"Islamists cannot be negotiated with, mainly because their demands, that we become Muslim or we die, are impossible to meet."

I just read a fascinating piece in The Ottawa Citizen, by Leonard Stern, that succinctly tells us what we are facing today. He attended the advance screening of the United 93 movie as a student of terrorism and militant Islam, and came away haveing learnt 3 lessons:

1) ...the hijackers, though on a suicide mission, were not madmen. They were disciplined, well-trained and committed, in other words, soldiers. ... the 9/11 hijackers had broader ambitions: They belonged to a political movement larger than themselves. Criminal acts are different from acts of war, and we need to understand the difference if we are to protect ourselves.

2) ...United 93 helps us understand the total vulnerability of what security experts call soft targets. ...Anything and anybody is a terrorist target -- a day-care centre, a shopping mall, a corner church -- and it's impossible to protect them all. The political lesson is that defensive measures alone are not sufficient to fight militant Islam, not when Islamists define their struggle as a war against civilians. ...So we have to look at anti-terrorism as an offensive and long-term effort. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a radical attempt to reboot the Middle East, to spark a re-ordering of dysfunctional Arab-Muslim societies in a way that would make room for democratization. The Iraq gamble may ultimately prove too ambitious, but the Americans were right to try.

3) You do what you got to do: United 93 was the only hijacked plane that did not reach its target, and that's because the passengers rose up and tried to storm the cockpit. Why did they rise up? As the movie shows, the passengers learned from phone calls to family on the ground that the other planes had been commandeered into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was then that the United 93 passengers knew they weren't turning back to the airport for negotiations. When the enemy is on a suicide mission, your only hope is to destroy him before he destroys you. And so the men and women of United 93 died fighting.

If the Islamists -- those seeking to transform Islam from a religion into an expansionist, messianic, violent, political movement -- gain ascendancy in the Middle East, then the suicide bomber "will become a metaphor for the whole region," as the historian Bernard Lewis has put it. Islamists cannot be negotiated with, mainly because their demands, that we become Muslim or we die, are impossible to meet.

Currently the most dangerous Islamist is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's apocalyptic-minded president who is holding the West hostage with his quest for nuclear weapons. Right now the world is scared, yet still hoping Mr. Ahmadinejad will turn back to the airport, so to speak.

Very soon we will have our United 93 moment and realize this is one airplane we'll have to land ourselves.

[United 93] [Islam] [Iran] [Ahmadinejad] [terrorists]