MUSLIMS ARE AT WAR WITH THE WEST

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris18sep18,0,1897169.story


Liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism."

It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad.

The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

...and more on the Pope,

Ironically, this increase in the oppression of Christians in Muslim countries follows the well-publicised attempts of Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, to seek reconciliation with Islam. To the dismay of the Vatican’s own historians, Pope John Paul II made his historical ‘apology’ for the sins of the Crusades. This has not been reciprocated by any Muslim apology for the centuries of jihad that took Muslim armies as far as Poitiers in 732 and to the gates of Vienna in 1683; and there are signs that Pope Benedict has had enough of these double standards. Archbishop Fitzgerald, the Curial Cardinal responsible for relations with Islam, has been sent off as Papal Nuncio in Cairo.
Yet those who read the full text of Pope Benedict’s lecture will see that it was not primarily about Islam. Addressed to an audience of academics, it was also crafted for delivery in Regensburg, a city at the very heart of Europe, once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a command post of the Counter-Reformation. Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Prefect of the Holy Office, had kept alive the concept of a Church militant in the face of the relativism of the modern world. Now as supreme commander of a spiritual army he is waging war on two fronts — in the West against scientific materialists and in the East against religious fundamentalists — the first holding that the very idea of God is a nonsense, and the second that God transcends reason and can therefore be known only through what has been revealed in the Bible or the Koran.