Maybe I see the world differently than most. But I'm deeply bothered by the rhetoric reported in the news since the London bombings. Specifically, I'm bothered that there is limited outrage at the people who are actually setting off the bombs and blame is redirected back at the victims. Not only is there blame, but there is also persecution of the innocent. Bombs go off on the other side of the world and New Yorkers feel the impact of fewer freedoms.
The terrorists are not stupid. In fact, they are fighting a war in a way nobody ever has. They are patient and calculating. They know brute force is not enough to defeat their enemy. They use violence and force, not to annihilate, but as leverage to initiate a cultural change. A few bombs in London have altered big-city commuting forever. The terrorists know that we have standards we adhere to and they know that they have vocal supporters in the form of political activists. Not only were British citizens attacked, but their freedoms are eroding as a direct response. They have passed laws to prevent public criticism of Islam. Reporters are directly asking Blair if he blames himself. The whole time, terrorism continues plodding along, planning, recruiting, and killing.
This is not about past wrongs of the West. If it was, those issues would be negotiable today with the supposed wrong parties. This is not even about a few extremists who simply want to kill. This is about a strategic, global effort to change world culture. Change begins from within and Islam has been hijacked by the Wahhabbis and at the very center of the most holy places of Islam, Wahhabbism spreads. That doesn't mean all Muslims feel that way, but it does mean that the danger of this radicalism spreading is greater since Islamic services in Mecca are laced with extreme, hateful anti-Semitic and anti-Western rhetoric. Picture neo-nazis preaching from the Vatican and you will start to grasp what has happened to Islam.
We know who the enemy is: Islamic terrorism. We even know many of its weapons. However, the point is we are going after individuals but we are not disarming them. In fact, we give them more weapons after each attack. Some of the weapons are multiculturalism, political correctness, loose immigration laws, over-tolerance of immigrants who don't conform, pubic relations, internal political strife, and even our own humanity. We are being manipulated culturally and we don't even know it.
To these radicals, Afghanistan's Taliban created the perfect government structure. That is what they want and they are letting us do it ourselves. They don't have the numbers today to create a police state in New York, so they let the climate of fear create the police state for them. If we live in fear for ten or twenty years and allow the U.S. government to intrude in the name of security, will we even notice the switch to an oppressive regime? Take the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, for instance, and notice how Israeli freedom diminishes with each attack. They are building a wall around their country out of fear. Fear is the goal and terrorism uses it well.
Culturally, we love characters like Batman. The entire Batman persona is a construction intended to take the fight out of the criminals before they do anything. Yet when it comes to taking out the trash in real life, we don't do it. It's funny how we love our pop culture heroes, but criticize real people with those same characteristics. In this cultural war and we need to be like Batman: dark and scary to anybody who thinks they can kill one of us. We must disarm the terrorists by ignoring the debate on how we treat enemy combatants, or if it's fair to profile terrorists just like we profile serial killers, or the pros-and-cons of actually enforcing immigration law. Debate is for pundits and philosophers at this point. We are in real danger both physically and culturally. The U.S. policy is going to have to be more action that scares our enemies. Terrorists are taking advantage of our goodwill and that is the very thing eroding our freedoms.
The terrorists are not afraid to die so we need to put fear in them in other ways. Maybe it is destroying their culture before they destroy ours. Maybe it's completely destroying cities like Damascus, the home of international terrorist support. Maybe it's leaving a path of destruction in the holiest of places until their fight is gone. I don't know what it will take. But our terrorist enemies do not give us the same consideration. Yes, we are better than them. However, we will not stay that way if we continue to provide them with cultural weapons to defeat us.
Civil libertarians are directing their anger in the wrong place. The real enemy is terrorism and we should be doing everything in our power to annihilate it one weapon at a time.
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Long Way From Home by The Heavy