What was the real occasion for the embassy attacks on 9/11/2012?

First and most of all, these attacks were planned and scheduled anniversary greetings from al-Qaeda.

Second, Joe Biden’s repeated brags that GM is alive and Osama is dead required a riposte.

Third, the West and the Muslim world needed to be told we have not crushed and cannot crush al-Qaeda in particular or Muslim terrorism in general.

And we all needed to be reminded forcibly and clearly, once again, just what the continuing rise to power of Muslim fundamentalism everywhere there are Muslims involves.

Did that silly video actually provoke all this street theater?

Certainly not.

The world in general and Western culture in particular are packed full of material equally or more derogatory to Islam or to Mohamed.

Websites and books and Internet videos abound, worldwide and in a multitude of languages, all of them doing their level, sometimes angry best to blacken the name of Mohamed, his book, his religion, and all their works.

And the vast weight of all that popular hatred of Islam grows constantly – and by leaps and bounds with every such evil outburst of Muslim savagery as this, that all the world gets to witness.

Hanging all this on just another indiscernible drop in the ocean of fear and loathing of Islam that the Muslims have produced around the world in recent decades is absurd.

It would be more accurate to say Joe Biden’s chest-thumping provoked it.

And every such outburst teaches us again the bitter lesson of our time.

Very nearly all Muslims everywhere, of course, share the view that their own religion is uniquely true and all other religions are false.

Not unlike the Christians, they also believe their religion must prevail through all the world.

But it is unique to their faith that the normal and ordinary and historically exemplary method by which the spread of Islam is made to happen and people are brought to the faith is not and never has been preaching and persuasion but war and force.

And, more to the immediate point, it is their universal conviction that unbelievers everywhere can and should be forced to treat as sacred their founder and his "revelation."

In fact, Islam, uniquely among the Abrahamic religions, is all about religious warfare and the coerced submission of unbelievers by cities, regions, and whole nations to Allah, and has been from its birth.

The Jews have never been interested in spreading their religion to others, at all, and the exemplary method of spreading Christianity enjoined by Jesus, Paul, and all the earliest of his followers was preaching to the low and the humble.

Nothing could have been further from their minds than careers of religious conquest of the then Roman Empire, though that is exactly what the Muslims launched themselves into, and quite successfully, in the earliest years of their faith.

"Submission," in fact, is the very meaning of the name, "Islam"; that is the first and central lesson of its founder Mohamed, and religious war is the exemplary manner in which he spread his faith to the unbelievers of Arabia, as narrated in the Koran.

Islam is not and never has been a religion of peace; it is and always has been uniquely and relentlessly a religion of war.

Fundamentalist Buddhists would launch a worldwide campaign of preaching pacifism and vegetarianism.

We all know that is not what the rising tide of fundamentalist Muslims have done.

None of which is to say it would be wise for Obama and the pols of the Democratic Party to declaim these truths in every stump speech across the nation for the next two months.

Nor is it clear how any reaction to these facts could be more stupid, dangerous, or absurd than that of Ann Coulter in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/2001 - advice she has never recanted - that we make war on the entire world of Islam and forcibly convert them all to Christianity.

No one joined her in urging this.

But far too many think something short of that but much in the same spirit is called for.

All the same, it is well to be clear on the facts and honest with ourselves about Islam and about what is happening in the Muslim world.

See Pat Condell’s “American Dhimmi.”

No, I do not agree with everything he says, here.

He is, after all, just another drop in that ocean of the Islamophobe right and his "Third World" Obama story is utter tripe.

But this one video, especially now, is worth a look.

Though I warn you it's rather depressing.

American Dhimmi

And through all this bear in mind that the Democrats are by far, not only domestically but in foreign affairs, the lesser evil.