Islamofascists Unleash Polio

While our own government officials ponder the question of whether smallpox vaccine should be manufactured again to head off a return of that disease as a biological weapon, it seems that the Islamofascists have unleashed another disease that had recently been close to facing the same fate -- eradication -- as smallpox: polio.

A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate the polio infection was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has single-handedly returned polio to epidemic proportions.

The theory's source seems to be a physician and the president of Nigeria's Supreme Council for Shari'a Law, Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, 68. Dr. Ahmed, an Islamist, accuses Americans of lacing the vaccine with an anti-fertility agent that sterilizes children (or, in an alternate theory, it infects them with AIDS)....

Unfortunately for the Moslem world, that disease is affecting ... other Moslems.

The polio-vaccine conspiracy theory has had direct consequences: Sixteen countries where polio had been eradicated have in recent months reported outbreaks of the disease -– twelve in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and Togo) and four in Asia (India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen). Yemen has had the largest polio outbreak, with more than 83 cases since April. The WHO calls this "a major epidemic."

The common element, the New York Times notes, is that incidents of polio are now located "almost exclusively in Muslim countries or regions." That's because, scientists hypothesize, the polio infection traveled from Nigeria in a uniquely Muslim way -– via the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, which took place in January 2005. Testing confirms that all three Asian strains of the disease originated in northern Nigeria.

We now have yet another example of why Islam needs a reformation, of why the moderate Moslems must stop tolerating the radicals in their midst. In this instance, we have a concrete example of Islamofascist leaders cynically sowing fear of the secular West in order to maintain their own power, only to reap pestilence for their fellow Moslems.

Islamofascism ultimately needs no help from the militaries and police forces of the West to destroy the Moslem world. By flippantly rejecting the many hard-won advances made by the West, Islamofascism can exterminate the Moslems quite nicely on its own, thank you very much.

The choice between blind obedience and death -- and reason and life -- looks pretty clear to me. But I can't make that choice for the moderate Moslems. That choice is their own.

-- CAV