Would anyone expect the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims to react with less indignation to the eradication of Mecca and Medina than did Israelis to the obliteration of Joseph’s tomb?

Of course, apologists for the crazed, delusional rhetoric of Tom Tancredo might argue that bombing holy structures in Mecca and Medina represents only the beginning of a new and necessary “no more Mr. Nice Guy” strategy for the United States – an appropriate but insufficient retaliation for terrorist excesses by Islamists. According to such logic, the American military ultimately will move from blowing up buildings to annihilating people until we finally succeed in breaking the Muslim will to fight back.

In this context, we should consider the example of war-time Japan—where it took the death of more than 3 million human beings, and two devastating atomic bombs, before the thoroughly defeated Empire finally agreed to surrender. Killing a comparable percentage of today’s Muslim population would require at least 50 million deaths. Even assuming some moral justification for such unprecedented genocide, we’re left with a practical problem: where, exactly, would we find our 50 million Muslims to slaughter? Would we try to kill them all in Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or would we try to distribute the carnage throughout the Islamic world?

Of course, it’s an absurd question, and an obscene suggestion, that the United States should lash out at millions of Muslims, the innocent along with the guilty, in response to some new terror attack. As a practical matter of policy, however, the idea of bombing sacred buildings constitutes an even more irrational notion than the concept of slaughtering Islamic civilians at random. Blowing up the Grand Mosque in Mecca would produce at least as many enraged, indignant, and bloodthirsty responses as bombing Muslim population centers. At the same time, destroying a few buildings (unlike strikes against population centers) would do nothing at all to destroy the ability of believers to strike back against the infidels responsible for the outrage.

On my radio show, Jerusalem-based author Victor Mordecai (“Is Fanatic Islam a Global Threat?”) acknowledged that even though bombing Mecca wouldn’t take away Muslim capacity to terrorize societies in the West it would, in fact, remove their inclination to do so. He argued that the definitive destruction of the ancient Kaaba in Mecca (the large, black-draped cubical structure toward which devout Muslims direct their prayers five times each day) would serve a useful purpose: undermining Islamic claims that their God is, indeed, “the greatest.”

According to Mordecai’s logic, tens of millions of previously fervent believers would face a crisis of faith if American bombs succeeded in erasing the focus of their daily devotions and yearly pilgrimages; many of them, he insists, would turn away in disgust from the fanatical faith that had previously animated their lives. Never mind the fact that they’ve maintained their beliefs in the face of abundant prior evidence of the emptiness and falsehood of Mohammed’s promises that Islamic faith and practice would give believers permanent worldwide dominance over benighted infidels. Mordecai declares that turning the Kaaba into an unapproachable glow-in-the-dark nuclear waste dump would serve as the final, definitive rebuttal to Koranic claims, and that most Muslims would, instantaneously, abandon their religion.

Even in the unlikely event that he’s correct, and that the vast majority (say, 90%) of the world’s Islamic believers respond to Mecca’s destruction by abandoning Allah and rejecting the Prophet, that still leaves well over 100 million fanatics even more determined than before to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, to destroy America. The core problem of Islamo-Nazi terror has always been the fierce intensity and determination of the few, not the passive hostility of the many. If bombing Mecca did, in fact, seriously damage Islam’s credibility as a competitive world religion (a very big and doubtful “if”), such action still would leave millions upon millions of enraged fanatics sworn to do whatever it takes to exact mass-murdering revenge. It doesn’t take billions of believers to menace the United States – millions (even thousands) can perform that function quite nicely. On September 11, nineteen crazies with box-cutters managed to butcher thousands and to change the world.

Finally, Tancredo defends his own inflammatory rhetoric by firing back at unidentified political rivals who say we “should take anything like this off the table,” claiming that such nuke-averse wimps aren’t “fit to be President of the United States.” In this rhetorical strafing, the Congressman aims only at straw men rather than actual flesh-and-blood candidates. More serious White House contenders, along with officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, don’t want the Mecca-bombing option removed, but they don’t want it discussed, either. Opposing Tancredo’s public effort to place a doomsday scenario “on the table” isn’t the same thing as ruling out that possibility as some desperate, worst-case eventuality. The entire Mecca-bombing debate not only damages our present efforts to win cooperation and support from non-radical Muslims, but serves to constrict, rather than enlarge, the real-world policy options a future President might consider in response to some horrific terrorist incident.

In short, only a madman could seriously suggest that threatening Mecca and Medina (even as a campaign stunt) somehow enhances US security. The State Department rightly characterized the Tancredo remarks as “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.”

Giving Tancredo the benefit of the doubt, he may not count as crazy because he can’t count as serious. If nothing else, his lamentable “nuke Mecca” musings help to highlight the unmistakable difference between plausible candidates for President of the United States and a shabby, grandstanding demagogue who’ll say anything, and risk any damage to his country, in puerile pursuit of a few fleeting moments of media attention.