Posted on 07/28/2005 2:12:17 PM PDT by Jean S
Why not nuke 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. Although many have attacked him for the wrong reasons, his suggestion is still wrong.
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.
Tancredo’s 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 today’s jihadists, and goes back to the Qur’an. Will men who glorify suicide bombing and praise their 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.
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 today’s 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 Qur’an 98:6), wouldn’t 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 Ka’aba 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.
His pointis wrong....Turkey stopped radical Islamism with it's actions in 1924....Because they have finally emerged again after 80 years simply means that we need to crush the jihadists now....Mecca is a fine threat, they should know that if they destroy major Western cities we will respond in kind....Major force IS the only thing Islam has ever respopnded to.....They will not reform themselves....Wake the bleep up....
I think you're a GIANT squid and I hope your statements are read by all......
I wonder where Air Force General Curtis LeMay would stand on this.
I'm with you 1000%, Dog.
And about what the author said about the destruction of their holiest of holies serving as a rallying point - why the hell does anyone worry about making them mad?? They already hate us and want us dead as it is! I'd say that's pretty damned mad, wouldn't you?
Solution: 10 Megaton air bursts from "clean" fusion bombs. Incinerates everything on the ground without kicking up too much radioactive fallout.
/ Atomic Cowboy
Right, and those moth-- f------, barba---, worth----, pissan-, pedo-----s need to realize that thay are not dealing with a bunch of whining, hollywood simps.....
The best way to uncover the enemy is to make them angry.
The best way to end war and ensure peace is to kill the enemy.
Ok. You found me out... there is a little touch of 'green' in me :)
After all...
I was going to say something about fertilizer, but changed my mind. No need to be morbidly descriptive.
Why stop at mecca?
Excellently stated. Just perfect. I'm just nervous that we are waiting too long to teach them one final "hadith" - the last "revealed truth" from ON HIGH! It's called "blood and thunder," world without end, Amen.
Thanks for such a great comment, Phsstpok!
Char :)
No argument there.
- F. Zappa, Dumb All Over
Saw your screen mane again and couldn't help myself. Good choice, BTW. ;-D
"The guys running this war on their side are cowards, and they are giving suicide missions to idiots. The Japanese were 100 times smarter and braver than these morons and were quite willing to die for their king in WWII. The Japanese understood what Hiroshima meant."
Well said.
Thanks brother. My ancestry has endured 500 years of Islamic rule. I know what they are.
" they shall not approach the Sacred Mosque [Mecca, the Kaaba]"
Best reason I know to get rid of Mecca if they take a step of magnitude against US.
Easiest way for this to happen is for a few elites to get it in the neck and in the pocketbook.
Tancredo has been vilified greatly, but some in power must be considering this option. I would like to know what the trigger will be to utterly destroy these villains. More than that, I would like for the islamofascist to know what the trigger is. It is my belief that they do not believe there is any trigger, and therefore if there was an internal impediment to them imposing a nuclear strike, it is dissipated by the notion that we will not do such a thing. If I am correct in assessing these fascists, then we are sticking our finger in he dike and waiting for the bomb to detonate. New York, Washington, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Omaha?
If we persist in seizing the misunderstanding of Islam and press the issue of a "peaceful religion", we will loose, if only by allowing these terrorists to inflict their terror.
I have one other question for all of my freeper friends. When a nuclear device is detonated in this country, what will be our response? For our leadership to respond is to immediately affirm that their assessment was wrong and therefore their remedy was wrong. Their failure to be honest in this assessment and engage in their willfully inaccurate analysis of a "peaceful religion" will carry a price too high to imagine.
I am not smart enough to know what to do. No American wants innocents to die,....not American....not Arab. As President Bush said, we may be effective in stopping 100 attacks. They have to be effective in carrying out a singular attack to effectuate the near destruction of Western civilization.
If this is a war in the sense of WWI and WWII, and I think it is, then it seems the proper response is to end it as quickly as possible. I believe we need to demonstrate our willingness to pull the nuclear trigger. Perhaps in the Tora Bora region of western Afganistan/eastern Pakistan region and serve notice upon all Arab leaders that are beligerents toward America that they need to know that their capitol may be next if al Queda is not destroyed.
Very well said!
Funny how that is..
And how much trouble have the Carthaginians caused lately?
Eradication works
If this is done right, no one will have to be nuked. We did it with the former USSR and we can do it with the Muslim world.
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