If the enemy tells you blatantly up front "I am going to attack you and kill every last one of you. My religion does not allow me to do anything else. I will rape and kill your children and your wives and I will behead you and any who stand against my religion" Then it's no longer an assumption that he will kill innocents, it's a fact. The only question is "when will he kill".
The only way to protect the innocents is to make him incapable of harming them. That's why we have prisons for people and war for cultures.
The core instructions are in the Decalogue: thou shalt commit no murder. That does not mean that, if provoked or threatened, you may not kill.
Exactly. And we as a people (that is, all non-moslems) are under dire and deadly threat from these satanists called moslems. They will either kill us or enslave us. Their religion leaves them no other options. We must act in self defense and in defense of the innocents.
It means you may not initiate assault nor may you respond with force far in excess of what was applied to you.
Again, I do not find that in the bible. God commanded the children of Israel to utterly destroy His enemies. Why? So that in the future the survivors of those enemies could not corrupt and destroy His people.
Is it moral to eradicate a culture that attacks you and swears to continue attacking you as long as you or they are alive? Yes it is. In fact, it is immoral not to eradicate them.
The question also does not bring what response those you respond to apply back at you. If they counter-attack, you may counter-attack, and this can continue until someone stops being the first to strike. If you were always second, then you are always assured of having acted morally in a morally gray area.
The way to stop the response is to eradicate the problem initially. We know from a simple reading of the koran that the moslem must always war against any non-moslem. They are commanded to fight until we are enslaved or dead. So how many non-moslems must die (and in the case of non-Christians be sent to hell) before we can defend the world against this cult?
Defense of the innocent is never morally gray
Of course, if the USA is no longer a Christian nation, then none of this applies and any standard for waging war that appears to suit the fancy of the ruling class would be in order. Is that preferable to you?
If the USA was no longer a Christian nation then we wouldn't care. If you are satanist anyway you may as well be moslem. Perhaps that explains why the liberals are so pro-moslem. They will side with anything that is anti-Christ
I am Catholic, as it happens and resolutely anti-Muslim. I am Conservative, as well, so sliding liberal in there doesn’t stick either.
In first argument, you make the case that the enemy has defined himself verbally. It could be bluster (and would be if we had real men in charge of our government). It could be a threat intended to intimidate, if it could. It’s called poker when you sit around a table and have cards in your hand. In any case, it is all theoretical.
If such an enemy had so expressed himself (and yes, I agree the Muslim nations have done just this, Iran in particular), then I am arming myself just as fast as I can. I have put early-warning systems in place. I have distributed my armed forces to all locations I consider to be especially vulnerable or desirable to my enemy as targets. I have prepared the populace by not sugar-coating these threats, but making sure they are published so everyone is on their guard against a potentially mortal enemy. I may even place forces in provocative locations (off, Yemen, for instance, or perhaps deep in the Persian Gulf) as canaries in the coal mine.
But, I still do not throw the first punch.
Your second point: I am under no illusion that life as a Christian (an Anglican priest, no less) would be any better than the dhimmitude and likely would be killed outright (if they felt merciful for some unprecedented reason that day). I might be offered the option of conversion but probably not. That is why I would be on full-alert against them. I would leave as little opening for them to attack as I can manage. I would be talking up those I might be able to trust as allies to be further threats to them.
I would still not attack them outright.
As to eradicating the initial problem. That seems to require a lot of cities-into-glass as I see it. That will not solve the problem but would certainly precipitate wider war. If we are perceived even tangentially as being morally in the wrong, we would lose no matter how many Muslim cities we flattened. Once again, we must leave no doubt that we are defended, that we are alert and that they are the ones we are watching day and night. They must have no illusion that we will not answer at least as harshly as we are addressed, and perhaps more (proportional does not mean strictly equivalent: we may up the ante, as it were).
But we still don’t strike first.
I am arguing in fact from the theory of war as enunciated by St. Thomas Aquinas with whose writings you may be familiar. It would be novel to suggest he was a satanist. It would be equally novel to suggest it of me
That said, I mean what I say: the USA is founded on principles which are best stated and most deeply ingrained in Christian theology, doctrine and praxis. That the Founders were primarily active Christians was a great advantage in how our governing principles were set up and how the government was structured. Atheists down the ages have tampered with that great structure and it no longer serves the same purposes so well. It was THAT well constructed that it still works better than any other, even in a maimed and defective condition. This is at least partly due to the magnificent vitality, courage and virtue of the American people, who have stood four-square against tyranny in all its forms. It may be we may have to stand against it here at home. But the fact now is that the US is at most a nation populated mostly by Christians. That means that this nation is not strictly bound by Christian ethics and could, should she choose, act as you suggest.
I strongly recommend against it, not least for realpolitik reasons as well as moral and theological ones. The Church never should strike first (even the Crusades were a response and not a unilateral assault), nor should any nation mainly populated by Churchmen and women.
I think that's true. It's like in a criminal conspiracy case: as soon as they take steps toward the commission of the crime (getting the components for explosives, drawing up a detailed map, etc.) they must be stopped by force. They've already started their "course of action": you don't have to wait until they actually complete it.
"The only way to protect the innocents is to make him incapable of harming them."
Again correct. Your whole strategic plan is to make the aggressors themselves incapable of action. Target their fighters and crush them to the ground.
"That's why we have prisons for people and war for cultures."
Yes, with this clarification: "culture" is too broad a term. It includes all the humans of a group, and their entire way of life: families, food, music, homes, land, law, literature, etc. etc., the good and the bad, all mixed together. We don't make war on cultures. We make war on something more limited: the aggressors and their military assets.
"The core instructions are in the Decalogue: thou shalt commit no murder. That does not mean that, if provoked or threatened, you may not kill."
That's also true. The absolute prohibition is: you do not, in a directly intended manner, slay noncombatants or--- another way to put it --- those who are not deliberate accomplices in acts of aggression. The Bible calls this "shedding innocent blood" and the Lord declares that He "hates" this, and says it is an "abomination to My soul". Here in this literal Bible translation (Link) He says it a dozen-plus times. God apparently thinks this point requires ongoing and insistent reinforcement. You can see why.
And that's the Old Testament. This gets even stronger in the New Testament.
"Is it moral to eradicate a culture that attacks you?...In fact, it is immoral not to eradicate them."
Once again, you are required to use physical force, even lethal force, to stop a determined physical aggressor. As for an aggressor culture, it's more complex. If the culture has hell-bent features, you can attack those features via other means, for example by legal suppression of its financers and enablers, by argument, education and media campaigns, by exposing its elements of ugliness, evil, and futility, or by appealing to conversion to a better standard of love and reason.
That goes for toxic elements of our own culture, too; not to digress, but we are among the world's major cultural exporters of filth, e.g. sodomy, pornography, and child-murder.
I hate the despotic and Christ-defying system that is fully-developed politically-empowered Islam.
As for Muslim people: I think God wants us to treat them discerningly as fellow human beings. Some are perpetrators, most are victims.