Imperialistic plans

One of the things about conspiracy theorists is that they live in a hazy world of innuendo and speculation.  There’s never any hard evidence to support their theory, just a lot of disparate facts that can be spun together into a tangled and usually nonsensical tapestry.  As often as not, the beauty of the theories is the complete absence of facts, a vacuum that itself is sufficient to convince the conspiracy theorist that there’s something rotten in Denmark.  The 911 Truthers, for example, are unfazed by the fact that their conspiracy, to be true, would require both the complicity of and years of silence by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of Americans.  If anything, this unnatural silence, coupled with the fact the buildings’ collapse and their all-encompassing hatred for BushCheney is all they need to deny the known facts about 19 Muslims who hijacked plans and crashed them, with their fuel tanks at almost full capacity, into buildings.  Instead, they are deeply enmeshed in a shadowy world of conspiracies from which it’s doubtful they’ll ever escape.

I mention all this because many on the Left think that I’m falling prey to conspiracy theorist paranoia when I say that Islamists are out to get us.  My defense, always, is that I’m not trying to piece together random and irrelevant pieces of evidence (or the absence of any evidence) to reach this conclusion.  I don’t have to — the Islamists are saying it themselves:

And in a sermon televised on Friday, Yunis al-Astal, a Hamas MP and cleric, told worshipers that Islam would soon conquer Rome, “the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and which has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam,” just as Constantinople was.

Rome, he said, would become “an advanced post for the Islamic conquests which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe.”

In his address aired on Hamas’s Al-Aksa TV and also translated by MEMRI, Astal told his audience: “Allah has chosen you for himself and for his religion, so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation to the phase of succession, security, and consolidation of power, and even to conquests through da’wa [preaching] and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world.”

“I believe that our children or our grandchildren will inherit our jihad and our sacrifices, and Allah willing, the commanders of the conquest will come from among them. Today, we instill these good tidings in their souls, and by means of the mosques and the Koran books, and the history of our prophet, his companions, and the great leaders, we prepare them for the mission of saving humanity from the hellfire on the brink of which they stand.”

The clip can be viewed at http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1739.htm.

One could conclude, of course, that these are just words and, as we all know, sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can never hurt us.  However, there is no absence of evidence about sticks and stones.  Beginning with 9/11, Islamists inspired by these very types of words have committed 10,904 acts of violence in the name of their religion. With these actual facts, you don’t need to grub around on grassy knolls or wear tinfoil on your head to figure out that something very, very nasty is going on.  As an elderly Holocaust survivor memorably said, “When someone says he’s going to kill you, believe him.”

As for me, I don’t believe that all Muslims are imperialistic genocidal maniacs, just as we now know that, sixty five plus years ago, all Germans were not imperialistic genocidal maniacs.  But the one sure thing history has taught us is that, in any group, when a critical mass becomes homicidally crazy, it’s irrelevant whether the entire group actually believes in or supports the crazies.  For purposes of the damage that can be done, all that’s required is that critical mass.