Conservatives dispute Bush on Islam
continued
Last month, at a White House event promoting U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan, Bush celebrated Islam as �a vibrant faith.� �Millions of our fellow citizens are Bush has delivered such speeches almost monthly since the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, beginning with an appearance at the Islamic Center of Washington on Sept. 17, 2001. �The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,� he said. �That�s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.�

Conservatives say they understand the political and even moral reasons for such pronouncements. Jeffrey Bell, a Republican operative, said there is no denying that there is a �clash between Western values and the radical Islam we�ve seen� but said it need not be �a war of Christianity versus Islam.�

�Bush is doing his best to minimize it,� Bell said, and so far has avoided a clash of civilizations.
Adelman agreed that describing Islam as peaceful �is the right political argument, but it�s a harder intellectual argument to make.�

That likely won�t get any easier with the intellectual ferment among American conservatives, many of whom are coming to a conclusion reached earlier this year by Norman Podhoretz in Commentary magazine. �Certainly not all Muslims are terrorists,� he wrote. �But it would be dishonest to ignore the plain truth that Islam has become an especially fertile breeding-ground of terrorism in our time. This can only mean that there is something in the religion itself that legitimizes the likes of Osama bin Laden, and indeed there is: the obligation imposed by the Koran to wage holy war, or jihad, against the �infidels
" Nobody would like to think that a major religion has a deeply aggressive and dangerous strain in it - a strain often excused or misrepresented in the name of good feelings. But uttering uncomfortable and unpleasant truths is one of the things that defines leadership."
-ELIOT COHEN
Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies
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