How many Muslims do we need to kill before we are safe?

Cal Thomas writes on one of his favorite themes this week; the Muslim Menace. He is taking on the current Republican line on Middle East unrest which is that the problems there go back centuries. TPM Reader DK, filling in at Talking Points Memo, has underlined why the Republicans might be taking this approach.

This sudden embrace of the "long view," as Brooks calls it, is of a piece with the recent claims by some neo-conservatives that there was nothing we could have done to prevent the sectarian violence in Iraq given its "coarsened and brittle cultures." Or as Josh paraphrased it: sure, we had a crappy post-war plan in Iraq, but that really didn't matter one way or the other.

While it is true that you can understand little about the Middle East without understanding its history, conservatives have an obvious motive for wanting to compress the last 20-30 years of events in the Middle East. Linking the brutal events of the recent past with the brutal events of today allows them to skip over the fact that real progress toward peace and stability in the region was made in the 1990s, in part due to U.S. leadership and diplomacy. In doing so, I suppose conservatives hope to obscure what a hash they have made of the Middle East in the last 5 years.

That said, it's the standard Cal Thomas Muslim Menace article in another way. He ridicules all possible peaceful resolutions to the crisis and then the article ends. This is typical for Cal Thomas. He presents the problem with Muslims, but leads finding a solution up to his readers (once he has eliminated all peaceful solutions).

I assume this is because his preferred solution is not something he wants in print. But at least some of his readers have suggestions.

Hogrider writes: Give 'em what they want

They state that they prefer death and martyrdom over American guarantees. Give 'em what they prefer, death and martyrdom. What they get in the bargain is the second death which is eternity in the lake of fire.

Everybody says that they don't want war. A certain number of people are lying when they say that.