Our grand culture of whitewash.

Lawrence Auster can always be relied upon to parse any thought down to its essentials and here he makes clear how important it is to understand the utter incompatibility of Western civilization and Islamic civilization. (Well . . . not so much “civilization” as “way of doing things.”) In doing so he reveals the iron law of the contemporary Western world -- thou shalt whitewash the true nature and aims of Islam:

[Melanie Phillips’s] idea of a good Muslim is a person who "derives merely spiritual solace" from the faith. This unwittingly condescending language is precisely the language that non-believing and weakly believing people always use about religion and religious people. Secularists and the superficially religious think that religion is about "comfort," "consolation," and "solace" in a harsh world. They reduce religion to therapy and uplifting feelings and a sense of community. But that's not what religion is, and it's not what Islam is. Religion is about following God, and Islam is a religion at the core of which is God-commanded eternal war upon non-Muslims, a fact made numbingly clear on almost every page of the Koran, and confirmed by innumerable jihad warriors and Islamic thinkers over the centuries.

. . . But Muslims do not share [a common] moral framework [with Britons]. They have an Islamic framework. And the Islamic framework demands the destruction of Israel, the Islamization of Britain, the defeat of Christianity, and the removal of any moral condemnation of Islam, including Islamic terrorism.

In short, Phillips sees Islamic extremism as immoral, rather than Islamic, for the same reason that the neocons refer to Islamic extremism as "Islamo-fascist," rather than as Islamic. In both cases the motivating impulse is to preserve the belief that Islam itself is not the problem, and therefore that Muslims can be assimilated into our societies and into a democratic global culture.

44,000,000 Muslims reside in Europe and you can be sure that current and future problems involving Muslims there are and will be attributed to, what else?, “discrimination” on the part of the host population. That Europeans have insanely imported a hostile civilization en masse will not be hinted at.

In the U.S., we see the same thing. The movie of Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” changed the Islamic terrorists in the book to neo-Nazis, the all-purpose, generic, UL-certified repository of villainy in our time.

Yup. The fix is in. Western governments and media will go to any length to conceal the true nature of the Islamic threat.

Our Kenyan president should appoint Messrs. Golan and Globus as co-directors of the Voice of America. When they made movies Chuck Norris unloaded no small amount of small arms ammo on the right kind of people.

Neo-Nazis they weren’t.

"The unreformable Islamitude of Muslims, and why Melanie Phillips doesn't get it." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 10/20/07 (emphasis added).