The Paralysis of Europe
The massacre in Paris of the staff of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was an act of terrorism, but also a successful act of war in the clash of civilizations between Islamism and the West.
Nor were we lacking for warning signs.
In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a license to kill author Salman Rushdie for his anti-Muslim novel “Satanic Verses.”
Danish cartoons of the Prophet with his turban in the shape of a bomb caused riots across the Middle East. Charlie Hebdo published them. The vulgarian Theo Van Gogh was carved up alive on a street in Amsterdam for insulting Islam in his 10-minute film “Submission.”
Have we not known that millions of Muslims now take their faith so seriously they will die for it, and kill for it? Mock and insult Islam, ridicule and lampoon the Prophet, and you risk your life.
The editor and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo knew this. Their offices had been firebombed. They had guards. There was a combination lock on their office doors.
Shocked by the slaughter, we of the West have been reasserting our belief in freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
“Je Suis Charlie!” read the signs at the Paris demonstration for Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday night — “I am Charlie.”
One sees no such banners in the Islamic world. Regimes there may deplore terrorism in Paris, but no one weeps for Charlie Hebdo.
For across that region, Islamism is rising, churches are being burned, and the remaining Christians are fleeing into exile. In Afghanistan, at the peak of the U.S. presence, a Muslim convert to Christianity was threatened with death and had to leave his own country in fear of his life.
If there is one goal that unites Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in Somalia, al-Qaida in the Maghreb and Arabian Peninsula, ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is to cleanse their societies of non-believers and Westerners. ...
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