Posted on 02/11/2006 12:32:55 PM PST by Exton1
"Muslim Opinion" Be Damned Monday, February 6, 2006 By: Alex Epstein
America's attempts to appease "Muslim opinion" are depraved and suicidal.
As Muslim groups express outrage and issue death threats over cartoons depicting Mohammad, many Western leaders are responding, not with condemnations of the death threats, but with condemnations of the cartoons--and of the newspapers that published them.
This is the latest example of the apologies and hand-wringing that occur anytime there is any widespread display of Muslim anger. To listen to most of our foreign-policy commentators, the biggest problem facing America today is the fact that many Muslims are mad at us.
"Whatever one's views on the [Iraq] war," writes a "New York Times" columnist, "thoughtful Americans need to consider . . . the bitter anger that it has provoked among Muslims around the world." In response to Abu Ghraib, Ted Kennedy lamented, "We have become the most hated nation in the world, as a result of this disastrous policy in the prisons." Muslim anger over America's support of Israel, we are told, is a major cause of anti-American terrorism.
We face, these commentators say, a crisis of "Muslim opinion." We must, they say, win the "hearts and minds" of angry Muslims by heaping public affection on Islam, by shutting down Guantanamo, by being more "evenhanded" between free Israel and the terrorist Palestinian Authority--and certainly by avoiding any new military action in the Muslim world. If we fail to win over "Muslim opinion," we are told, we will drive even more to become terrorists.
All of this evades one blatant truth: the hatred being heaped on America is irrational and undeserved. Consider the issue of treatment of POWs. Many Muslims are up in arms about the treatment of prisoners of war in Iraq and at Guantanamo--many of whom were captured on battlefields, trying to kill Americans. Yet these same Muslims are silent about the summary convictions and torture--real torture, with electric drills and vats of acid--that are official policy and daily practice throughout the Middle East.
Or consider "Muslim opinion" over the United States' handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the United States is accused of not being "hard enough" on Israel--a free nation with laws that protect all citizens, Jew and Arab alike--for Israel's supposed mistreatment of Palestinians. Yet "Muslim opinion" reveres the Palestinian Authority, a brutal dictatorship that deprives Palestinians of every basic freedom, keeps them in unspeakable poverty, and routinely tortures and executes peaceful dissenters.
So-called Muslim opinion is not the unanimous and just consensus that its seekers pretend. It is the irrational and unjust opinion of the world's worst Muslims: Islamists and their legions of "moderate" supporters and sympathizers. These people oppose us not because of any legitimate grievances against America, but because they are steeped in a fundamentalist interpretation of their religion--one that views America's freedom, prosperity, and pursuit of worldly pleasures as the height of depravity. They do not seek respect for the rights of the individual (Muslim or non-Muslim), they seek a world in which the rights of all are sacrificed to the dictates of Islam.
The proper response to Islamists and their supporters is to identify them as our ideological and political enemies--and dispense justice accordingly. In the case of our militant enemies, we must kill or demoralize them--especially those regimes that support terrorism and fuel the Islamist movement; as for the rest, we must politically ignore them and intellectually discredit them, while proudly arguing for the superiority of Americanism. Such a policy would make us safe, expose Islamic anti-Americanism as irrational and immoral, and embolden the better Muslims to support our ideals and emulate our ways.
President Bush, like most politicians and intellectuals, has taken the opposite approach to "Muslim opinion": appeasement. Instead of identifying anti-American Muslims as ideological enemies to be discredited, he has appealed to their sensibilities and met their demands--e.g., sacrificing American soldiers to save Iraqi civilians and mosques. Instead of seeking to crush the Islamists by defeating the causes they fight for--such as Islamic world domination and the destruction of Israel--he has appeased those causes, declaring Islam a "great religion" and rewarding the Palestinian terrorist Jihad with a promised Palestinian state. Instead of destroying terrorist regimes that wage war against the West--including, most notably, Iran--he has sought their "cooperation" and even cast some as "coalition partners."
Such measures have rewarded our enemy for waging physical and spiritual war against us. "Condemn America," they have learned, "and American leaders will praise your ideals and meet your demands." "Attack America via terrorist proxy," terrorist states and movements have been taught, "and America will neither blame you nor destroy you, but redouble its efforts to buy your love."
Every attempt to appease "Muslim opinion" preserves, promotes, and emboldens our enemies. Every concession to angry Muslim mobs gives hope to the Islamist cause. Every day we allow terrorist regimes to exist gives their minions time to execute the next Sept. 11. America needs honest leadership with the courage to identify and defeat our enemies--"Muslim opinion" be damned. They should begin by declaring that militant groups and states that threaten anti-Western violence in response to free speech will be met, not with appeasement, but with destruction.
Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.
Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by imams Northern school teachers; will learn from Arabic Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision." --- General Pat Cleburne, CSA
LOL! But it's a great analogy.
