previous post next post  

Not A member of the Lefty media.

Up Against Fanaticism

By Phil Lucas, Executive Editor, Panama City New Herald

If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and
gender diversity but not diversity of thought or if you think there is
an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny
pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you.

We published pictures Thursday of burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims. Some readers didn't like it.

Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them.

Well, we sure don't want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we? That's just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get hurt.

There's more in the extended post.

We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can't get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France,Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia,etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims.

We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them.

One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more that 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City.

Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and reckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.

Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached sufficient numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years.

Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland. Sound Familiar?

Let's consider the concept of a "long war.! " Last time it was 200 years, give or take. Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part, the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between the individual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death.

That's the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys.

There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims - some live here - but that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the million gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in Easter Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausage over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of death.

Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on "diversity," we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we're so addled on Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a backbone.

It doesn't take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest,the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No exceptions.

Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you.

Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.

Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is.

But many Americans don't get it.

That's why we published those pictures.

If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start.


3 Comments

why is not in every news report.
 
John, I know you're quoting Phil Lucas, but there is a factual error in there that I absolutely must point out. Where he says, "Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached sufficient numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years." This is not correct. The Crusades were NOT started to "drive the Muslims back". They were really started by a Pope who was attempting to expand his worldly power by giving the monarchs of the day a task that would occupy them and their large armies. Yes, the Islamic Empire did infringe upon the West, notably in Spain, and was ultimately driven out in 1492, the same year that Columbus made his world changing discovery. What Mr. Lucas asserts regarding the Crusades is not correct, and it calls his entire thesis into question. I am not disputing that we are in a war against fanaticism. What I AM saying is that calling this a "culture war" resembles the same language used by the Nazis to eliminate the Jews. Do we really want to tread down that path again?
 
Not that I completely disagree, and I knew what you point out at the time I posted it (and, in retrospect, should probably have put in the caveats) , was it not a culture war we waged on the Germans and Japanese - especially after the war, in order to change their culture? Ask yourself - if we don't change their culture, what have we done other than give them a setback for a while and killed a bunch of people. And the fanatics have been calling it a culture war from the get-go, and in Bin-Laden's case, he seems to just see it as picking up where Salah-Al-Din left off. If all we do is go in, kill the current thugs, then pull out leaving a new set of thugs - what have we accomplished, in the grand strategic sense? Certainly we will have accomplished tactical and operational tasks, but will we truely have changed the equation? One reason the die-hards are fighting so hard is because they do see it as a culture war - and understand that if they lose, they lose big. We aren't there to obliterate their culture - but good gosh golly, don't we want to knock it onto a different path? You may not like the language Jack, but masking ourselves in Newspeak because we don't like the ugliness of the truth - well, isn't that what we've been doing all along prior to this? I invite your always reasoned response (no snideness implied or intended!)
 
© 2008 John Donovan
All rights reserved.