De-escalation

Will at the League points to this op-ed (titled “The West is Choked by Fear”) in Der Spiegel. He highlights an excellent passage, but I like this one a little more:

Thus began the “de-escalation” that had been called for. The only problem is the other side isn’t thinking about de-escalation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is still in effect, and the attempt to murder Kurt Westergaard last week wasn’t the first attempt to carry out a death sentence for an instance in which no crime had been committed. Islam may be the “religion of peace” in theory, but it looks different in practice.

Pushing for de-escalation against an enemy who is committed to your destruction is a fool’s game. Worrying that someone will want to kill you even more because you screen people from a certain country a little tighter at a security check in an airport is idiocy. “De-escalation” would be great if we were dealing with a rational enemy. But the Islamofascists aren’t particularly interested in de-escalating. And until they are willing to take the notion seriously, neither am I.