Islam's defining doctrine of jihad war against non-Muslims, and resultant 14 centuries of sanguinary imperialism, and accompanying acts of terrorism, through the present, notwithstanding, ad nauseum contemporary State Department pronouncements re-affirm what Muslim propagandists insist--that the creed is an enlightened pacifism.

Glaring examples of this corrosive State Department apologetic on Islam have been provided by the two most recent Secretaries of State, Condoleeza Rice, and the current Secretary, Hillary Clinton. Then Secretary Rice, at The Annual State Department Iftar Dinner, October 25, 2005,  amplified the standard "religion of peace" trope, asserting Islam was

...a great faith, of one of the world's great religions, a religion of peace and love.

During her September 15, 2009 Iftar Dinner address, Secretary Clinton used the jihadist Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, Council on American Islamic Relations' (CAIR's) deliberately inflated estimate of US Muslims (~ 7million; hard data from the Pew Forum in early 2010 tallied 2.6 million US Muslims), to claim,

The nearly 7 million Muslims in our country have enriched our culture, have made it stronger because of the contributions that many of you and others across America have given to us.

Clinton then added her own hagiographic editorial comments on Islam, as ostensibly embodied in the celebration of Ramadan (ignoring the association between Ramadan and jihadism, since the advent of the creed),  and the supposed benevolent example of Islam's prophet, Muhammad (oblivious to his role, affirmed by institutional Islam, as the prototype jihadist):

Now, this time of self-reflection and clarity reminds us that the principles that are the hallmark of Ramadan - charity, sacrifice, and compassion... we need to be inspired by our leaders to fight poverty, injustice and hate with, "the weapon of the Prophet--patience and righteousness." Well, that, to me, sums up much of what we celebrate tonight as we break fast.

Such obsequious pandering to Islam--despite the daily confirmed, abject failure of these efforts to provide any strategic benefit to the US--was not always enshrined State Department "policy."

Edward A. Van Dyck, then US Consular Clerk at Cairo, Egypt, prepared a detailed report in August 1880 on the history of the treaty arrangements (so-called "capitulations") between the Muslim Ottoman Empire, European nations, and the much briefer US-Ottoman experience. Van Dyck's report--written specifically as a tool for State Department diplomats--opens with an informed, pellucid, and remarkably compendious explanation of jihad and Islamic law (Sharia):

In all the many works on Mohammedan law no teaching is met with that even hints at those principles of political intercourse between nations, that have been so long known to the peoples of Europe, and which are so universally recognized by them. "Fiqh," as the science of Moslem jurisprudence is called, knows only one category of relation between those who recognize the apostleship of Mohammed and all others who do not, namely Djehad [jihad[; that is to say, strife, or holy war. Inasmuch as the propagation of Islam was to be the aim of all Moslems, perpetual warfare against the unbelievers, in order to convert them, or subject them to the payment of tribute, came to be held by Moslem doctors [legists] as the most sacred duty of the believer. This right to wage war is the only principle of international law which is taught by Mohammedan jurists; ...with the Arabs the term harby [harbi] (warrior) expresses not only an unbeliever but also an enemy; and jehady [jihadi] (striver, warrior) means the believer-militant. From the Moslem point of view, the whole world is divided into two parts--"the House of Islam," and the House of War;" out of this division has arisen the other popular dictum of the Mohammednas that "all kinds of unbelievers from but one people."

The witless and self-destructive apologetic on Islam which currently permeates our State Department even includes grotesque, de facto endorsement of Islamic "blasphemy" law, as promulgated by the Muslim avatars of a modern Caliphate, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

We are in desperate need of a strong new Secretary of State willing to purge the State Department of all those dogmatically inculcating such counterfactual, delusive Islamophilia. Diplomats possessed of--or at least receptive to learning--Van Dyck's unapologetic wisdom, must be recruited and installed if we are to survive the violent and non-violent jihad being waged against the US. America employed such informed, clear-eyed patriotic diplomats in the past; we need them now more than ever before.