Boviosity!

Instapundit is only the latest to link to this perfectly tuned Mark Steyn piece:

Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.

But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead" because "they are Nazis" and "I feel nothing but hatred for them", the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London's cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.

This makes me angry, and prone to doubt the judgment of many of the people who feed me my daily news. Is it any wonder more and more people are ignoring them? If you're getting your news from mainstream sources, you're probably being misled in many, many ways, both subtle and un-. If you're not going to read the entire Steyn piece, at least read the other portion that Instapundit excerpts.

I try to live a peaceful life, filled with good things like God and family and work and music. Live and let live. It took me awhile after 9/11 to realize that there are people who want me to stop doing all those things and either go be crazy with them or die. Fuck them, and everybody who would make excuses for them. Because if you want to make excuses for them, it doesn't matter whether you're one of them or if you're simply deluded - you're just as dangerous either way. "Engaging issues seriously" sometimes requires making judgments like that. It ain't easy. But it's moral vapidity of the most dangerous sort to pretend that making excuses for people who want to kill me isn't the same as wanting to kill me.

The Steyn article mentions the murder of Danielle Shefi, a 5-year-old girl killed by "Palestinians" in her parents' home in a Jewish settlement. Visit that page and tell me what you think is the best way to negotiate with the representatives of the culture that championed her death. The question of what to do with them becomes less sticky every day, for me.

It ain't about revenge, any more than spraying a wasp nest with poison is revenge for being stung by one of their number. It's because I know the nature of the wasp. And I am learning more every day about the nature of the Palestinian and the Islamist. The wasp nest solution would be a difficult choice if they weren't such animals. But they're becoming less human to me every day. They bring it on themselves. I pray for them, and I know God loves them. But I also know that God does not expect me to let them kill me.