HORROR IN PAKISTAN – AT 7:47 A.M. ET:   We begin this morning with a story that illustrates what we are up against in the war on terror.   Yesterday a decent Pakistani provincial governor, a Muslim, who had spoken up in defense of a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy, was assassinated.  And this is what followed, from AFP:

Hundreds of Facebook users welcomed the killing of liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer as a strike against reformers of the country's tight blasphemy laws. The Punjab governor was shot on Tuesday by one of his guards, 26-year-old Mumtaz Qadri, who confessed to the murder because of Taseer's vocal opposition to the law that was recently used to sentence a Christian woman to death.

Analysts say the assassination underscores how deeply religious extremism has penetrated Pakistan's conservative society, with even the Internet-literate elite resorting to Facebook to rally support for the killer.

Nearly 2,000 Facebook users joined one group on the social networking site praising Qadri, and dozens of "fans" joined other pages set up in Qadri's honour in the hours after the shooting.

All the pages had been removed by Wednesday. Facebook was not immediately reachable for comment. But other private account holders used their Facebook status updates to make comments such as: "We salute you Mumtaz Qadri," "thank God he (Taseer) is not alive (any) more" and praise for the attacker as "a soldier of Islam".

In a sign of mainstream media opposition, Pakistan's leading Urdu-language newspaper, Jang, ran a front-page story declaring: "There should be no funeral for Salman Taseer and no condemnation for his death."

"A supporter of a blasphemer is also a blasphemer," said a sub-heading, reporting that 500 religious scholars and clerics had paid tribute to Qadri.

COMMENT:  Nice, huh?  Remember, though, it's America's policies that are doing this, and those Israeli settlements.  That's all it is.  It couldn't be a corrupt, twisted ideology, could it?  Nah. 

Yes it is.   We, as Americans, have never been particularly good at understanding the way ideology can drive an entire people.  We are an idealistic, but not an ideological society.  Zealotry doesn't do too well here, we permit a variety of viewpoints, and the American people, in their practicality, tend ultimately to reject easy, ideological answers.

Not so elsewhere in the world.

We are fighting an ideology as dangerous as Nazism, yet many in our so-called "intellectual" establishment don't want to accept it.  It doesn't fit a party line that blames America for the world's ills, and it doesn't fit the simplistic teachings of an adolescent "multiculturalism," which holds that we must "respect" other cultures, and ask no questions.

We intend to ask questions, and we don't have to respect anything we don't find respectable in our moral universe.

January 5, 2011