Insensitivity

It’s nice to be sensitive to the feelings of others, but sometimes that isn’t appropriate. It’s particularly inappropriate when the others in question are hateful, vicious savages bent on your destruction.

There are tens of thousands of Islamists out there who would like to cut off your head, your wife’s head, and the heads of your children, because of a dozen mediocre cartoons that offend their delicate sensibilities. There are millions more who would dance in the streets as they watch the video of your head being cut off.

There are two ways that we can look at this. On the one hand, we can pretend that this is not an obscene demonstration of the most indefensible excesses of primitive human nature. On the other, we can acknowledge that such behavior is wrong and damnable, and condemn it without reservation.

Should the press run cartoons that are offensive to Muslims? Should Muslims cut the heads off of people who offend them?

The two questions are not remotely comparable. The two acts, one perhaps tactless, the other unquestionably barbarous, are on moral planes so vastly separated as to make idiotic any suggestion of their equivalence.

It is time to stop pretending that this is a conflict between two great traditions. Radical Islam is a vicious farce, a depraved cult with lunatic followers. Its adherents are unspeakably cruel to their own family members, routinely mutilating and murdering their own wives and daughters. They are bent on conquest and violent conversion, and the ruthless extermination of anyone who refuses to yield to their theocratic tyranny. The public face of radical Islam is that of a murderous savage.

If there is another face to Islam, it chooses to hide in the shadows. That is unfortunate.

Update: As usual, Mark Steyn gets it.