Some Coloradans may have forgotten that Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo never backed away two years ago from his suggestion that the United States threaten to "take out" Muslim holy sites in the event of a terrorist attack involving a nuclear device.

To the contrary, the 6th District Republican defended the statement in a column in which he mocked the concept of "moderate Muslims" and advocated holding all such believers, in effect, collectively responsible for the crimes of their religious brethren.

No surprise, then, that Tancredo repeated this reactionary idea at a campaign stop this week in Iowa. "If it is up to me," he said, "we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina."

No one likely to be elected president shares Tancredo's view. But given the likelihood that his position strikes a chord with some people, it's important to repeat why such an outlook is wildly wrong. Muslim terrorists could come from Europe, Africa, south and east Asia, or at least a half dozen nations in the Middle East. They could be part of al-Qaida or freelance jihadists - or in covert league with a rogue government such as Iran.

But no matter where they might be from, Tancredo would retaliate by razing two cities in Saudi Arabia that harbor shrines sacred to a billion Muslims residing everywhere from Indonesia to Denver. This is not only collective punishment - an insult to Western values - but also a form of state terrorism, since the innocent victims in those cities could number in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

We hold no brief for Saudi Arabia. Quite the contrary. We're highly skeptical, for example, of a plan announced just this week by the Bush administration to sell advanced weaponry to that country as part of a program to counter the growing influence of Iran. While Saudi Arabia has made some strides since 9/11 in reforming a cultural milieu poisoned by jihadist rhetoric, it has not gone far enough.

As a Freedom House probe discovered last year, Saudi textbooks still emphasize "intolerance and hatred of religious traditions, especially Christianity and Judaism." That's putting it mildly. Among the appalling tidbits Freedom House uncovered was this advice for eighth-graders: "The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians . . . ."

Those textbooks are supposed to be under review by the Saudi government; maybe some of the claptrap has been purged. Even so, Saudi society clearly generates more than its share of jihadists. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times recently reported that "about 45 percent of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia . . . \[and] Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis."

And we're going to reward their homeland with a favorable arms deal?

It's one thing, however, to tighten the screws on a government that indulges jihadist propaganda and quite another to talk about incinerating holy sites and innocent people in the name of fighting terrorism. And by the way, how many centuries does Tancredo suppose the Islamists would carry aloft the avenging torch after that occurred?