Thursday, July 07, 2005

If you don't bother the nasty terrorist, then the . . .

. . . nasty terrorist won't bother you. Yeah, right.

Think of our friends, relatives, and allies in Britain today, and our men and women who have volunteered to risk harm to themselves overseas in a daily effort to end the threat of terrorism.

I sure get tired of the silly notion that we should somehow negotiate with the terrorists to find some way of getting along. If we will only stop attacking, then they would surely be willing to sit down and talk it over, tra-la, tra-la.

We aren't being attacked by criminals to be dealt within the airy, intellectual confines of trial, rights of the accused, and punishment. We aren't faced with an organized, uniformed army pursuing some national political objective and fighting under the Geneva convention and historic notions of warfare. And we aren't being opposed by competitors negotiating for a piece of the action, where each side concedes that the other must receive at least a sufficient share so as to assure mutual survival of the negotiators.

Since 9 - 11, and before, the enemy's position has been something we cannot negotiate. They want us to be dead, Islamic, or dhimmi and living under sharia. And they appear to want nothing else from us, except perhaps the tools with which to make us dead, Islamic, and living under sharia. The only matter that can be negotiated is the tools to obtain the ends, sword, bullet, flame, or our willing capitulation, whatever will lead to one system of belief, theirs, dominant over the entire world. They will attack when they have a good opportunity, in New York, or in London, or in Madrid. They will attack over Lockerbie, or in Indonesia. They will attack cripples in wheel chairs on luxury liners, or athletes at the Olympic games. They will blow up antique monuments, or schools filled with children. They will attack however, or wherever they can in an effort to convince us that they cannot be stopped and that opposition is wasted effort.

This isn't, as I said, crime or war or competition for resources. This is jihad. This is black and white. We are in a fight that we did not choose, where our objective is nothing less than our physicial and cultural survival. The fact that you may not have seen it quite come to that in your own neighborhood, does not make it any the less true. The fact that one has not yet been forced to choose between black and white, doesn't mean that there are any shades of grey in between. It just means that one is enjoying a temporary parochial circumstance. It just means that right now, the enemy seems to think that terrorism will work.

And there is some history to support the belief that we will not act decisively. We have among us professors and media stars and politicians, self-ordained philosophers and perpetual adolescents who oppose use of our military in efforts to increase our security, all from positions of relative safety, for their own personal aggrandisement.

The enemy depends on us to be restrained. The enemy depends on us to sabotage our own efforts at defense, all out of some supposedly high-minded notions.

The enemy has seen that a well-organized crowd of us will seize the opportunity to demonstrate our moral superiority over the hoi polloi by arguing the value non-aggression over the security demanded by our social inferiors. The enemy knows that men such as these will do and say anything that comes to mind to distinguish themselves from the society they despise, up to and including crippling our own military with budget cuts and the self-satisfaction that comes to those who purposefully undemine the morale of our military.

There is one legitimate reason to hold back -- we would hope we can avoid harm to those innocent and long-suffering people among whom the terrorists hide. We probably could, of course, turn the entire region that births the terrorists into in unhabitable glass shield, but for concern over the innocent citizens of the region.

But beyond that consideration, anything any of our disloyal opposition does to prevent even one step towards stopping the jihad, places the jihad that one step closer to its objective. And the objective is that moment when you, or I, or somebody we know or care about, perishes in a red cloud of exploding flesh and body parts.

The message from London is the same as it has been - the terrorists will not stop themselves. We must stop them.

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