Respecting Islam will be the death of us
Dwelling on the tactic, never defining the enemy
By Diana West, JWR
Discussing the war on “terror” has been endlessly awkward. Terror — like blitzkrieg, sneak attack or even disinformation — is a tactic not an enemy. But in our politically correct era, we dwell on the tactic, never defining the enemy. Drop 500-pound bombs on his head if we must — and we must — but don’t describe him as an Islamic jihadist in the age-old tradition of Islamic jihadists going back to Muhammad. Such historical precision might be hurtful and insensitive, and we wouldn’t want that.
Indeed, as a matter of American foreign policy, we don’t want that. Better to keep things vague and indirect, much as the Victorians are reputed to have done to avoid giving offense in the drawing room. Once upon a time, “We the People” were crass enough to have repelled German blitzkrieg, defied Japanese sneak attack and even to have combated Soviet disinformation. Now, “We the Peoples” are enlightened to the point where we send armies out for years to fight generic terror — no matter how specifically Islamist that terror is.
There are many reasons why this matters, not least of which is that without understanding the religious nature of jihad, along with its sister institution of dhimmitude (inferior status of non-Muslims under Islam), there can be no triumph over jihad and no avoiding dhimmitude. There can also be no understanding of the religiously rooted attitudes toward jihad movements among even non-violent Muslims, generally ranging from tacit ambivalence to wild adulation.
In fighting our war on terror, we have simultaneously fought against any such understanding. Maybe the reason goes beyond reflexive political correctness. Maybe we in the West simply don’t want any enemy at all; maybe we simply want to safeguard ourselves against terror. Maybe our elites believe that, in targeting only terror, the enemy will learn to like us, and terror will go away.
This mindset may explain why the United States exhausts itself trying to disclaim a connection between Islam and jihad, opening Islamic centers on U.S. military bases (most recently at Quantico at the behest of a Wahhabi-educated cleric), thus, as Paul Sperry writes at frontpagemag.com, “facilitating the study of the holy texts the enemy uses, heretically or not, as their manual of war”; treating those same holy texts reverentially by military order at Guantanamo Bay; and even sending in the Marines to donate prayer rugs to an Iraqi mosque (Operation Cool Carpet).
Such tactics suggest we no longer seek a military triumph over Islamist jihad — if we ever did. Had we engaged in such a war, it would be over by now. The president would have directed the military to eradicate, freeze or neutralize jihad threats where they exist — from Iran to Syria and from Gaza to Fallujah. Concurrently, we would have closed our own borders as a post-September 11 security precaution, and implemented an immigration policy designed to avoid repeating the European example of Islamization through massive Muslim immigration, or, as some are calling it, “reverse colonization.”
But no. Such a war on terror long ago gave way to the Struggle to Make Everyone Think We’re Swell. In this no-win fight, we must watch what we say — as when the government distances itself from an official’s frank characterization of three suicides at Guantanamo Bay as a jihadist “PR stunt.”And we must watch what we do — as when we repeatedly send our military on dangerous house-to-house missions with restrictive rules of engagement rather than using air power. In a war in which an interrogation could save a city, we rewrite our interrogation rules to make sure that they won’t. “If this debate were limited to what’s best for interrogation purposes, the decision [about whether to soften interrogation techniques] would be pretty easy,” a senior Defense Department official told the New York Times. “But then you have to look at what we lose diplomatically.”
Why? What are we, Lichtenstein? We sure act like it. This newspaper’s Tony Blankley recently noted the defeatism in America’s about-face with jihadist Iran — the looming front in the war. By offering non-military nuclear technology or else threatening non-military sanctions, the Bush administration seems to have acquiesced to what Mr. Blankley describes as “the only ‘respectable’ position” among both European and American elites: namely, “the absolute exclusion of a military option.”
If true, this would mean that the already inadequately titled “war on terror” would no longer refer to war at all. And that would leave only…
Im pleased to find someone else is paying attention, Seems only the kafir are aware of what is painfully evident.
I am having some real trouble recifying the memory of the “home of the brave” with the land of dhimmitude I currently witness.
I will have the courage to say America will cease to exist as an ongoing concern within 50 years, barring devine intervention. .
Stay up to date at http://www.kafirnation.com
Comment by KAOSKTRL
— June 20, 2006 @ 10:36 am
As far as I am concerned, every detainee in Guantanamo should be provided with a free rope with a pre-tied noose at the end and a fixture for attaching it to his cell’s ceiling, to use as he pleases. In fact, if they were proven to be waging war while dressed as civilians, they should have been shot upon capture and never even brought to Guantanamo.
When that mob at Fallujah was stringing up and burning dead Americans, a helicopter gunship should have fired all its missiles (with fragmentation warheads) right into the mob’s center and then followed up with its machine guns. That would have guaranteed that nothing like that atrocity (murder and mutilation of Americans) would have ever happened again.
Remember that, to stop the LAST batch of Nazis, we and our allies had to kill something like seven million Germans while burning down entire German cities. We had to kill more than a million Japanese to stop Tojo, and we burned down or nuked at least three of their cities in the process. It will take similar measures to stop Hitler in a Headscarf, preferably before he obtains a nuclear weapon and detonates it in one of our cities.
T. Bubba Bechtol, part time City Councilman from Midland, TX, was asked on a local live radio talk show the other day just what he thought of the allegations of torture of the Iraqi prisoners. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but to thunderous applause from the audience. “If hooking up an Iraqi prisoner’s scrotum to a car’s battery cables will save ONE American G.I’s life, then I have just two things to say: ” “Red is positive, Black is negative!”
Crude but right on the mark. (In practice, drugs might be more effective.) Unlike a prisoner of war (who is required to tell us only his name, rank, and serial number), a captured terrorist has no rights whatsoever under the Hague and Geneva Convention. “Red is positive, black is negative” is not even unconstitutional if nothing the prisoner says is used against him in court, and if its purpose is to extract life-saving information and not to punish. Civilian law allows any police officer (or in many cases an armed civilian) to KILL a criminal if that is what it takes to stop him from perpetrating a violent crime like murder or rape. Physical coercion of a captured terrorist that falls short of killing him therefore sounds a lot like “reasonable and necessary force” if that is what it takes to get him to tell, for example, where he and his cohorts have planted a bomb that could endanger innocent people.
Comment by Bill Levinson
— June 20, 2006 @ 6:24 pm
People that talk like that? - sounds like home to me.
Comment by RandyTexas
— June 21, 2006 @ 12:03 am
Well duh! Everyone knows that the red wire is positive and the black is negative.
What gets everyone confused is which wire to attach to which testicle. I can’t find the Wikipedia article for this!
Comment by Shy Guy
— June 21, 2006 @ 3:32 am
Video: British Islamist Defends London bombings…
Once upon a time, “We the People” were crass enough to have repelled German blitzkrieg, defied Japanese sneak attack and even to have combated Soviet disinformation. Now, “We the Peoples” are enlightened to the point where we send armies out for ye…
Trackback by Hyscience
— July 11, 2006 @ 7:55 am
Beheading Desecration Video of Dead U.S. Soldiers Released on Internet by al Qaeda (Video/Images)…
… God bless America, and God bless our troops. And never ever forget the terror, the pain, the suffering, forced upon Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker by the Muslim terrorists in Iraq. Keep the images in your mind forever - and remember that you, …
Trackback by Hyscience
— July 11, 2006 @ 7:55 am