Watching a History Channel presentation on the Ku Klux Klan yesterday, I was struck by a few thoughts.
According to the special, the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision sparked a revival of the waning Klan that had been on a downward spiral since its peak in the 1920s. The ruling unified the Klan in its unwavering purpose: to prevent blacks from exercising their rights as full citizens.
The Klan’s hatred and fear of blacks fueled a ramp-up of violence in the South and that violence culminated at several points. Among the most widely publicized were the 16th Street Baptist Church murders, the Schwerner—Cheney—Goodman murders and, much later, the Michael Donald murder (warning: graphic). These and other murders involved bombings of public places, ambushes on lonesome roads, hidden snipers or more “traditional” lynching methods after which the body was left hanging in a plain view.
Today’s international terrorists have many similarities to our domestic terrorists of old. Today’s terrorists kill in secret but leave their victims’ bodies by the side of the road or hanging in public view, as was so in the cases of the Blackwater Four and of Nicholas Berg (warning: even more graphic). They also murder international envoys sent in peace, just as our terrorists murdered prominent peacemakers.
Are there any differences between the two groups? Our terrorists terrorized in the name of keeping the “right” to oppress others and keep them cowed and in poverty. But why would they want to keep another group down?
Today’s terror apologists would have the world believe that contemporary terrorists blow up liberating armies, public conveyance, and the school children of their own kinsmen in order to throw off oppression and escape poverty.
However, that’s not what the terrorists themselves say:
Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said "I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.Those are the words of the rich, well-born founder of Al Qaeda, What’s-His-Name and those words were put into practice most notoriously by nineteen mostly rich, mostly well-born members of his flock. Even more, his words have taken hold in the minds of many of his poor, oppressed co-religionists. But who is doing the oppressing?
What is stopping the average citizen of the oil-rich Arab Muslim nations from being as “blessed” as is the Infidel?
Instead of being honest with themselves, both yesterday’s and today’s terrorists choose to believe their own imaginings rather than face their own shortcomings and/or those of their leaders. Instead of acknowledging reality and doing something about that, they set themselves up as superior to the hated group and view that group as a) dangerous or b) blasphemous. They set up their toy enemy soldiers only to knock them down. The only problem is that the toy soldiers are living, breathing human beings.
Three years before I thought of any of this, however, some guy named Lee Harris wrote an essay about it for the Hoover Institute.
The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?In the last post, I guessed that it would be unlikely that al Qaeda would use a WMD on the West because of how strategically stupid it would be. But after seeing the Klan special and reading the Harris essay, I’m no longer so sure. For, in order to make that type of calculation, a certain amount of rationality would have to exist. I don’t think it does.
It may be that it is just as useless to appease the Islamists as it was to appease the Klan. Why? Because the only thing that you can give the Islamists is something you don’t want to give them: the fulfillment of their fantasies and that does not involve dispensing Balkan- or Somali-style humanitarian aid or anything else so mundane. (The lack gratitude for either of these adventures should tell us that.)
The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus in susceptible populations: Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas — fantasy ideologies were not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will.The will, that is, to see you converted, dead or enslaved and to see the entire world as an Islamic one; I have my doubts as to whether that will be on any future G8 agenda.
If it is so that the Islamists are attempting to bring their own fantasy Islamic world into existence—just as KKK types tried to bring about and still dream of having their fantasy white world--then all this talk about pulling back forces and helping them eradicate poverty is a waste of time. The KKK was neutralized only because this country was created on certain principles and its people—educated on those principles—could be shamed. That is not so for the majority of Islamists and those who are gullible enough to believe them.
Stopping them may involve some methods of awakening that are uglier than any of us wants to contemplate. Ask the Japanese.
(Thanks to Diggers Realm)
