Tolerating Islam: “He grabbed her by the hair and then shot her in the head”

By John Ransom
Friday, March 23, 2012

Mehdi Nedder knew the suspected Islamic terrorist, Mohamed Merah, only “slightly,” says the Associated Press. But what he knows about him now has him slightly more worried.

Merah, 21, killed seven people in Toulouse, France, including three children, who just happened to be Jewish, and three French paras, who just happened to be soldiers, before he was finally killed in a shootout with police.

He bragged he had brought France to its knees according to various newswire accounts.

"This person doesn't represent me," said Nedder. "What worries me is what society will say tomorrow in the bakery shops, at the butcher's or at the post office."

He should be worried. And so should all Muslims.

The world, you see, can’t afford Radical Islam.

Nor should it tolerate it anymore.

That doesn’t mean that the Judeo-Christian West can’t afford it; or that Israel can’t afford it; or that China and India can’t afford it. All of these regions and countries have long been burdened by costs associated with accommodating Islamists whose fantasies of a world-wide Caliphate are as grandiose as they are fantastical.

What it means, rather, is that no one, but mostly including Muslims, can’t afford to tolerate Islamists, pat them on the head and send them back to their cultural corner like a willful and precocious child.

Because Islamists won’t stay in that corner; they are armed and equipped with modern weapons, and a mind thoroughly embedded in the feudal past.

There is a debate going on in this country about energy policy that is complicated by the fact that too much of the energy the world uses is controlled by radical Islamists.

Judging by the $30 premium in oil prices, that complication is costing the world about a trillion dollars a year.

How many people can be fed, educated and clothed with a trillion dollars?

There’s a debate too about US involvement in wars and rumors of wars that at its most basic comes down to supporting liberty against radical Islamists.

Wars in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq along with covert wars in Syria, Iran and numberless other places are being fought today by forces from dozens of countries.

Right now as you read this, the US Navy’s 5th Fleet is making steam up and down the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, as it has over the last 17 years, with the specific strategic responsibility of keeping sea lanes open near Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

You may debate the validity of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Libya. You can even debate the cost and whether it’s worth the price.

The Congressional Budget Office says that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will cost $1.8 trillion by 2021. Outside groups say the costs are perhaps double that amount. Neither accounting goes beyond US defense expenditures.

There is no denying, however, that at the nub of it, those wars are all about radical Islamists, who can’t accommodate themselves to the modern world.

And it’s also about the people who indulge them.

France has been, until now, a modern-day playground for Islamists who hearken back to the days of yore when they waged a siege on the gates of Vienna and raided the Russian and Georgian steppes for Caucasian slaves for the Ottoman Empire.

For years France has helped disseminate the lie that everything wrong in the Arab world is the fault of Israel and the United States. They welcomed Islamists into their country.

But now Merah may have brought France to its knees in ways not intended.

“This week's killings at a Jewish school and the link with the earlier killings of three soldiers in the same southwestern region of France initially prompted a fragile truce in France's election campaigning,” reports Reuters. “Political analysts say the Toulouse killings could transform the contest in the few weeks left before the two-round ballot, which takes place on April 22 and May 6.”

The beneficiaries will be those who have warned against a permissive multiculturalism that celebrates the permanent minority against the common sense of the shifting majority.

In normal times, social stability and the forces of the establishment would be enough to beat back critics. The offender would be killed- as he has been- and a patina of reform would gloss the surface.

But in Europe these are not normal times.

Not since discontent swept through Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to the rise of fascism, has Europe faced so grave a cultural crisis.

"I've been saying this for 10 years,” says Marine LePen, the rightist candidate running for president. “Entire districts are in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists and I say it again today the danger is underestimated.”

And the sentiment is not just confined to France either.

Germany, Holland, the UK and the United States all have sizable portions of the electorate who have grave reservations about tolerating Islamic culture in their midst.

And why shouldn’t they?

“[T]he killer got off his bike without removing his helmet and went through the school gate,” reports Israel National News regarding one child, Miriam Monsonego, aged 8, who was shot in Toulouse. “Children fled, but Miriam was not able to get away from his clutches. First, the killer critically wounded a 17-year-old student and then grabbed Miriam, put a gun to her head and shot her.”

Some accounts say he grabbed the 8-year old by the hair and shot her.

The time for excusing, tolerating or otherwise ignoring Islamic violence, listening to special pleading and promoting Islamic exceptionalism is over.

“I think it’s time to have the courage to stand up and say that we represent an insistence on modernity,” said Newt Gingrich one year ago as reported by Politico. “And we represent a decisive opposition to those who would kill us for the purpose of imposing our beliefs on the rest of us. And we are prepared to say an act of terrorism is an act of jihadism.”

Elitists belittled him. Think Progress called Gingrich's rhetoric "fearmongering." Maybe they can explain to Miriam's parents the concept of fearmongering.

“The radicals that are targeting us are in fact bigoted, misogynist, and intolerant,” said the most-tolerant Howard Dean, former governor, former DNC chair, former presidential candidate who melted down to a TV audience. “And if we respond that way, they’ve won.”

Given the racism, misogyny and intolerance that are at the cornerstone of Democrat multicultural rhetoric, under Dean’s definition, Islamists have already won the hearts and mind of liberals.

But the rest of us won’t be gulled so sweetly.

It’s time Mehdi Nedder and his fellow believers show up in the bakery shops, at the butcher's or at the post office and apologize for the putrid stain they’ve let Islam become to the rest of the world that exists outside of Howard Dean, Barack Obama and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.