Sales of a controversial Turkish novel on a conspiracy to kill Pope Benedict XVI are on the rise ahead of the pontiff’s historical visit to Turkey beginning next Wednesday – his first to an overwhelmingly Muslim nation. ‘The Plot Against The Pope’ is a highly speculative potboiler narrating how the conservative Roman Catholic society Opus Dei, a subversive masonic lodge and the CIA collude to make the pontiff’s murder a pretext for a US attack against Iran.
Geez, it’s got everything.
Janet Daley in today’s Telegraph:
The remarks he made in a lecture in Regensburg, Germany, which implied that Islam rejected rationality while Christianity saw it as essential to faith were contentious (and almost certainly designed to be so), but they raised a question that almost no Western government has the courage to ask, let alone answer. How is a liberal democracy to deal with an illiberal religious minority in its midst?
To understand the life-or-death significance of what the Pope does and says when he arrives in Istanbul, it is necessary to see this confrontation for what it is. This will involve some traumatic re-adjustment for most of the opinion-forming class in Britain. The first assumption that will have to go is the premise that Islamist terrorism can be understood in pragmatic, politically rational terms: in other words, that it can be addressed with the usual mechanisms of negotiation, concession and amended policy.
The most readily accepted version of this is that a change to our policy in the Middle East will remove the grievances that “fuel” Muslim terrorism. The Cabinet has apparently been advised that all foreign policy decisions over the next decade should have the goal of thwarting terrorism in Britain and that this should involve “a significant reduction in the number and intensity of the regional conflicts that fuel terror activity”. So Britain is contemplating constructing a foreign policy, specifically in the Middle East, that is designed to give in to terrorist blackmail.
VDH—
We in the West write novels and film scripts about killing our American President, while those in the Middle East plan it, as their latest vows to blow up the White House attest. Better yet, we supposed liberals–not Nazis, communists, or monarchs–now will censor our own cartoons, operas, films, novels, and Pope, as if the Enlightenment was a mere construct. If we find the struggle to stop Islamism is too costly or at least too bothersome, maybe appeasement of it will prove less so.
In short, while the Islamists get bolder and crazier, we become more timid and all too rational, quibbling over this terrorist’s affinities and that militia’s particular grievances–in hopes of cutting some magical deal with an imaginary moderate imam or nonexistent reasonable militia chief or Middle East dictator.
Jules Crittenden on “Abandonment with Honor”
They are sure to let Turkey into the EU now.
Surrender and accomadation cloaked in tolerance and pragmatism. This is a blueprint for Western Civilisation?
I’d better go shake out the old prayer rug…
“The first assumption that will have to go is the premise that Islamist terrorism can be understood in pragmatic, politically rational terms: in other words, that it can be addressed with the usual mechanisms of negotiation, concession and amended policy.”
Janet is making a srange error here. To understand Islamist terrorism in pragmatic, politically rational terms is not to say that it can only be addressed using the conciliatory mechanisms of rational political pragatism.
The correct rational, pragmatic response in this case is a sustained and targeted use of violence coupled with a rigid adherence to Western values.
The most effective way of achieving “a significant reduction in the number and intensity of the regional conflicts that fuel terror activity” is to destroy the combatants in those conflicts, not to appease and accommodate them.
The grievance that “fuels†Muslim terrorism is that the rest of us are not Muslims. Cloak it in any language you choose; there is no such thing as defeat with honor. I am filled with rage at the Eloi on the Left who are so willing to surrender the legacies of the Enlightnment. They are as much my enemies as the Islamists.
Interestingly, Richard Marcinko, the ex Navy seal turned Judith Regan property, and Dan Silva, the
former CNN reporter, turned lefty novelist, has painted the bullseye on the Vatican, presciently;
and Wahhabism as the instrument.
It took some timem however, for this perspective to evolve(his first terror war novel, the misleadingly named “Mark of the Assassin” set in 2004, has global terrorism, including a TWA type missile attack, engineered by a cabal of ex East and West bloc spymasters; doing this to make a
market for their arms supplier friends; his perspective has improved with the Gabriel Allon series, about a former Israeli army officer and
art restorer, turned Mossad agent, after Munich;
beginning with an operation against a rogue PLO
figure, bent on assassinating Arafat; going after
a Da Vinci code level conspiracy involving Pius
X11 and the Nazis, to preventing a Black September revivalist group; finally going after
a terrorist network, headed by a former Saudi
intelligence officer, targeting the Vatican
army
ahem,
What a concept! The Eloi!
Brilliant. The Democratic party is (are?) the Eloi…
After further consideration, I also think that Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha are in a pitched battle to claim the name of “Snowflake”…