Posted on 07/28/2005 9:39:56 AM PDT by rdb3
Why not bomb Mecca? Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has brought the issue to the table. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has demanded that he apologize to Muslims, and commentators left and right have subjected him to vociferous criticism. At the same time, however, he seems to have tapped into the frustration that many Americans feel about official Washingtons politically correct insistence, in the face of ever-mounting evidence to the contrary, that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists.
Although Tancredos presidential hopes and possibly even his seat in Congress may go up in the mushroom cloud created by the furor over his remarks, the idea of destroying Islamic holy sites in response to a devastating terror attack on American soil is not going to go away particularly as long as elected officials rush after every Islamic terror attack to repeat the well-worn mantras about how they know that the overwhelming majority of Muslims abhor violence and reject extremism, and are our faithful and reliable allies against terrorism in all its forms.
However, although the resentment Tancredo has tapped is real and has legitimate causes, his suggestion that among the many things we might do to prevent such an attack on America would be to lay out there as a possibility the destruction of Islamic holy sites is still wrong but not generally for the reasons that most analysts have advanced.
Primarily, of course, it contravenes Western principles of justice which, if discarded willy-nilly, would remove a key reason why we fight at all: to preserve Western ideas of justice and human rights that are denied by the Islamic Sharia law so beloved of jihad terrorists. But even aside from moral questions, which are increasingly thorny in this post-Hiroshima, post-Dresden world, there are practical reasons to reject what Tancredo has suggested.
Tancredos idea, of course, is based on the old Cold War principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Both sides threatened each other with nuclear annihilation, and the threats canceled each other out. The Soviets would no more risk Moscow being wiped out than we would Washington.
But applying this principle to present-day Islamic jihad is not so easy. The Soviets did not inculcate into their cadres the idea enunciated by Maulana Inyadullah of al-Qaeda shortly after 9/11: The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death. This lust for death runs through the rhetoric of todays jihadists, and goes all the way back in Islamic history to the Quran, in which Allah instructs Muhammad: Say (O Muhammad): O ye who are Jews! If ye claim that ye are favoured of Allah apart from (all) mankind, then long for death if ye are truthful (62:6). Will men who love death, who glorify suicide bombing and praise God for beheadings and massacres, fear the destruction of holy sites? It seems unlikely in the extreme and that fact nullifies all the value this thread may have had as a deterrent. Nuke Mecca? Why bother? It wouldnt work.
Others have argued, however, that the deterrent value of destroying Islamic holy sites would lie not in giving jihad terrorists pause, but in showing Islam itself to be false and thus removing the primary motivation of todays jihad terrorists. If Allah is all-powerful and rewards those who believe in him while hating and punishing the disbelievers (the vilest of creatures, according to Quran 98:6), wouldnt he protect his holy sites from these disbelievers?
However, Muslims have weathered such shocks to their system in the past. In 1924, the secular government of Turkey abolished the caliphate; the caliph was considered the successor of the Prophet Muhammad as the religious and political leader of the Islamic community. By abolishing the office, Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk hoped to strike at the heart of political Islam and create a context in which Islam could develop something akin to the Western idea of the separation of religion and state. Instead, his act provided the impetus for the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood, the first modern Islamic terrorist organization, in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood and its offshoots (which include Hamas and Al-Qaeda), and indeed virtually all jihadist groups in the world today, date the misery of the Islamic world to the abolition of the caliphate. The ultimate goal of such groups is the restoration of this office, the reunification of the Islamic world under the caliph, and the establishment of the Sharia as the sole law in Muslim countries. Then the caliph would presumably take up one of his principal duties as stipulated by Islamic law: to wage offensive jihad against non-Muslim states in order to extend Sharia rule to them also.
The abolition of the caliphate, then, accomplished precisely the opposite of what Ataturk hoped it would: it gave the adherents of political Islam a cause around which to rally, recruit, and mobilize. In essence, it gave birth to the crisis that engulfs the world today. It is likely that a destruction of the Kaaba or the Al-Aqsa Mosque would have the same effect: it would become source of spirit, not of dispirit. The jihadists would have yet another injury to add to their litany of grievances, which up to now have so effectively confused American leftists into thinking that the West is at fault in this present conflict. But the grievances always shift; the only constant is the jihad imperative. Let us not give that imperative even greater energy in the modern world by supplying such pretexts needlessly.
Our job was to get skinny and send it to the fat cats. Intel's problems are in their laps.
Let me get this straight, it was bad to get rid of the caliphate because it created terroists group to bring back the caliphate and the caliphate is bad because it would cause war agianst nonmuslim nations. So what he is is saying it is better to have muslim nations fighting war than to have mulsim terrorists? Sounds like stupid logic to me. Than again bring back the caliphate, let them start a war, nuke them and their stone back to the prestone age or slime period out of the pond. No more islam....hhhuummmmm. Liberals would never go for it so I vote for getting rid of the caliphate and never letting it return.
see my tagline.
I like your thinking. Only prob is that it gives them a few chances to kill more civilized people.
