JIHAD DENIAL WILL NOT MAKE SOCIETY SAFER

Robert Spencer's written on The American Thinker about the long-running cliche of denying Islam's condoning jihad every time there's a horrorfest:

Every time a Muslim commits murder in the name of Islam, the denial begins again: Western leaders and the mainstream media tie themselves into knots trying to explain what happened without making any reference to its guiding motivation.

Last week was no different: Muhammad Merah was a self-styled "Islamic warrior" who killed a rabbi and several children at a Jewish day school in Toulouse, France, in an attack that the international media widely reported initially as having been perpetrated by a neo-Nazi. When it became clear that Merah was actually a jihadist, the predictable denial began: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that the attack had nothing to do with Islam, and the call echoed worldwide not to allow the murders to harm French "pluralism."

In fact, however, Muhammad Merah's murders had everything to do with Islam: he claimed affiliation with al-Qaeda and may have trained with the Taliban, both of which are explicitly and ostentatiously Muslim groups that justify all their actions by reference to the Qur'an and Sunnah. He claimed to be a mujahid, which is a warrior of jihad, which is an Islamic theological and legal concept. He killed Muslim soldiers who fought in the infidel military -- something that only someone who considered one's loyalty to the umma to trump all other loyalties would have done.

Indeed, so grounded is Merah's massacre in Islam that it is virtually inconceivable that he would have carried it out had he not been a Muslim. And so Sarkozy is, like every other leader in the Western world today, whistling in the dark, trying to pretend that there is no problem when there is a huge problem, and basing the future of his nation on the fantasy that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in France do not believe the same things Muhammad Merah believed.

Read more at the links. Any and every politician who takes the kind of PC-position that Sarkozy's taking is not helping one bit, and for all we know, could even hurt their positions long-term. In fact, if any of the problems cited by the Obin Report from 2004-05 - which Bruce Bawer's written about this week - still hold true, then the danger is everywhere in France. If they don't want to lose their Jewish community and even some other ones, then they have to start working on the problem much more seriously than before.