By Vic Rosenthal
Iran, as everyone knows, is still holding the 15 British sailors captured a week ago. They’ve not released the one female captive, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, as it was thought that they were about to, and in fact have dressed her up in Islamic garb and displayed a letter allegedly written by her which ‘apologizes’ for the British vessel’s presence in Iranian waters (which Britain categorically denies). They also broadcast a taped ‘confession’ by one of the Royal Marines among the captives.
So continues another saga of courageous Muslim response to Western insults. Like the American hostages of 1979, the murdered Israeli athletes of 1982, the beheaded Daniel Pearl, Nicholas Berg and Paul Johnson, the kidnapped Israelis Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, and who knows how many others, the captured British sailors bear witness to the sadistic depravity that characterizes the jihad against the West.
Over and over again Muslim nations and militias express their anger at the fact that their third-rate political culture is unsuccessful in the economic and social spheres, and at the humiliation that much of the world is in infidel (in the case of Israel, Jewish) hands, by killing and terrorizing individuals that are unlucky enough to fall into their hands, knowing that the Western world — unlike them, who are capable of using their own children as suicide weapons — is capable of empathy and suffers as a result.
At the same time, Muslims in Europe, the US, and other places are insisting that their religious sensibilities must be treated with the utmost respect. But this respect, which is due to the religious aspects of Islam, is not due to the political aspects. If these aspects are inseparable — if Muslim leaders continue to declare violent jihad, especially as expressed in acts of terrorism directed at individuals, to be an essential part of Islam, then Islam itself will be defined as a violent, barbaric religion which itself will be despised and fought against.
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