The next suspicious package found anywhere should trigger direct hits on medina and mecca. Sorry, lib-cons but its true.
Osama Bin Laden's trying to stir up a worldwide "faith-based war" against the rest of the world is suicidal, so our policy ought to be to involve the Buddhists and Hindus as quickly as possible. Subject to local complications, of course.
Beneath those two populous millstones, Islam would disappear without a trace.
Actually something similar to this happened during Tamerlane's comquest of the Middle East. After defeating Bayezid and incidentally using him as a footrest, Tamerlane turned the main mosque in Damascus into a stable, called all the imams in and lectured them about why Allah was not on their side or this wouldn't have happened. BTW, Tamerlane was a muslim but apparently he was a Mongol first.
Problem is, it's not a mischaracterization. There is a group of folks on this thread whose preferred response basically boils down to genocide. If you want "completely rabid," that's a good place to start.
Any sensible person must reject--out-of hand--any writer who implies, however indirectly, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima or the conventional attack on Dresden was unjustified.
You've mischaracterized the author's statement. When his point is understood properly, your argument evaporates.
This isn't an argument against nuking Mecca under ultimate extremity--it's an argument against any violent action or threat of violent action; as such it is on its face preposterous.
The "ultimate extremity" would be a decision that ALL Muslims would be to blame for a nuclear attack on us, and that ALL Muslims are thus fair game for retaliatory nuclear attacks. It is certainly true that those responsible must be hunted down and destroyed. However, if it is not the case that "ALL Muslims" are to blame for a nuclear attack, then there is no justification for an "ultimate extremity" that calls for large scale attacks on "ALL Muslims."
Again, the supposedly reasoned response has nothing to do with the actual facts. The abolition of the caliphate in fact accomplished exactly what Ataturk desired: it established Turkey as a secular state. Ataturk couldn't possibly have cared less what a bunch of nut-cases in Egypt used as a justification for their murderous ideology.
You've once again missed the author's point, which is that Ataturk's actions had unintended consequences, as spelled out (accurately) by the author. Nevertheless, if we instead grant your alternative hypothesis about the rise of Radical Islam, all you've really done is acknowledged the author's underlying point, which is that Radical Islam is in fact a response to some external event.
the logic of his position leads inevitably to helplessness and surrender, and his historical assertions are simply laughable.
No, and no. The author's actual position has little in common with your characterization of it. He is not suggesting helplessness and surrender; very far from it.
We have.......millions.......of pigs, swine, hogs, porkers, javelinas.
"Tremble, O Islam, before our wrath!"
How's that?
For the fun of it!!! Radioactively boil Brer Rabbit, don't throw him in the briar patch.
How do we 'know' this?
Will they bow to a crater?
You're right on that one.
Which is why I think the idea of nuking just Mecca would not work.
It needs to be broader.
Remember the Cold War? Do you think that at the height of the Cold War, that the Russian military would have thought twice if our MAD policy was to nuke only Moscow?
No, they would have thought it an acceptable loss for the conquest of Western capitalism.
And the same goes for the Islamofascists. Losing Mecca is an acceptable loss for a world caliphate.
Now, if we were to consider nuking all the major Islamofascist population centers as a new MAD doctrine...
I think that only then would the Islamofascists pause to consider.
So what is and would be your response if we are nuked by Islamic warriors???
So waste your time with me. Your response to another attack on the USA, please?
Hey, me too. Not to them. Islam has the 5 pillars. If you don't do all 5 you go to hell (thousand cockroaches eating your stomach, the works). Make one impossible and yes, the entire faith goes down the proverbial tubes.
There is really nothing you can do to deal with the insane. If they happen to be insane and murderous your best bet is to eliminate them. Other than that it really does not matter what you do. They are crazy. So, since it does not matter what you do then do whatever you want.
Since Mecca is the home office and not near by why nuke it? It's better to eliminate all the local "franchise" operations.
Ahhh, but to quote Dr. Strangelove ... "But the whole point of having a DOOMSDAY device is for other people to KNOW that you have a DOOMSDAY device."
You have to let them know that it will happen. They should be scared s***less that we are even talking about it.
Radical Islamists believe that we are ultimately impotent -- we can't find Osama, and we can't even threaten to kill thousands of Muslims if there is an attack without the whole billion Muslims coming after us, and Allah would't let us destroy their holy places anyhow. They feel invulnerable. So they attack us with impunity. And so called "Moderate Muslims" are guided by the Koran to protect any Muslim against any unbeliever.
This is a very dangerous belief ... for us, and, unfortunately, for them. They evidently don't understand that, since the US convinced itself it was necessary to destroy Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US could equally well convince itself to destroy Mecca. It would be much better for all if Muslims believed that we would incinerate all Muslim Holy Places if we were attacked with WMD.
OR ...
Maybe they should worry that some members of the Zionist Conspiracy might decide that turn about is fair play, and make their own dirty bomb and contaminate Mecca with radioactive cesium -- making it uninhabitable for the next 100 years.
I don't know. Let's test the proposition, unless you have some other bright idea.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.