We should send a present of some well placed daisy cutters over Mecca on the next Hajj. We may not kill them all but the message will be sent that we think their "religion" is BS and the Mr. NiceGuy days are over. Any mosque is fair game. Your Koran is a bunch of gibberish written by the wife of an illiterate psychopath as dictated by him. He dictated as he saw "visions" (see; opium induced hallucinations). THe Koran contradicts itself on numerous occasions and is scientically wrong( ie.it states the sun sets in a swamp). The prisoners at Gitmo and any other prison we may have need to be subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding, and anything else up to the point that the liberal pussies cry foul because we all know liberals secretly admire al qaeda memebers and given the opportunity would have trysts with them. I haven't even gotten into the Satanic Verses for which Salman Rushdie nearly paid for with his life. But for those that are interested I encourage you to Google the satan verses. My only hope is that George Bush will stop with the Religion of Peace mantra, take off the friggin gloves, give these people a chance to accept christianity, and if they refuse send them to their paradise err hell.
Every sentence in this article is "right on"!
It's time for steel tipped shoes :)
When I want the opinion of a muslim i will give it to him, then slap it out of him!
Thanks! Cleburne's words are pretty apt, too. But such is the history of warfare. The question is when will we accept that this is war. One certainly hopes that the realization comes before it is too late.
Steel-tipped explosive-laden...
Don't know about anybody else, but given the opportunity to see a bunch of the deranged prostrate themselves in a specific direction as an "in your face" exercise, I would keep a large, finely-shaped image of a pig on a pedestal and and place it in front of them, then see how long the "protest" lasts...
I wish we could call this the New Bush Doctrine. Instead, he's the champion of the appeasers.
Indeed. I guess capitalism is one of the ways to express our freedom of expression. Lol.
http://kokonutpundits.blogspot.com/2006/02/visions-of-mohammed-in-3d.html
Great analogy - we operate under a Lincoln version of what the USA should be. The Jeffersonian ideal was swallowed up in the leviathan central government that 12 years of Reconstruction and Northern arrogance spawned. FDR brought it to full fruition with the New (Raw) Deal of the 1930s.
Ask what your government can do for you - period. As Barry Goldwater said-any government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take it all away.
<< We have to have our own attack - not response - plan thought out, and I'm not convinced we have one. I think Bush, who is a good and idealistic man, may be so convinced by his own rhetoric that he is ignoring the simple fact that these people, BASED ON THEIR INSANE IDEOLOGY, hate us and want to kill us. No ifs, ands or buts. >>
Reckon you're on the Right Track. Especially about Mr Bush.
Now think about this one: America hasn't won a hot war since 1945.
North Korea is still there.
Like Pyongyang and its psychopathologically-hesperophobic capo di tutti capi state, "china," all of Vietnam is now run by the murderous gangsters called "communists" from whom Bill Cli'ton ran and for whom John Kerry fought long and hard to see to victory. And three and a half million South East Asians are dead at their hands.
We turned our backs on our dead Marines in Lebanon and Iran's mad mullahs were afforded victory over us by Jimmy Carter, who also treasonously delivered our Panama Canal to Peking's psychopaths. And set off World War Four.
The treasonous and loathesome and fearsome Cli'ton Crime Family provided its predatory Peking pals with our nation's every nuclear and aeronautical and missile and military secret and technological treasure and, as cravenly as its front-man had run from his Vietnam callup, ran from every hint of trouble it encountered anywhere in the world - including in New York City. And thus incited and aided and abetted and facilitated the atrocities of Yemen and Nairobi and Dar es Salam.
And of September 11 2001.
As of now Mr Bush is conducting American Soldier-intensive Iraq almost as if he was a Cli'ton clone and most certainly as if he was a cloned Colin Powell or Tiny Blair.
But I reckon you are on the right track.
Now, if only we can elect a leader capable of understanding the threat long and presently posed Judeo-Christian/Western/Human Civilization. And willing to ruthlessly preemptively attack and destroy those who pose it and those who support them.
BUMPping
The sentiments you have expressed should not be written, not out of fear but out of recognition that there are still some reasonable Muslims out there. An American city must die before the national will to do as you suggest appears.
Mr. Epstein should be promoted to Senior Fellow TODAY. He speaks the plain, unvarnished truth.
This picture says it all. They've ALREADY assumed the position.
Let's just put a picture of Mohammed in a jar of urine and call it "Piss Allah" and then protest when the NEA refuses to fund it.
Better yet, someone photograph the above and sell it on T-shirts.
Cork-suckers.
I agree. Our current problems are the result of decades of appeasement. Unfortunately, many of the people in power still seem to believe that appeasement or a sort of bland look-the-other-way policy is the way to go, despite the fact that all it does is postpone the crisis and let it get worse in the long run.
For a long time, this has affected only other countries: that is, we turned over Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, North Korea, etc. to various thugs, but since they were so far away it had no direct effect on us at that time. Now, however, it's all coming back to haunt us. Not all of these countries may be Islamic, but Islam is the international totalitarian ideology that has finally empowered some crummy little hell-holes and given them a common cause against us. In this they are now supported by non-Islamic but totalitarian countries that we have been ignoring, such as North Korea and Venezuela.
The question is, of course, what to do now. And unfortunately, I suspect that our government is thinking more along the lines of urging us all to buy duct tape and be prepared for the worst, instead of going and aggressively slapping these countries upside the head so that they don't even think of messing with us.
But then it's possible that it's already too late to do that and we really can only wait for an attack to which we must respond, since these countries are already so well armed and so united that the slap upside the head is no longer possible without wiping out the entire world.
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