Posted on 07/14/2004 7:03:04 PM PDT by wagglebee
Even though I may not look it, I am essentially a pretty happy guy. Like most people my age, I get out of sorts when I consider the steady decline of art, culture and baseball. But so long as nobody puts a gun to my head and makes me listen to Hip Hop, and so long as I don't have to watch MTV or suffer through yet another Jim Carrey movie, I don't let myself get too perturbed by current trends.
I don't even object to the mud-slinging one associates with presidential campaigns. I just remind myself that nobody ever got to sling mud at Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein.
One of the few things that I do find truly depressing are Islamic fanatics and those Americans on the radical left who defend their atrocities. I can't be the only person who finds it peculiar that the very same people who break out in a cold sweat over the slightest overlap of church and state in the United States – who despise evangelical Christians and distrust orthodox Jews – have no problem arguing on the side of people who speak of jihads and who treat their women like chattel.
What I find most disconcerting about these Muslims is that they almost manage to make the Nazis look normal by comparison. This is not to suggest that Hitler and his butchers weren't abominable. Hitler was an evil lunatic who wished to wage war on mankind, and thus turn "Deutschland uber alles" into more than a catchy slogan. But at least the world he set out to conquer was the world of the 20th century. You have only to look at Berchtesgaden, his palace in the mountains, to understand that the man loved excess. He may have been a vegetarian, but the little bastard was a hedonist at heart.
Der fuhrer and his cohorts appreciated art and music, architecture and film, beautiful women and shnapps. The only thing that makes the Nazis worse than the barbaric Islamics is that, being technologically advanced, they were more efficient killers.
The world of the mullahs is the world of the Dark Ages. It is an ugly place and it smells like a sewer. It is as enlightened as a cesspool. It turns its back on life and it celebrates death. Its heroes are suicide bombers. Its motto is, better a dead martyr than a living child. Who would choose to live in such a world? Only the hopelessly insane.
I say, whatever it costs to defeat this plague is well worth the price, just as the costs were justified to rid the world of the Third Reich.
At times, I confess, I get downhearted because it seems such an impossible task. The Muslim terrorists, after all, seem to be everywhere in the world, blowing up buildings, blowing up people. We brought down Saddam Hussein – as we brought down Hitler – but still the fighting rages on in Iraq. How can we hope to defeat people who aren't merely fighting for a leader or a nation, but because of their religion, because Muhammad gave them their marching orders 1,400 years ago?
Well, in spite of all that, I find reasons to be hopeful:
For instance, think about the French Revolution. One day, the French were ruled by a despotic king; the next day, "Voila!" they weren't.
One day, here in America, we had slavery; the next day, after 200 years, we didn't.
One day, Italy was being bossed around by a two-bit tyrant named Mussolini; the next day, he was in the town square, hanging upside down like a side of beef.
One day, the Soviet Union had a few hundred million Eastern Europeans under its brutal thumb; the next day it barely had a thumb.
But even more to the point, consider Japan. The Japanese who invaded China, Korea, Shanghai and Manchuria – and bombed the hell out of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor – thought they were on a holy mission on behalf of their emperor. Think of it as a jihad with soy sauce.
Emperor Hirohito was more than a national leader – he was a god. He was as distant and mysterious as the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. When he went on the radio in 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to announce to the nation that the war was over and that they had lost, his countrymen didn't know what to make of it. They had never heard his voice. Gods, for god's sake, don't talk on the radio.
Because Hirohito was regarded as a deity, dying on his behalf had been regarded as a holy act. The Japanese, as you may recall, had had their own version of suicide bombers; they were called Kamikazes. They were pilots whose sole mission was to fly their explosive-laden Zeros directly into allied battleships and destroyers. Next stop, they were told: Paradise. Sound vaguely familiar?
So ingrained in the Japanese was blind devotion to their emperor that, long after the war was over, isolated soldiers were found on South Pacific islands still defending their turf. They simply hadn't heard God on the radio.
Who would have ever guessed that in no time at all, Japan would not only be a peace-loving democracy, but that its citizens would feel as free as the English to gossip about the royal family, and would revere baseball players above all other mortals?
In other words, what so often seems impossible to imagine only means that imagination is often lacking.
From all this, I find hope that the Islamic necrophiliacs will go the way of the Visigoths and the Huns, Napoleon and the Nazis.
I believe we will destroy them because, having vowed to destroy all of us – even those who speak on their behalf – they really leave us no choice in the matter.
I am curious about one thing, though. When Arab terrorists speak about martyring themselves so they can go directly to Paradise, is their vision of the place as desolate and as gruesome as the world they're trying to foist on the rest of us?
Does it at least have indoor plumbing?
Does it at least have indoor plumbing?
I'm thinking it may be about time to send the jihadists to "paradise" 200,000 at a time.
I assume that you are speaking of a multi-megaton express ticket to Paradise. If so, lemme find the latitude and longitude for Riyadh...
bumping...
This excellent article is worth the read for that line alone!
That would be a number 26, right after the long duck dong......
Seriously though, a definite "hits the nail on the head" article! The analogies he draws are frighteningly accurate, except to the whacky liberals, Michael Moore, and their anachist friends in Europe and elsewhere.
Best closing line on a column ever.
And I'll make this prediction about Michael Moore's life expectancy if he opens his fat trap after a truly massive terrorist attack and issues the same seditious bilge he spouted 3 days after 9/11:
Chemical weapon deployed in a football stadium with massive casualties: Fair trial for treason, followed by a first class hanging.
Nuked city: Turns himself in to avoid mobs hunting his white whaley ass, fair trial followed by a first class hanging.
Weaponized ebola/smallpox epidemic: The Army forensic team has to identify the scraps left after some mob catches him hiding in a donut shop in Flint. They even burn his hat.
The discrete footage from women groups in Afghanistan shown in inside of Taleban HQ. The restroom walls were smeared with feces, you could smell it just watching the video. I'm sure the plumbing didn't work or just ran down to the first floor.
Every time you hear about the smart Jihadi who has an engineering degree but they would rather become bomber than do some plumbing!
Now, if your local pastor started spouting about St. Peter running a brothel and a bar up there, you'd hand him a one-way ticket to the rubber room, wouldn't you? Fact is, these guys are nuts, seriously, batsh!t nuts.
I would disagree with the descriptor. I believe they are deceived.
It would be truly a societal rarity needing study if an entire segment of a religiously zealous population went criminally bonkers all at once.
Nevertheless, I understand his point. They act like they are all criminally insane, which proves that it's important to have a sound belief system.
I retract my advocacy of hanging for Mr. Moore. In honor of Bastille Day, I say we give him the guillotine.
"I assume that you are speaking of a multi-megaton express ticket to Paradise. If so, lemme find the latitude and longitude for Riyadh..."
As close as I can tell, it's 24 deg. N by 47 deg. E. A large enough yield would be able to handle any inaccuracy in my plotting of the location (I used a small map in the back of a daily planner, so my accuracy is subject to question; but it's close enough).
Funny he should ask that, but no, it does not have indoor plumbing, it is a tent next to a stream that flows with wine. I suspect the wine is the toilet. Guess it pays to have your tent up stream...
His list of one day this and suddenly the next day that makes it sound as if those events happened when someone said abracadabra. The end of slavery in the US involved the bloodiest war in US history. The end of the axis powers of WW II was no magic trick. The communist collapse in the late 1980s didn't just happen out of the blue. As for the French revolution it didn't either. The French revolution however didn't improve anything instead it introduced the world to enlightened atheistic rule.
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