The Enemy We Face

by Gary Bauer: We live in a time when major public figures berate President Bush for refusing to negotiate with some of America's worst enemies, a time when some of America's leaders would have the president sit down with the likes of the Holocaust-denying Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the terrorist groups that do his bidding. It's clear to me that such thinking is the natural result of a sometimes-willful misunderstanding about the nature of the enemy we face, and confusion about why negotiating with evil does not work.

We know the terrorists have used children and even babies as vehicles for their attacks. But the terrorists put a wicked twist on their devilish deeds last Friday when they used two women with Down Syndrome as homicide bombers. The two women were strapped with explosives and sent separately into two crowded markets in Baghdad. Iraqi military officials said the women were apparently unaware of what they were doing. The explosives were then detonated by remote control by al Qaeda terrorists too cowardly to do their own morally bankrupt bidding. The separate explosions killed nearly 80 people and injured another 200.

The exploitation of the developmentally disabled should not surprise us (though it should never cease to anger us). We are, after all, at war with an enemy that worships death. But we must remember that even in our own society it is legal to take the lives of innocent disabled human beings. In fact, studies show 9 out of 10 Down Syndrome babies are aborted once their disability is detected. This realization should re-affirm in us the courage and determination to defeat the culture of death at home and the culture of death abroad, the two battles for our existence whose outcomes will determine America's future.

Recently, over 300 evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders sponsored a letter seeking "reconciliation" and "common ground" with Islam. The letter, "Loving God and Neighbor Together," was issued as a response to a similar letter written to Christians by 138 Muslim leaders last fall. Sadly, the Christian letter expressed regrets for excesses of the "war on terror," acknowledged Allah as the God of the Bible and insisted that, "without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world." In Can Christians and Muslims Reconcile? in Human Events, I caution against the false hope of letters like "Loving God and Neighbor Together." At the end of the day, an enemy committed to the total destruction of western civilization must be defeated. It is essential that Christians recognize that any attempts at finding "common ground" or "mutual understanding" with Muslims will be fruitless unless and until Muslims stand up to confront their co-religionists' use of faith to justify violence and the annihilation of the west.
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