It is important to keep these attacks on Buddhists in mind. Islam demands that all Believers must be killed, convert, or if they can be considered ahl al-kitab, People of the Book, then permitted to exist as dhimmis (from ahl al-dhimma, the People of the "Pact" -- that Pact being akin to an "offer the Muslims make that you can't refuse."), in a state of humiliation, degradation, and permanent insecurity.

Buddhism, we learned as schoolchildren, disappeared from India, the land of its birth. It was a mystery, never explained in the schoolbooks. But Buddhism was destroyed in India by the Muslim invaders, and huge numbers of Buddhist temples, and statuary, also destroyed. It took time, it took effort, and the Muslims of the past lacked the explosives of today. The two enormous Bamiyan Buddhas were finally destroyed in 2002; they had escaped destruction by Muslims until then only because the technical wherewithal was not available. When it became available, it was used -- to blow up the Buddhist statuary.

This must be understood: Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians are all under just as much threat, and have suffered in some ways far more already, than Christians and Jews. It is not a "war of civilizations," no matter how many times that misleading phrase is repeated (Huntington, incidentally, borrowed without attribution some of his material from Adda Bozeman, a professor at Sarah Lawrence, herself a White Russian who became deeply concerned about the role and the threat of Islam toward the end of her writing life -- see, for example, her discussion of Islam in Politics and Culture in International History and in her Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft). It is, as it has been for 1350 years, a war of Islam against all non-Muslims. And there should be, but there is not yet, a clear-eyed recognition of the common danger so that Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Confucians and all others can, whatever their differences, agree to support one another against Muslim aggression -- whether through violent Jihad, or through the use of "wealth" (bribery, boycotts,etc.), or propaganda, or the demographic weapon. Eventually either the Western world will see the need for mass expulsions of those who subscribe not to an alien creed (Buddhism is alien), but to an alien and a hostile creed (which is Islam), or it will be irreversibly changed. It will be interesting to see if many in the West, as in Israel today, continue to cringe at the very thought of behaving as the Czechs behaved with 3 million Sudeten Germans in 1945-1946, or whether the duty to preserve, for all of its faults and follies, our own civilization, will help us to overcome the suicidal delicacy with which this problem is being approached.

Islam is a permanent threat to all non-Muslims. All Muslims are literalists. The texts cannot be modified. The Qur'an is the word of God, and the doctrine of abrogation (naskh), which allows for some verses to be cancelled, has already been employed to cancel only the earlier, and much milder verses from the so-called "Meccan suras." The desperate logic-chopping attempts of various Iranian "reformers" (and one understands their impulse -- they simply cannot turn their backs completely on Islam; it would involve admitting to themselves the intellectual and moral failure of what, after all, they deem central to their identity, which is why pride in a pre-Islamic or non-Islamic past, and dislike of the Islam-bearing Arabs, are attitudes to be encouraged -- in Persia, in Afghanistan, among the Berbers and the Kurds. Some of these Iranians are busy trying to find some kind of model among the Mu'tazilites of the 8th century; others look to Abduh and other modern "reformers" whose efforts all came to nothing, smashed on the rock of immovable Islam.

So far the only solution that has, in a sense, worked is that which does not attempt to change the tenets of Islam, but to tame them, constrain them, to destroy the power of the mullahs and even, where necessary, to militarily attack them and their mosqes. This was what Ataturk did, and to this day an enormous effort goes into monitoring the mosques, banning the wearing of the hijab in government service, and so on. But Kemalism is always unstable, always in danger of being undone as, in an Islamic country, like water seeking its own level, the culture always tilts, inevitably, back to Islam itself. Kemalism is an unnaterural condition for Islam; but it is the only thing which makes modern Turkey the one Muslim country (possibly those in Kazakhstan and in a few other places among the five stans of Central Asia, having been de-Islamized to an extent from decades of Soviet anti-religious propaganda, is another)is that of Ataturk: the ideology of Islam cannot be changed, but appeals to Turkish nationalism, and suppression of political Islam, which require constant vigilance, seem -- while there is always the danger of relapse -- to have worked in Turkey. Let other Ataturks be encouraged.

And meanwhile, Infidels must educate themselves -The story of Buddhists under Muslim assault is important because it shows that even peasants in rural villages, non-white, and neither Christian nor Jew, are equaly the victims of Muslim aggression (for some reason what happens to the black non-Muslims in the southern Sudan, or in West Africa, is constantly overlooked or forgotten; the Jihad against Africans is dismissed for reasons which need to be pondered).

Similarly, far more attention should be paid to the attacks on Hindupeasants in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, and in India itself, Sikhs in Pakistan and Kashmir, Asian Christians -- especially those in Indonesia, where in the last year alone 5,300 churches have been destroyed -- without a single story appearing on this in the major Western press. Why not? Where is the New York Times, or the London Times? Where is 60 Minutes to detail the vast pogrom against non-Muslims all over Indonesia? Where, for that matter, is the coverage of the persistence of the Jizyah (the tax paid by non-Muslims to Muslims) within Islam -- for example, in the grotesqe bumiputra system in Malaysia, by which the Hindus and the Chinese are forced to take on, as full partners, Muslim -- but not Christian -- Malays (the indigenous tribes are almost completely Christian) in a phony effort to help the "sons of the land" (or "bumiputra"), who happen, for some reason, to always be Muslims, and those supporting them always non-Muslims.

Look East in order to make rhetorical points among the guilt-ridden denizens of Western Europe and America. They may only blame themselves (quite unnecessarily) for supposed sins vis-a-vis the Muslims -- but then how do they explain the murders of non-Muslims all over Asia and Africa, and even of those who, like the Buddhists of southern Thailand, are not part of what has been so cleverly presented as "Western -- i.e. Judeo-Christian -- colonialism" that fully has earned Muslim hostility.