Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Guide For Killing Christians

Veterans of various Middle East conflicts have advised us not to go to Israel this spring, but I’m holding out. After all, there have been conflicts there throughout recorded history. “A group of Americans traveling on a bus in the West Bank would be a tempting target,” said a Navy Seal officer in San Diego last month where two of my sisters went to attend my nephew Mike’s graduation. Our itinerary would take us to Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea, and Qumran - to the caves where the ancient Essenes hid the Dead Sea Scrolls - and all these are in the West Bank. There would be several days in Jerusalem and several days in northern Israel as well.

My sisters and my wife took the tour in May, 2000 and they want to go back with us, their husbands. We were supposed to go in October, but Hezbollah was rocketing Tiberius and Caesaria in the north. Now, Hamas has announced they will be targeting Americans for death because of our support of Israel.

On October 31st, Al Qaeda released an updated version of “A Guide for the Undecided on the Legitimacy of Killing Christians.” It promises that more attacks against America are coming soon and offers both an historical and theological rationale for killing Christians everywhere, especially Americans. Not good.

Weeks earlier, Al Qaeda released a manual titled “How to Fight Alone.” Frontpagemagazine.com describes it as “a how-to guide for Muslims to conduct their own ‘Jihad of One’ against the ‘Crusader-Zionists’ . . .[with] instructions on how lone Muslims can take the battle to the infidels.” Hmm. The infidels. That would be us on a bus. Crusaders without weapons.

Recommended methods for lone jihadists include “stabbing, feeding overdoses of cocaine or heroin, injecting air via needles, assassination with guns, burning down homes, putting poisonous snakes in cars, tampering with car brakes, planting explosives in vehicles, running over people, and luring people and then killing them.”

That’s not all. “The book also highly recommends poisoning targets and includes various methods of preparing and obtaining lethal toxins, including botulism. The book also gives instructions on making improvised explosives.”

It’s been over six years since the female members of my family made their pilgrimage. The September 11th attacks occurred sixteen months later and Palestinians all over Gaza and the West Bank danced in the streets when they heard the news. Why? Obviously they were happy Americans were massacred by Arab Muslims like them. The Palestinian Authority threatened western journalists who recorded the celebrations, saying they couldn’t guarantee their safety if the images were broadcast.

Here in the United States, most Americans believe a few radicals hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only Muslims we have to worry about. Any others who hate us are justified by American foreign policy, they insist. Newspaper editors who profess to champion free speech worry interminably about offending Muslims if they publish children’s cartoons of Muhammad, though they have no qualms publishing photos of a crucifix in urine or the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. Though there have been few if any attacks on Muslims in the United States, they fret about the invented syndrome “Islamophobia,” as if any American fear of Islam is irrational.

Some of us, however, are coming to believe that the only irrational fear Americans have about Islam is the fear of taking a hard look at what it is becoming. We keep repeating that Islam is a religion of peace in spite of mounting evidence that it isn’t anymore, if it ever was. We go to great lengths to deny what is staring us in the face - that Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and all the rest are very popular with Muslims all around the world. That diplomatic approaches to the Palestinian problem, the Iraqi problem, the Syrian problem and the Iranian problem amount to little but appeasement and will only postpone an inevitable showdown. We’re deathly afraid that we may well have to use our overwhelming military power to destroy our enemies. That’s what we really fear, so we continue trying to appease them. Winston Churchill summed it up a half-century ago. “The appeaser,” he said, “feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last.”

It should be pretty clear by now that a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza is not going to appease Muslims. They want Israel gone. That’s what conservative Israelis have claimed all along but we didn’t believe it. Now we do. After 9-11 and a three years in Iraq, we know our enemies and Israel’s are the same. They will not run out of suicide bombers and they will soon have nukes if they don’t already. It’s not a matter of whether they’ll use them against Israel and against us, but when. All it will take is one to wipe out Israel and nobody knows that better than Israel.

Israelis understand crocodiles better than Americans or Europeans do. Their long history has taught them. They’re not going to feed it much longer and they’ve had nuclear weapons for decades in preparation for exactly the threat now looming. Have I painted the picture clearly enough?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom,

That's what people in the eastern hemisphere have been crying out loud, for God's sake...we've been carping not about terrorists, not about radicals BUT about your average, daily Muslim on the street. India (and, by that, I mean Hindus) have been persecuted by repeated Muslim invaders and occupiers for hundreds of years. Our temples were looted, our innocents were raped and murdered and here, in this chokingly politically correct society, we call Islam a religion of peace??!!!
Israel exactly knows the nature of its enemy -- plz see Glenn Beck's one-hour interview of former Israeli PM, Bibi Netanyahu, on CNN Headlines. PM Netanyahu was hitting one homer after the other. I don't think even Glenn was able to put things into 'context' the way a guy like me was.

