Know your enemy

Joshua Trevino writes a good essay on The Brussels Journal. Here is the money quote:

In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question. See Andrew Sullivan for a shining example of this self-contradictory foolishness; or worse, see the President of the United States on Islam. Mark Steyn noted it well: these days, when Muslims slaughter our own, the political leaders of the victims generally rush to a mosque to make friendly overtures. We are assured that “real” faith does not do awful things, nor encourage them, nor give succor to those who do: and in the very hour of grief, as the bodies are lifted, or unearthed, or scraped, from the scene of the latest horror, that is what we must remember. We are not to believe the perpetrators, nor their sympathizers, nor the Palestinians celebrating the news of thousands dead in New York City. The true interpreters of Islam are not Muslims themselves — though they certainly deserve that basic respect — instead, we must listen to John Esposito, Juan Cole, Karen Armstrong, and George W. Bush.

The rest is worth your attention.