Know your enemy

Know your enemy
Arnaud de Borchgrave

Radical Islam — or Islamofascism, as conservatives are prone to call it — conveys the impression of a political movement. It is no such animal. Al Qaeda's suicide bombers and assorted gunslingers are not individual al Qaeda terrorists, inspired by Osama bin Laden, that have hijacked a religion. Like it or not, the West is fighting a religion "that arose in enraged reaction to the West," writes Fergus Kerr in "20th Century Catholic Theologians."
The only leader who has called it by its real name, according to Mr. Kerr, "is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace in World War I." Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, "challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg University address," which touched off noisy protests throughout the Muslim world. The pope repeated a question posed by Manuel II Paleologos, an obscure 14th-century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter quarters near Ankara. "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."