Posted on 03/04/2008 5:38:25 AM PST by jdm
Not long ago, my son and I had a dinner argument over the war against radical Islamist terrorism. He’s a brilliant academic, about to enter graduate school for either math, physics, or both, but he sometimes gets trapped in his rationalism — which, to be honest, isn’t exactly the worst thing a father could wish for his son. He insisted that violence only made the problem worse, and that we had to find a negotiated settlement with Islamist terrorists.
Alan Dershowitz had an answer for that in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. In an essay entitled “Worshippers of Death,” Dershowitz argued that the West has to understand that terrorists use our rationalism as perhaps their greatest weapon against us:
Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women — some married with infant children — are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:
“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: “[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.” Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”
“The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: “We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: “It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion.”…
As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will be shot at — some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the “harsh arithmetic of pain,” whereby civilian casualties on both sides “play in their favor.” Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when they kill civilians, even inadvertently.
Dershowitz challenges Western preconceptions about the definition of combatants in an age of symmetrical warfare. Instead of generals fighting the last war, the entire civilization has reacted to the asymmetrical terrorist conflict with the wrong notion of which side has the short end of the asymmetric stick. It’s not just the suicide bomber who qualifies as an “illegal combatant”, but also the civilian who allows the construction of the bomb in his home, the civilian who sends money to support terrorist activities, and the mosque where such activities get planned.
That’s a far cry from the Western notion of war, and its scope reveals that the West may find itself outnumbered, if not outgunned, in this war. If we want to dismantle the networks that support and create terrorism, then we have to adjust our definitions of civilian and combatant accordingly. That change has been forced on us by the terrorists, which is one of the reasons we cannot abide their presence: they want real non-combatants to die in droves in order to undermine our morale, precisely because we want to remain in a World War II mentality.
Does that mean we should reject rationalism and our humanity and kill everything in sight? Of course not. I don’t want my son to think that we have to wipe out all Muslims any more than I want Muslims to think that they have to wipe out all Christians and Jews. We do have to understand, however, that strikes on terrorists who bury themselves among civilians will create the collateral damage terrorists fully intend as a demoralizing influence on our will to resist them.
In short, we need to understand this war as something other than Hitler rolling into Poland or Japan bombing a naval base in Pearl Harbor. We face a network of radical theological nihilists who want to destroy civilization by using our civilized impulses against us. We have to maintain those impulses but not shy away from doing the necessary work of ridding the globe of this new and dangerous cancer, militarily, politically, and financially. That will require the West to understand that the collateral deaths are the fault of the terrorists, whether that is in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, or anywhere else where terrorists launch attacks in the midst of civilians.
In short, it requires the West to dump the fantasy of the old set-piece paradigms and get serious about saving millions and perhaps billions of lives in the long run by doing what needs to be done now. The irrational do not seek a negotiated solution, and rationality cannot be rescued by surrendering to the irrational.
Rationalism is GREAT - as long as both sides are rational.
Alas, that is not the case when one is dealing with religious fanatics.
Yeah, if we just TALK to these people, and find out why they don’t like us, and not act so arrogant and beligerant in the world,
they’d be peaceful.
The brilliant young academician sounds like a prime candidate to attend the “Daniel Pearl/Nick Berg School of Diplomacy”
What- there isn’t any Daniel Pearl/Nick Berg School of Diplomacy? Hmm, wonder why..
To paraphrase Patton - let enemy die for his country.
Kill them all, and let God — or Allah — sort it out? The dilemma facing the civilized, secular West comes down to this: if we have to become as blood-thirsty as our enemies for survival’s sake, have we forever lost that which makes us superior to them?
“I don't want you to talk Mr. Bond... I WANT YOU TO DIE!”
Well, Coke Zero for me, anyway...
“No b*stard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb b*stard die for his country”. — George S. Patton
See my tag line
Hmmm. Steve Coughlin said these same thing in his treatise, “To Our Great Detriment” (Link below)
In case you forgot he’s the expert on Islam the Pentagon axed ostensibly “was due to an expensive contract.”
Right.
http://www.strategycenter.net/docLib/20080107_Coughlin_ExtremistJihad.pdf
That will require the West to understand that the collateral deaths are the fault of the terrorists, whether that is in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, or anywhere else where terrorists launch attacks in the midst of civilians.
Well, he almost gets it. People in "the West" need to understand that mosques are military installations. Islam is a military organization. It must be outlawed and the mosques must be destroyed.
ML/NJ
Ann Coulter is right. Kill the leaders and convert them to Christianity. Islam is a religion of death.
Sura (2:191-193) - "And slay them wherever ye find them , and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution of Muslims is worse than slaughter of non-believers...and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah."
Sura (5:33) - "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement"
Sura (8:12) - "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them "
Bukhari (52:177) - Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him. "
Tabari 7:97 The morning after the murder of Ashraf, the Prophet declared, "Kill any Jew who falls under your power. "
Ibn Ishaq: 327 - “Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion. ’”
The Japanese in WWII were as resolute or more than any jihadists. When the gloves came ALL the way off in late 1944 even they began to come around.
I guess people don’t read history any more. The US has ample precedent of facing hardened fanatics, and responding by creating more and more efficient ways to kill them.
Coke didn't even finish in the money.
If they want to die so much, then why do they cry foul when *civilians* are hit?
There are no civilians in islam.
People in the West need to understand that Islam gives us 3 and only 3 options -
Conversion
Humiliating Subjugation, subject to death on a whim
War
Choose.
Dear Islamists... Your conclusion is wrong, although the basis is correct... We DO love life. We (the West in general, and Americans in particular) want everyone to get along. We believe that everyone should be able to try to achieve "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It even says so in one of our most revered documents. We would LOVE to get along with you, and live together in peace, harmony, and prosperity. So, yes, we do love life.
But you claim to love death. Fine. If that's what you love, so be it. If you want to base your society on death, giving up any future hopes for your children, then so be it. You will never know peace, except through conquest. But those days of conquest will come to an end. Eventually, you will cross a line where the people of the West, and in particular, the Americans will say "ENOUGH!" and put the adults back in charge. You see, right now, we've gotten "fat and happy." But that can change in a moment.
While we don't love death, as you claim to, I can say, without a doubt, we do know it, and if we so choose, we're perfectly capable of using it as a terrible tool. Don't believe me? As the residents of Dresden, Germany, or Tokyo Japan. You want nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons to wreak havoc on the US? I'd like to remind you that those two cities were pretty much wiped out WITHOUT the use of nuclear weapons.
Put simply, we don't love, worship, or strive for death. We want everyone to live happily together. But eventually you'll push too far, and you'll bring ruinous consequences down upon yourselves. You'll yearn for the days of "Black September" when you tried to overthrow the Kingdom of Jordon, and your people were slaughtered.
This isn't the sort of thing that we enjoy or relish. But it's something that we've shown that we're quite good at, if necessary.
Mark
Killing for survival is different than killing for pleasure.
So, *No* to your question.
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