Try a little tenderness . . . but only if you have a death wish *UPDATED*
A repeated thread in the comments lately has been the claim that the reason the terrorists are mean to us is because we’re mean to them. If we behaved more “morally,” they would inevitably yield to our good example. My response to this kind of argument has always been the same (and I’ll quote from my own comment, because I’m too lazy to retype it):
Regarding Gandhi: His pacificism worked only because Britain was not a nation that was going to respond in a bloody, violent fashion. It wasn’t Gandhi’s morality that won India’s freedom, it was England’s. The same holds true for MLK’s non-violent protest. While the South may have had profound racist problems, it was the fact that America as a whole was a moral nation that his tactics work.
When one has an enemy that revels in blood and conquest, that makes no secret of its desire for world domination, and that is vocal in its hatred and disdain for you, whether that enemy is Nazi Germany, Iran, or your average Islamist, your restraint and morality is not only irrelevant, it is a red flag before that blood-thirsty bull.
Forbearance cannot be a one way street. If all the pacifistic forbearance is on one side, and all the violence on the other, you simply end up with a bunch of dead pacifists — and, worse, dead pacifists who have engendered the slaughter of everyone else unlucky enough to be yoked to their sides.
The question in any war isn’t just your own nature, it’s your enemies’ as well. As Mike Devx pointed out in the same comment thread, while the British were initially somewhat violent in their response to the Indian riots, they pulled back, sickened by their own violence. The opposite was true for the Germans. Their tentative forays into aggression in the 1930s against Jews, Communists, homosexuals and the mentally ill excited their blood lust. Rather than pulling back, they accelerated the killing, and became ever more murderous and creative in their brutality. What finally ended the blood soaked orgy in which they’d engaged for more than a decade wasn’t their own horror at what they’d done, but the fact that America, once roused, had the military might to destroy that regime.
With that in mind, you should read Aaron Klein’s Schmoozing With Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans to a Jew! or, at the very least, read the American Thinker’s review about the book (from which I quote, below). As the book’s title indicates, Klein, an Orthodox Jew, was able to talk to Islamists all over the world and they spilled their ideological guts to him. These guts show that, contrary to MSM and Progressive claims, they don’t want to live peacefully by our sides, their primary goal isn’t simply to clear the US out of Saudi Arabia, and they’re not at all interested in adopting Western values:
The Arab Palestinian leaders with whom Klein spoke are very candid about their dreams not only to wipe out Israel, but to establish a worldwide caliphate. Their plans for American society should awaken anyone who thinks the Arab terrorists are only Israel’s problem. And it should also smack awake all the moral relativists who equate Israel’s security measures with hegemonic brutality.
A deputy commander of Fatah’s al Aqsa Martyrs Bridade, Nasser Abu Azziz, explained to Klein that when sharia law is imposed in Western countries, “these sick people [homosexuals] will be treated in a very tough way,” explaining that the Islamic leadership will “prevent social and physical diseases like homosexuality.” All the terrorists whom Klein interviewed agreed that homosexuality would not be tolerated in the US once Islam rules.
And homosexuality is not all they condemn. The failure of western women to conform to Islamic standards of dress will reap harsh responses including, if necessary, torture. Sheik Hamad, a Hamas cleric, said those women who refuse to cover themselves in conformity with Islamic values would be punished either by imprisonment, whipping or stoning. And we aren’t just talking about Madonna’s bustiers: under the standard described by Klein’s interviewees, even Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who does in fact wear a robe — would be a target for stoning. She’s omitted the head covering.
[snip]
Klein’s interviews show that Palestinian leaders have also, and repeatedly, perpetrated a vile hoax on their acolytes. The myth of the seventy-two virgins in paradise who await each martyr is a theme echoed and believed by those who extol and consider suicide bombing an option. Klein’s subjects do not explain how the appetite for virgins fits with the love of Allah as an incentive for becoming a suicide bomber.
When asked about the source for the promise of the seventy-two virgins, Ala Senakhreh, West Bank chief of Fatah’s Martyrs Brigade, insisted such a promise was made in the Koran. When pressed about where exactly that promise could be located, neither Senakhreh nor any of his dozen henchmen clerics present could find such a passage. After much anxious searching, the Sheik became increasing hostile and Klein quickly left. He had apparently discovered the point at which the terrorists’ hospitality collided with their refusal to be questioned closely about their ideological weapons.
These are not good people, and wishing will not make them so. As Mike Devx pointed out, they are the modern equivalent of Nazis, people who embrace murder both as a vehicle to achieve their social and political goals, and as a pleasant pastime. They can be stopped only by brute force, not by peaceful example. And because everything veers back into American politics right about now, that fact alone is a good reason to vote for McCain over Hillbama.
UPDATE: Just so you can see the faces of the enemies of Western civilization.
