MORE UNHINGED CONSERVATIVES. It's easy to forget that there's a large contingent of conservatives who think we're at war with an entire religion. Really. Over at the National Review, Mark Krikorian makes the following prediction (via Josh Patashnik at The Plank):
When Iran's Islamic regime finally unravels, some significant number of nominal Muslims will quickly become apostates, embracing Bahai or Zoroastrianism or Christianity (or Buddhism or even Judaism). As this becomes a more widespread and public thing, some of the many remaining fundamentalists will start beheading newly Christian school children and raping newly Zoroastrian women and blowing up newly constructed Bahai temples, intensifying the existing popular disgust with the Islamic faith and thus accelerating conversions to other faiths.
Eventually, as the number of former Muslims begins to constitute a large percentage of the population, the various keepers of Islam will see the need for a new version of the faith that people won't abandon -- thereby ushering in the long-awaited but ever elusive "moderate" Islam, where jihad really does mean nothing more than spiritual struggle, where the many problematic suras and hadiths are explained away as historical artifacts. Muslims won't make this change if they don't have to, but they will when the only alternative is the disappearance of Islam.
Moving past the patently ridiculous idea that a change of regime in Iran would lead people to renounce the religion they've followed for more than a thousand years, this is mainly interesting because it reflects the assumption that we're fighting an entire religion--that there's something inherent in Islam as it is practiced across the middle east that makes all Muslims our enemies. It's an absurd idea and one that we should try to ensure stays as far from policy-making as possible, but large segments of the conservative commentariat accept it as gospel and that's downright scary.
--Sam Boyd
