Peter Hitchens Vents His Spleen

I make no apology for lifting this straight from the Daily Mail. I implore other bloggers to do the same.

Is this what they mean by 'Muslim tolerance'?
By PETER HITCHENS, The Mail on Sunday
Last updated at 15:10pm on 18th September 2006

Listen to this: "Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate."

Or then again, this: "Believers, take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends."
Then there is the instruction to fight against those who are not of the true faith "until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued".

All are direct quotations from the Koran, which Muslims believe to be the absolute word of Allah, and which cannot be altered.

If you seek even more ferocious attacks on Christianity and Judaism, you will find them in the Hadith, Islam's other great book of scripture.

Week after week in those lands where Muslims rule and Christians are a minority, the message pours out from the mosques: "God did not have a son."

All the central doctrines of the Christian faith are emphatically denied. Things are said about Jews and Christians, sometimes comparing them to pigs and monkeys, which would attract the attention of the Thought Police if they were uttered here.

Only recently an Afghan was threatened with death - the prescribed punishment under Sharia law - for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Christians in Pakistan live in constant fear of attacks on their churches and their homes, usually following false allegations that someone has burned a Koran.

Coptic Christians in Egypt suffer a similar misery. Christian Arabs who can afford to have been emigrating by the thousands to avoid increasing persecution by their Muslim neighbours.

Hypocritical fury
For years Liberals in the West have spread the myth of "Muslim tolerance". It does not exist and never did. Where Islam rules, other faiths must cringe in humiliated subjection.

These are facts. Is it not astonishing that this militant, angry religion, whose name means not "Peace", but "Submission", whose whole existence is based on the denial and rejection of its rivals, dares to get into a self-righteous rage over an obscure quotation in a dull academic lecture by the head of the Roman Catholic Church?

In Islam it is still the year 1427. They have had no reformation. The more Islamic a state is, the more its women are shrouded and confined, the more its minorities are despised - and the more freedom of thought and speech are crushed.

And yet the deputy leader of Turkey's Islamist ruling party, Salih Kapusuz, attacks the Pope for having "a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages".
If we bow to this manufactured, hypocritical fury, then we will already have lost one of the most important battles to face us.

While our silly leaders bleat and panic about terror threats, a far greater menace to our free societies comes from the growing power of Islam in our midst.

Much of that power results from the weak-kneed refusal of our own liberal elite to stand up for what is good about our Christian civilisation. Back the Pope.

Cracking stuff...