Recognizing our differences

     Not a day goes by that we don’t hear a drumbeat of stories about the “civilians” being killed in Lebanon and the growing “civilian” crisis there.  But what is a civilian?  If Israel bombs the home of a civil Hezbollah leader and kills the leader, his wife and his four kids are there 6 civilian deaths?  Five?  Four?  None?

     Before you answer, please view the matter from the standpoint of the Islamic extremists.  You know, the ones who raise their children to be suicide bombers and human mine field clearers.  The ones who believe that dying for their religion is the most honorable act one can commit.  The ones who targeted civilians on 9/11 and routinely target civilians with missles and suicide bombers in Israel, Iraq, Spain, etc., etc.  The ones who routinely use “civilians” as human shields.  The ones who turn mosques into ammo dumps and strategic headquarters.  Viewed through their eyes there are no such things as civilians. 

     So why all the talk about civilian death and disaster?  Well, while the Western mind has great trouble understanding the Islamic extremists’ view of the world, the extremists understand their enemy very well.  They are quite happy to trot out wailing mothers and maimed children and scream about how brutal and inhumane it all is.  They play on our softness, our tender concern for innocents.  Only in a world gone mad, or a world in which the opponents understand us very well and we understand them not at all, could such tactics succeed.  We have one side that routinely targets civilians and the other side that works diligently to avoid civilian casualties.  Yet, to hear the American left tell it, the second group is the inhumane one.  They buy the wailing mothers ever time.

     We cannot make sense of the current world struggle between radical Islam and the West unless we undertand the very different persepctive our enemies bring to the battle.  They understand us very well and play us like a fiddle.  It’s about time we understand them as well they understand us, and judge them (and their “civilian” disasters) through their eyes.  DQ