Better to be feared?

James Lewis:

Tehran isn't interested in loving the West, or even in tolerating us. If you doubt it, just listen to the Khomeini gang. Since the 1979 they've been yelling "Death to America! Death to Israel!" Have we not heard?

Even while the Brit Left is busily trying to figure out a way to blame America for Tehran's barefaced kidnapping of 15 UK Service personnel, The Telegraph is rediscovering common sense. In an editorial entitled, "If they hate us, let them also fear us" they are drawing the obvious conclusions.

No doubt a lot of Europeans were secretly glad that they were not the target of all that mass hatred. But of course that's simple self delusion. Khomeini and his followers were taught to hate the whole West, including Europe and America --- for its wealth, power, sexual openness, women's liberation, homosexual freedoms, capitalism, Christianity, its free press, its Marxoid intellectuals, and for conquering Andaluz in 1495. (If you forgot how we conquered Andaluz and drove out the Muslims, Ahmadinejad hasn't. Nor has Osama Bin Laden.)

In fact, Europe has very conveniently blacked out its own history. Europe as a unifying idea arose to resist numerous Muslim invasions --- in Spain, France, Eastern Europe, even in the British Isles, which were the subject of slave raiding well into the 18^th century. That's what the Song of Roland is all about, the first European epic poem. That's what Charlemagne was all about, the hero of today's European Union. You can try to imagine that's all past, but Ahmadinejad lives in the past. That's what "Islam" means to the radicals: Surrender to the 7^th century, or get your head chopped off.

Short of running up the white flag the West has only one strategic option: To show its real mettle. This will upset the fantasy-prone Left to no end, but it's so obvious that only a fool or a professor could think otherwise.

The West is far more powerful than the madcap mullahs. What they have over us is sheer pig-headed fanaticism. But if you pit two speedboats with armed IRGC zealots against a couple of boatloads of oh-so-polite Brits, the zealots will win every time.

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So far the politeness defensive has been a failure. Weakness strategies work best for the weak, like the Palestinians. They do much better with their victim offensives than great powers.