

How is it that the poet Cervantes and the pulp writer Howard can have had such a complete understanding of Islam and its failings and we do not? Neither Don Quixote nor The Footfalls Within could find a publisher nowadays, and were they published there would be a chorus of condemnation by apologists for Islam who would claim the two authors were simple bigots intent on besmirching the good name of peaceful Muslims.

Just look at the attacks on Mark Steyn by the intellectually lazy armchair thought police like M.J. Murphy of Big City Lib or John Gordon Miller who bills himself as (I kid you not) The Journalism Doctor. A great deal of these attic dwelling academics’ lives are spent trying to prove Mark Steyn is wrong about Islam, though they clearly know nothing about either Steyn or Islam as Steyn himself proved in this essay.

The larger point though is that while news of the Mumbai terrorists torturing their Jewish hostages to death circulate, these two people are too busy trying to think up another way to get Steyn to bother pondering the depravity the world has just witnessed. They can’t be bothered commenting on the Mumbai massacre while “fighting the real enemy” which seems to include everyone who hasn’t raped, murdered or maimed innocent people in the name of a violent religious-based political ideology. Big City Lib has in fact studiously ignored the atrocity in India while having the temerity to ejaculate this post about global warming called Meanwhile in More Important News.

I used to think it was simple cowardice that kept the M.J. Millers of the world from standing up and decrying Islamic Imperialism. But it isn’t, although I would put forward Miller likely is not what we call a Man’s Man. Instead it is the enticing delusion of Islam as a religion that wants peace with us. Despite all the best evidence, and Muslims telling us they will never live under our laws even in our own countries, it is easier to believe that Mark Steyn or America or global warming is the real enemy. Because those are enemies the Millers of the world can fight. And by fight, I mean whimper about on the Internet.

But the fight against Militant Islam is a literal fight to the death. Those who speak out against Islam are targeted for death, those who defend their churches, their families and their lives are torn to pieces by mobs. Muslims will kill you. Mark Steyn will not. Muslims riot when criticized. Americans do not. Muslims drag Canadians into court to be charged with thought crimes. Global warming will not. Any enemy but Islam seems more manageable to people like Miller, thus they delude themselves into thinking it is “neocons” or writers or any of a hundred different easy marks that they need to defeat to bring about this imagined peace with Muslims. And while they do, more women are raped, murdered and enslaved. More Jews are tortured to death. More hotels are assaulted, more trains blown up, more of the West destroyed.

And that’s where the delusion is most dangerous, because we seem to think the West can suffer these attacks forever without falling, as long as we pretend there’s not a war on.