Since I had no hand in the unfortunate Mecca discussion of several years ago, I’ll jump in this time. Obviously, it was a stupid thing for Tancredo to have said, and he ought to repudiate it. But there are two further points: One, it may actually have been useful for Muslim nations to have heard that there are people here who are thinking this way – we want them to think that we’re scary and unpredictable, which may have been what Rick meant by the Sicilian gesture (I don’t know, BTW, whether Tancredo’s immigrant grandfather was Sicilian or not). The second point actually runs contrary to this – we assume that Islamists would despair at the prospect of Mecca being destroyed, but that may not be the case for the Wahhabis. They take iconoclasm so far that, as I understand it, the Wahhabis over the years have destroyed many Islamic sacred sites, including Mohammed’s boyhood home and tombs and cemeteries all over Mecca and Medina, even the graves of Mohammed’s parents and the Caliph Abu Bakr, and were only stopped from destroying Mohammed’s own tomb by the outcry of traditional Muslims. My point is that the enemy hard core is so fanatic that they might consider Mecca’s destruction a price worth paying for our own destruction – thus negating any imagined deterrent value of such a threat on our part.