Islam: "We Must Be Clear"

Islam: "We Must Be Clear"

Syrian-backed Muslims kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Israeli war planes just buzzed the summer home of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad. Asad was home at the time, too.

Muslims in Iraq kidnapped and murdered four Russian diplomats. Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a fearfully-worded order to his security forces to track down and "destroy" those responsible.

I know that it's not "mature" or "responsible", but I had to chuckle at these two news reports.

In his 2003 book The Crisis of Islam Bernard Lewis wrote:

"Sooner or later, Al-Qa'ida and related groups
will clash with the other neighbors of Islam--
Russia, China, India--who may prove less
squeamish than the Americans in using their
power against Muslims."

The clock just struck sooner.

And not just for the actual perpetrators. The Russians will err on the side of their safety and collateral damage rather than on being sorry.

Israel's action, put in the language of American domestic politics, is getting at the "root causes" of the problem. Syria is the sponsor and enabler of the kidnapping in Israel as it has been for previous Muslim acts of war against Israel. Syria has also been sponsor and enabler of the infiltration of Muslim soldiers into Iraq who have then attacked American and Iraqi forces, Iraqi civilians, and the nascent Iraqi democracy generally.

So it was with a wistful sigh as well as a chuckle that I read these news stories, the sigh that President Bush isn't as clear-sighted as his counterparts in Russia and Israel.

"We must be clear," Bernard Lewis also wrote. That was the title of his famous post-9/11 article in the Wall Street Journal. We must be clear in our response to Islam's attacks, and we must be clear in what we expect in the behavior of the people of Islam. This is Public Occurrences.