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One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.

No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims.

Laying the groundwork for such radicalization is the seductive idea of political Islam, which preaches a Utopian view of society where all citizens are part of a just and fair "umma," or community of Muslims. In this world, the separation of religion and politics is heretical, and Europe's Muslims -- now representing between 5 percent and 10 percent of the continent's population -- need to be walled off from Western culture.
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Instead of integrating Muslims, this all-embracing form of Islam builds a cocoon in which people have little contact with mainstream society... Education is often stunted and the chance of professional success limited...

"It's a vision of society that separates people into two camps, Islamic and non-Islamic," says Ms. Bouzar, [a prominent French Muslim social scientist], "They have a need to Islamicize everything."
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The key message is that everything in life, including politics, has a religious dimension. The separation of church and state... is "un-Islamic."

If cartoons can inflame the hatreds of Muslims to the point that they are baying for blood, it is only a matter of time before Europeans decide that they have simply had enough of this nonsense, and that it is time to strike back.

Those voices calling for greater sensitivity to Muslim sensibility, as if that would prevent the problem from ever breaking out again, simply do not understand the nature of what they are up against: a religion that seeks—one way or another, depending on which of its adherents you ask—to convert all non-Muslims. A European culture that would be sufficiently “sensitive” to Islamic law would quite frankly be one in subjection to Islamic law—and anything short of that is going to produce clashes of the sort we are witnessing today.

The outrage on both sides of this issue may calm down in the short term, but it is only a matter of time before another incident brings the simmering hatreds right back to a boil. One of these times, the lid will be blown off completely. The most radical elements within the Islamist world are looking for a war—and they are going to get it.