“When Pope Benedict XVI flies to Turkey tomorrow, he will embody the most potentially incendiary confrontation between Islam and the West since the defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 brought an end to Islamic conquest in Europe.

“The Pope will take with him an understanding that at the root of our problems in dealing with the Islamist death cult, there is a fundamental debate to be had about the role of human reason in political affairs.

“The remarks he made in a lecture in Regensburg, Germany, which implied that Islam rejected rationality while Christianity saw it as essential to faith were contentious (and almost certainly designed to be so), but they raised a question that almost no Western government has the courage to ask, let alone answer. How is a liberal democracy to deal with an illiberal religious minority in its midst?”

Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph, 27 November 2006

The usual predictable nonsense. Islamism is equated with terrorism, completely ignoring the existence of democratic reformist trends within the broad Islamist movement, and the (non-“Islamist”) majority of Muslims are given a condescending lecture on how they must do more to “separate” themselves from violence. On the other hand, for the British government to cease its attacks on Muslim countries, or take a stand against Israeli state terrorism, would be to “give in to terrorist blackmail”.