Islam was born in a very violent region of the world, in very turbulent times and founded by a very violent man. Islam has repeatedly used violence to forcibly convert people into its faith, the world over. Islam, as a creed, has always been exclusionist (and I'm not referring to the exterme Wahabiis). Tom, we have to understand the nature of this religion. And, there are so many dumb-asses in this nation, who don't know all these things, thanks to the govt education they receive. It is dangerous for any country/society when an ignorant electorate votes those who promise blue-skies to them. That is why tough decision makers like Pres Bush and Don Rumsfeld will never ever be popular.

I strongly propose a moratorium on immigration from Islamic countries to the US for the next 20 years, at the very least. This nonsense has to be stoppped. Does anyone discuss religious minorities being persecuted in Pakistan and Bangladesh? Has anyone paid attention to ethnic cleansing in the Kashmir valley? Does anyone know that Somalia is becoming the next hotbed for Islamic terrorists? Where the **** are the NYT, WP, LAT, AJC, BG, etc? To busy paying attention to OJ Simpson, Dancing with the Stars, NFL and local crime beats? Tom, America has not woken up to the danger of Islam. I hate to be the guy to be repeatedly complaining about the ignorance of average Americans, but did you see the news today -- Muqtada Al Sadr (that b*****d) is trying to determine if Pres Bush must meet PM Maliki or not?!, Russia delivers rocket launchers/rockets to Iran, Russian spy gets poisoned in Europe, more than 200 people killed y'day in Iraq...plz wake up folks. This is extremely serious stuff. Tom, plz keep posting your comments, sir.

Sriraj.

Tom McLaughlin said...

I don't know enough about their mating habits to answer that one tom. I think it's educational propaganda in the madrassas and that all-too-common human tendency to look for the source of problems in others to avoid looking in the mirror.

You're all fired up Sriraj. A moratorium on Muslim immigrants? I'm okay with that, but it's up to the Dems now. In control of congress, they might dry up the funds to fight as they did in 1974 with the Vietnamese. Then we had hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. What will the Kurds and whatever other Iraqis who've been working with do if we pull out and there's a civil war? Will they be left to the mercy of the Baathists and Sadr's Mahdi Army?

They'll probably be allowed to come here by the hundreds of thousands. At least we won't have a shortage of Arabic translators when we have to go back into the region as we inevitably will, assuming it doesn't vaporize into mushroom clouds.

Anonymous said...

Tom,

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the efficacy of American foreign policy and military is being shaped not in Washngton, DC but on the editorial pages of this nation's major newspapers. And, frankly speaking, our leaders just do not have the guts to stand up to these pinko journos. In a conservative state like Georgia, it is a travesty that liberals like Cynthia Tucker get to be editors (not to mention the fact that she is a "female, African American" like that other nutcase, Cynthia McKinney) and Mike Luckovich (numero uno Bush basher) gets to be the cartoonist, at the AJC. I believe the situation is quite similar in other red states (Dallas News and Kansas Star in TX and KS, for eg). This is sickening to me that we do NOT have major newspapers that have views reflecting those of a majority of their readers. It also irks me to no end that tax-payer money is subsidzing liberal agendas through NPR and PBS. Why is our money being spent frivolously like this? All these people are weakening America by constantly bashing anything American -- politicians, military personnel, big companies, small businesses, etc. And then we sit and wonder why is there no control on the streets of Iraq? Because, the moment American troops take some action, these media hyenas are there to scream blood! What nonsense is this! Can't we learn anything from our good friends and allies in Israel?

Sriraj

Tom McLaughlin said...

Sriraj,
The Powerline guys have a contest for worst newspaper in America and should have a winner by now. I'll have to check in and see if my local ones placed. In the running were the Portland Press Herald, which I've written for back when they had an open-minded editorial page editor, and the infamous Boston Globe. It's owned by the New York Times but is losing circulation bigtime. There's a group of local businessmen trying to buy it.

Bob Novak had a great column recently saying that wars are won or lost in the media, not on the battlefield and he's so right. Bush should have sicced Gonzalez on the NYT when it published those top secret stories. It's not too late, but now he'd incur the wrath of the House Judiciary Committee in the form of impeachment hearings. The NYT is Holy Scripture to the Dems.