Our colleague Michael Medved brought to the attention of his national radio audience today a potentially historic sermon by Atlanta Rabbi Shalom Lewis, delivered over the recent Jewish holidays. Then Michael interviewed the Rabbi, who was nothing if not candid and eloquent.

Here is a Jew who is a member of the ACLU and says he routinely votes Democratic. Rabbi Lewis also says in his sermon that he never voted for George W. Bush. But now he is facing openly what so many American Jews (unlike Israeli Jews) have persevered to ignore--the reality, as Bush realized, that Radical Islam cannot be appeased but must be confronted and defeated. He covers all the arguments and does so with patient intensity. Of course, Islam is not the enemy. Of course, Muslims as a whole are not the enemy. But it does no one any good to ignore that it is a virulent variant of Islam is terrifying much of the world into silence and even paralysis. Cowardice and loss of confidence in our own standards is infecting our own society. It's a kind of political correctness that cannot see reality right dead ahead.

It is no kindness to Muslims, especially reformers, to pretend that things are not as they are. We have a lot of building to do with Muslims who reject the radicals. We need them. But they also need us.

George Gilder's The Israel Test is the best treatment yet in book form of the "canary in the mineshaft" that is modern Judaism and Jewry. Yet until recently at least, most politically liberal Jews have been loathe to face the current unpleasantness because it didin't fit their preconceptions. And many Christians and well-intentioned secularists are just as confused and intimidated. They not only decline to be brave, but they also berate those who are.

Read Rabbi Shalom Lewis' sermon. "Ehr Kumt" is Yiddish: "He is coming!" It's a warning.

Meanwhile, we all should remember the line from Isaiah, also quoted by Rabbi Lewis, "Woe to them that call the day night and the night day."