An answer is ventured
here. Partial quote:
There’s a sulky, grudging silent majority in most of the world—imagine Bakersfield with subtitles and exotic soundtracks. Most of the time, the hicks who make up those silent majorities are harmless, too busy messing up their own lives to do much damage. But in a few places, that hick anger and resentment of the cool, fast world links up with some bigger agendas, with money and ambition. And in those places, some pretty seriously godawful shit happens, and it’s just cowardice to pretend that everything was nice there until the eeeevul drones started blasting.
Which brings us to Quetta. Quetta has the bad luck to be in Pakistan, the other country created in the late 1940s on the basis of religious identity. That’s right: Israel and Pakistan, created at the same time for the same reason, to create a one-religion homeland. Since then, both of those countries have done their best to show the world that combining religion and nationalism is a very bad idea, which anybody who ever dated a Southern Baptist already knew.
Quetta’s next piece of bad luck is that it has a Pashtun majority. Pashtun have always been scary people, useful when they’re on your side but stubborn, dumb and violent in opposition. Kind of like Scots-Irish Southern Baptists, actually. And somebody who truly believes in the God of the Old Testament, no matter whether he calls himself a Baptist or Shas or Taliban, is a killer. The difference—and I didn’t know this until I went to Saudi—is that a lot of Muslims truly believe in God, and even the craziest American Baptist doesn’t—not really. Not to the death. It’s one thing to be churchy, but “to the death” is a whole nuther level. Nobody here has it any more, not the way they do over there. Again, that’s not something I always thought; I didn’t know it until I saw the real thing. Then I realized that our Baptists are faking it, even if they don’t know it.
I read a quote from somewhere that sums it up perfectly: “It is not their love for us but their lack of faith that prevents the Christians from burning us.” That’s exactly right; if they had the faith they claim, they would burn us. But they don’t. In a lot of places in the Muslim world, they still have faith. Faith can move mountains, but most of the time faith just kills people. It’s the one miracle humans can actually do: turning a talking, walking, breathing enemy into a piece of meat with one bullet. And the Pakistani jihadis love performing that miracle.
Here again, we run into a squeamish leftist avoidance tactic: Instead of admitting that Pashtun are God-crazed Jihadis, leftist commentators say, “Much of what passes for Islam in Pashtun circles is actually only Pashtunwallah, the set of customs…” Yeah, true. But then much of what passes for Christianity in Bakersfield is only Okie-wallah, Scots-Irish-wallah. So what? A set of customs that has the Smiter-God from the Old Testament backing it up is a terrifying thing, and it isn’t fazed by some nasal-voiced anthropologist pointing out that local customs have crept into the doctrine. Doctrine and custom are one and the same after a few generations, like God and guns in Bakersfield. You can blather all day about how “Jesus never shot anyone,” snicker-snicker, twitter-twitter, but in Bakersfield, “God and guns” is a complete sentence--a complete platform, in fact. Local cultures merge with the religion, make themselves the defenders of the religion, and both parties gain, the way both the Wahhabi and the Sauds gained from their alliance. It’s too late to do Siamese-twins surgery on them now.
Topic: What do Southern Baptists and Pashtun Jihadis have in common?