It's the Violence, Stupid

Introduction:

The lovely story which greeted my morning breakfast of scrambled eggs, sourdough toast with orange marmelade, OJ and coffee as I browsed the headlines at Jihad Watch (a morning ritual for a few years now):

Muslim shouting "Allahu akbar" beheads wife in front of their six children, throws her head off apartment roof 

Not in some Islamic hellhole in darkest Africa or the jungles of the south Philippines, mind you, but in the heart of Germany.

Discussion:

I would tolerate Muslims and their Islam -- and I would support our societies fully tolerating Muslims and their Islam on a legally-based equality with the practitioners of any other religion -- if Muslims were not physically violent. 

As repellant and ridiculous as I may find most of their ideas and texts, if they didn't act on them -- if they showed that they have learned like the rest of mankind has (with the usual exceptions based on human imperfection noted) how to modernize their religion and had long ago ceased to perpetrate physical violence as a relgiously motivated imperative -- I would defend their right to be equally tolerated in my society.

I sometimes think many in the anti-Islam movement start blurring the issue and deeming Muslims and Islam unacceptable even without the physical violence they perpetrate.  As though the mere act of wanting to wash their feet in airport bathroom facilities, for example, were intolerable.  Ewww, icky Muslims washing their feet in public sinks!  We must deport them!   No:  if Muslims perpetrated no physical violence, their desires for us to accomodate their odd Oriental practices should be tolerated.

Closely related to this, I think many in the anti-Islam movement don't realize that all laws require physical violence to maintain.  In freer, more orderly and progressive societies such as exist in North America and Western Europe (and Australia/New Zealand), authorities enforcing the law do not have to resort to physical violence nearly as much as they do in more corrupt and disorderly societies (with various countries in the Muslim world particularly egregious in this regard).  However, the basic principle is still operative:  Law requires physical violence to enforce.  And this principle is reinforced when some subculture is pushing for laws that go profoundly against the grain of the society into which they have immigrated.  Simply put, Muslims will never be able to implement their Sharia laws in the full-blooded way they want, without at some point the rubber meeting the road -- without at some point forcing us, through physical violence, to comply.  And Muslims will probably never enjoy that power, because they are too weak, and we are too strong -- with "strength" here including civilizational sophistication and all the technological and social infrastructure that brings along with it.  Even most of our PC MCs will wake up when the rubber is getting close to meeting the road.  They may not wake up in time to prevent horrific terror attacks to come in the decades ahead -- and for this grievously irresponsible recklessness they will have a lotta 'splainin' to do -- but they will at least wake up in time to prevent the Muslim dream of conquest from succeeding; namely, by doing what they should have done years or decades before that grim future we reasonably envision.

Conclusion:

Stories like the one that greeted my breaking of fast this morning, and thousands of other stories like this of various flavors of atrocity, should serve to keep our eye on the ball -- preventing the likelihood of increasing terror attacks in the coming decades.  And given the nature of the problem, there is only way feasible: extricating Muslims from our societies, simply because physical violence, often to a grotesque and ghoulish degree, is obviously an essential ingredient in their religious culture -- magnified to a level far beyond ordinary criminal violence by the supremacist expansionism which is at the heart of their religion.