It's a Religion of Peace, Damn it!

Once again Muslims in Nigeria go out of their way to demonstrate the peaceful ways of Islam:

MUSLIM pupils at a secondary school in northeastern Nigeria beat a teacher to death today after accusing her of desecrating the Koran.

Oluwatoyin Olusase, a Christian, was adjudicating an Islamic Religious Knowledge exam at the school in Gombe state when the incident occurred.

The students attacked her outside the school compound after the exam and killed her, witnesses said.

It was not clear exactly what Olusase had done that angered the students.

Police confirmed the killing and said their intervention had prevented the incident from turning into a riot.

"We have received information that a female teacher has been lynched by her students. We are investigating the report," Gombe state police commissioner Joseph Ibi said.

At least five people were killed and several churches burned down in February 2006 in the neighbouring state of Bauchi by Muslims infuriated that a Christian teacher in a secondary school had tried to confiscate a Koran from a student who was reading it during class.

Word got out into the streets that the teacher had desecrated the Koran, infuriating Muslims who went on the rampage.

This should surprise absolutely no one. After all, it was Nigerian Muslims who went on a 2002 rampage after a newspaper columnist wrote that the Miss World pageant, then being held in Nigeria, might please Mohammed himself. For that horrible transgression, several hundred people who were in no way connected with the paper, the writer or the Miss World pageant were brutally murdered by rampaging Muslims. This is a typical pattern, Muslims, worldwide, seem to enjoy responding to any slight, real or imagined, with brutality and murder. It doesn't just happen in Nigeria; it happens anywhere Muslims live in large numbers. Last year's Danish cartoon episode being yet another example of Muslim intolerance.

The predictable pattern of Muslim violence against non-Muslims everywhere for any reason has led Rod Dreher to reconsider Samuel Huntington's prophetic 1993 bestseller, The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington examines the 1400 year history of Islamic violence against non-Muslims, and the high levels of Muslim-on-Muslim violence, and concludes that Muslims cannot be peaceably assimilated in large numbers into non-Muslim cultures. Dreher takes Huntington's admonitions to heart and concludes:

Observing the 14 centuries of hostility between Islam and the West, and the facts showing a disproportionate amount of violent conflict between contemporary Muslims and members of other civilizations, what is the rational conclusion to draw about the wisdom of Islamic immigration into the West at the current historical moment?

The "rational conclusion" is that Islam is incompatible with Western Civilization (or any other civilization) and that to prevent continued violence and death, the two must be separated. Immigration of Muslims into the West should be halted, and Muslims already living in the West should be encouraged to return to their homelands. Saudi money, which supports much of the radicalization of Muslims abroad, through the funding of extremist foundations and mosques, should be directly stopped by Western governments, no matter how hurt the feelings in Riyadh.

But even after the events of the last six years, Western leaders are still unable to take reasonable measures to defend their people and the cultures. Multiculturalism is the new civic religion and like the Catholic clerics who refused to look through Galileo's telescope and let reality challenge their faith, the Western intellectual elite refuses to acknowledge the bloody reality all around them. Thus, despite the carnage they chant: All peoples are equal. All people want freedom (i.e. the Western version). All cultures are the basically same. All religions are equally good and want the same things. Diversity is strength. War is peace. "God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom." Ad nauseam. A laundry list worthless platitudes echoing the same intellectual bankruptcy and denial of reality. Unfortunately, this is also the dominant ideology of the West.

Nigeria's violence holds one last lesson for the hapless George W. Bush. A crucial bit of evidence with which to further evaluate his idea that bringing democracy to the Middle East is the panacea for Islamic violence:

At least 15,000 people have died in religious, communal and political violence in Africa's most populous country since 1999, when Nigeria returned to democracy after 30 years of almost unbroken military rule.

Add Nigeria to the list of nations - Iraq, Lebannon, Palestine, Egypt, Pakistan, Venezuela - in which democracy has worked such great wonders and brought America so many new friends.