The odd but symbolically important furor over the case of a foreign national teacher, working in Sudan, who allowed her class to name a teddy bear "Mohammed" has begun the slow process of yanking a great world religion back to its righteous roots.
To resolve the dustup, wise Muslims holding venerated positions in their own communities assisted a couple of British upper-house MPs in reducing the teacher’s brief prison sentence to a simple expulsion order classifying her persona non gratis. These mainstream Moslems bucked the lynch mobs and gave Islamically correct forgiveness to the unintentional offender ... even as street demonstrations called for the teacher's execution by firing squad.
Thus begins rational Islam's part in a policy of containment which will eventually defeat Islamofascism. Consider; just as it used to be dangerous for a mainstream Christian to speak out against the Ku Klux Klan in some neighborhoods, so it is dangerous today for a Muslim of conscience to tell the Whabbists that their emperor is buck naked, blind as a bat, deaf as a post and apparently somewhat malign in regard to his motives and means.
There will be more and more of this sort of speaking up as time goes on, both because mainstream Muslims will get sick of being represented by the slack-jawed KKK types among them and because it will become gradually less dangerous for them to speak the truth.
Just as it is OK today for me, living in the capitol of the confederacy, to say unkind things about Jefferson Davis and the whole rotten "way of life" defended by the C.S.A., so it will become progressively more acceptable for your Muslim Man in the Street to say unkind things about Osama bin Laden, the Ba'ath Party and the mullahs of Iran.
Sure, when I rank out on Prexy Davis, a few troglodyte Lincoln-haters will try to yank my chain, and I'm sure the afore-mentioned Men in the Street will catch some flak from the members of their own hometown loony fringe. Who cares? Like the poor, sthe angry idiots are among us always. The good news is, the core human qualities of love and reason tend to win out in the long run, else we would all still be ruled by half-bright hereditary monarchs.
These beginnings among the faithful of public outcry in defense of common humanity will continue, growing ever more dominant until Islamofascists are as rare and carefully concealed as are American Nazis and members of the legally-defunct KKK. The homicidal nutcases will still be there, but there won't be enough of them to stir up more than an occasional fuss. Decent people won't be scared to speak out against them.
Containment is the strategy that kept Leninist Marxism within acceptable boundaries until the USSR could collapse of its own internal contradictions. There's no obvious reason it wouldn't work in today's circumstances. Already terrorist alliances are falling to bits, with well-publicized infighting, fratracide, name-calling and spitting.
The Islamofascist movement is like most others. It will produce its own Trotskys and Stalins, Robespierres and Marats. Because of a tendency to get shirty with one another when jockeying for power and divvying up the plunder, there is no honor among thieves nor among most revolutionaries.
The longer the conflict continues, the more weak and fragmented the Islamofascist cause will become.
Meanwhile we will, hopefully, continue to play rope-a-dope. We will, offensively, take the fight to the enemy. The enemy may attack Americans who are self-selected from among our best and brightest, superbly trained, heavily armed and fully capable of shooting back. But no more 9/11s, please.
Defensively, odious provisions of the PATRIOT Act will continue to put the pressure on those among us intent on killing civilians. Unlike in the decades before 9/11, the enemy no longer has the uninhibited run of our country. A lot of very clever people are working 7/24 to ferret him out and take take down.
I’m not thrilled at some of the anti-terrorism methods and practices we’ve been employing, but in historical context, they are mild. Abraham Lincoln suspended haveus corpus for the duration of the Civil War, as did Jefferson Davis. It's reasonable to contend that the conflict into which we've been thrust is just as important as preserving the Union was in 1861.
Parenthetically, we should note that some leading lights in the international scientific community estimate that within the next 20 - 50 years, advances in nanotechnology will allow us to create very efficient, very cheap solar cells. Gouts of petrodollars will abate. The terrorists who are left will be poor ones.
That said, this war is going to be a long slog. At least decades; that's how long it took to dismantle communism.
Today is " … not the end, nor even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning."
