Professionally, speaking I’ve just been forced to the realization that I am one of the rarest animals on the planet … a prfoundly conservative high school history teacher. The sheer volume of multi-culturalist pap that gets kicked around on any given day by my earnestly lefty colleagues could drown a herd of elephants. Despite that, (perhaps because of it), I love what I do. This time of year, when I’m sitting at home waiting for Christmas Break to end I really start to pine for the classroom and my students … but I’m beginning to wish a few of the adults would just stay home.

Tragically, our faculty’s general liberal bent has only gotten worse as a result of the recent unpleasantness in the Mideast. In a sterling example of that trend my boss’s boss’s boss (the District Superintendent) recently sent several hundred teachers a copy of After Grief, The Fear We Won’t Admit an article published by Robin Wright in the Washington Post on the third anniversary of 9/11. The article was accompanied by a note in which the Superintendent suggested we all embrace Wright’s perspective.

No surprise … Wright’s article is a summation of a position increasingly espoused by the Left with respect to the War on Terror. Mark Steyn, writing in the National Review, best described that position as “a palpable longing to make the Islamists just a garden-variety terrorist movement.” Under this line of reasoning the whole “War on Terror” thing is entirely misguided. What is called for is “dialogue.”

At the outset one should observe that Mr. Wright’s writing style is almost entirely disingenuous to the extent that his use of language and sources imply that there is broad agreement among what he calls “Mideast scholars” that our national salvation arises only from the course of action he proposes … in a word “appeasement”. That is simply not true.

Mr. Wright’s basic contention is that we must “Bring Islamic movements and groups into the political process. Give Islamist parties new political space – wide open space – to absorb passions and sap anger … encouraging Islamists and their parties to participate … differentiating between Islamists and jihadists, and accepting anyone willing to work within a system to change it rather than work from outside to destroy it.”

My inclination, as an historian, is simply point out that appeasement has never worked as means of securing lasting peace. To put a finer point on that critique … replace the word “Islamists” in Mr. Wright’s formulation with the word “Fascist” and the word “jihadists” with “Nazis.”

Mr. Wright also endorses Reuel Gerecht’s argument that “Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s.”

As Steyn pointed out in his critique of this kind of  “logic”: “Many mainstream imams want to stone adulteresses to death, behead all sodomites, and kill all the Jews. Maybe the Grand Congress of Reconciliation would thrash out a compromise whereby we lightly pebble-dash adulteresses, merely castrate sodomites, and kill only some of the Jews, just the troublemakers, maybe 10 percent.”

To the sad fact that much of Islam’s fundamentalist agenda is simply unconscionable Misters Wright and Gerecht can only respond “Let it roll … Don’t walk away. Its part of the process. It’s trying to ensure the system is sufficiently open that fundamentalists burn themselves out.”

Surely this is the Left’s much vaunted “tolerance” taken well beyond furthest reaches of absurdity.

Wright references Oliver Roy to similar effect. Roy’s observation that “Conservative and even fundamentalist views of religion are manageable in a plural environment, as shown by a host of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish cases” is certainly true … as far as it goes. However, it is also irrelevant. In the argument at hand we are not dealing with Protestant, Catholic or Jewish fundamentalism. We are dealing with Islamic fundamentalism and the cases are not analogous. The first three (Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism) all preach tolerance …. the very crux of the matter at hand is that Islam essentially does not.

Similarly, one would be hard pressed (to put it mildly) to develop any meaningful list of “plural environments” in the modern Arab world. Roy’s contribution (at least as it reported by Wright) amounts to little more than wishful thinking.

Gerecht/Wright want us to “First, hold a genuine two-way dialogue.” Alas. This is simply more wishful thinking. No such conversation is possible because the other side has no “genuine” interest in negotiation. However, like the Israelis with the Palestinians, we could forge ahead regardless and attempt such a dialogue. The recently departed Mr. Arafat, and the organization(s) he represented, were received (indeed fêted) by the UN, the EU and the Arab League. Israel, via a plethora of major and minor US brokered agreements, (most notably Oslo), conceded to literally 95% of the Palestinian demands. And what has this bought? Today Israel is a place where jihadists run rampant …where becoming a suicide bomber and blowing up a school bus full of Jewish children earns your mother both a hefty check and bragging rights on Arab television.

There can be no “genuine two-way dialogue” with a party whose ultimate goal is to see you dead. Hussein Massawi (of Hezzbolah) famously responded to just such an overture: “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

Wright’s second concrete proposal was “… to use economic tools … (for example) the United States could use WTO membership to induce change and force countries to embrace the rule of law.” Iran can counter (with 100% veracity) that they already embrace the “rule of law” … Islamic law. And, according to the “let it roll embrace the Islamists” line of reasoning on what authority are we to argue our rule of law is superior to theirs and still maintain sufficient credibility to maintain our “genuine two-way dialogue”?

The third prong of Wright’s solution consists in the admonition that we “Embrace our own Islamic identity.” Nothing the author writes in the following paragraph explains precisely what this is supposed to mean. To be fair he seems to be arguing that Muslims in democratic societies must be afforded protection of the law and all rights associated with citizenship. But, Muslims in true democracies are afforded protection of the law and the rights of citizenship. Ironically in no small measure that is precisely why Muslims from around the world immigrate to western democracies in such large numbers. They have no such rights within Islam! Given the economic and social status of the American Muslim community the author’s contention that Muslims are somehow “on the fringe” of American society is simply laughable.

On a more parochial level it may be worthwhile to reflect upon the likely reaction of my multiculturalist Superintendent were I to distribute an article that called upon Muslim Americans to “embrace their own Christian Identity.”

At the level of the individual religious tolerance … indeed deep and meaningful respect for religious teachings other than one’s own … does not require one to abandon either logic or the fundamental tenants of one’s own faith. My faith demands that I love, respect and accept people of all faiths. But neither faith, law or logic require that I embrace the teachings those faiths espouse.

Radical Islam is not a cultural misunderstanding or a political movement. It is a pernicious evil. Evil is like alcoholism. The first step in it’s defeat is to recognize it for what it is and deal with it from there on that basis. The evil of radical Islam must be called by its true name as a first step. That the Washington Post, (not to mention my boss’s boss’s boss), cannot do even this much is a symptom of the Liberal uber-tolerance that inevitably leads to moral relativism and from thence ultimately to utter defeat.