No one expected Sydney to be the location of a terrorist attack. And perhaps in an effort to extend the state of denial a little further, folks are falling all over themselves to separate Islam from the terrorist who took some twenty hostages this week in a popular Sydney cafe. They are parroting the media's prepackaged and preapproved phrases such as “he is not representative of all Muslims,” and “primarily, Islam is a religion of peace.”

But here's the subtext: no, a political refugee from Iran who is facing multiple sexual assault charges is not representative of all Muslims. We all know that. But unless all Muslims are willing to condemn his actions, we can assume that they don't disapprove of his actions enough to do so publicly. Sort of like the Americans who “would never have an abortions themselves, but don't feel like they have the right to tell other people not to do so.”

Folks, wrong is wrong. Evil is evil. And murder is murder. If it's not worth condemning, then you're not really against it.

And here's where I expect to take the heavy fire: no, Islam is most certainly not a religion of peace. Western Muslim culture may be a culture of peace, but Islam does not accept Western culture. What does that mean? That means that Muslims who practice a culture of peace are apostates. Simply put, they are picking and choosing which parts of the Q'uran they would like to follow – much in the same way that many in other nations practice any religion.

For example, we all know people who claim the label “Christian,” but ignore the parts of the Bible they don't like – whether those parts speak to homosexuality, extramarital sex, bearing false witness, or any one of a hundred thousand pet sins that we might care to justify. On some level, every one of us is a bad Christian. Every one of us is an apostate. And our apostasy is measured against what is written in the Bible.

And what about Islam? How does one measure the apostasy of Muslims? If you measure the apostasy of Muslims against that which is written in the Q'uran, it becomes clear that it is only the Westernized Muslim culture, not the religion of Islam, that advocates for peace on any level. But I would still ask: how powerful an advocate for peace can one be if he steadfastly refuses to condemn those within his own ranks who perpetrate acts designed to disrupt peace?

Another very real problem that stems from all of this is that a refusal to acknowledge where the danger resides is the sole reason that we are completely impotent in a fight against it. We can’t acknowledge that violence is a fundamental tenet of Islam, because that would hurt the feelings of Western Muslim apostates. (Hear me when I say that the fundamentalists with jihad on their minds don’t give a rat’s backside if you call a terrorist a terrorist.) And because we can’t acknowledge that, we can’t strive to stop the spread of Islam without appearing to be bigoted.

If we refuse to see that the Q’uran specifically directs followers toward violent acts, then we must seek another motive for the actions of terrorists. We must, as Hillary Clinton has entreated us to do, “attempt to understand them.” We must seek to identify with those who believe that we – our nation, our culture, our families, and our God – hold so little value that to destroy those things means nothing. We must feel guilty for any actions we endeavor to take in order to save our own families and our own nation if they should happen to cause any discomfort to our enemy. Because they’re not really our enemies – they’re just on the other side of a cultural divide, and we should try to reason with them even though every time we do they take another city. Or blow up another cafe. Or shoot up another school.

Consider this: when Adam Lanza entered a Newtown, Connecticut school and opened fire, Americans were ready to condemn him, his mother, and thousands of law-abiding gun-owners who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime. They are now even filing a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the weapon he used, because we must do everything in our power to prevent another similar shooting.

But those same people get queasy at the thought of a few temporary non-lethal psychological measures being employed in order to gain the information necessary to ensure that we don’t face another 9/11.