Assuming that those accounts are all accurate quotes, it is one of the best lessons we can heed. The dogmatic voice of extremism rising from the Middle East, that beckons its young to suicidal attacks on a greater power, cannot be shut up by reason.
Force, force, and unrelenting force, I believe, is going to be the only workable solution, however desperately many of us wish otherwise.
There is one crime of passion that leads to killing... in the name of jealous love.... that permits us to grant a little mercy to a killer unlikely to repeat his act. But the passion-inducing fanaticism that calls to tens of thousands to an unholy war that exterminates civilians and even its own brother Muslims with impunity, that then claims the result was the work of the Jews or the CIA, is not a crime of passion or faith.
It is a crime of reprehensible consequences that should reverberate in our historical memory. It is a crime of sociopathic murderers that will never understand reason because they cannot grasp the easy distinction between right and wrong.
And for that crime - though I, myself, admit to a lifelong pursuit of peaceful non-violence and opposition to capital punishment - there is only one response that can work: the elimination of the sociopathic murderers for their crimes against humanity, by death or life imprisonment.
Some will call me a hypocrite for changing my mind. I'd say I have encountered new facts and new, sinister realities that threaten the existence of the all populations in the world, and I have both the reason and the maturity to adapt to a new, grave responsibility. It does not mean I love peace any less or have surrendered my reverence for the sanctity of life. It means I can see no other path that will preserve more life and more peace than to wage this war, with resolute determination, and fully aware of its potential cost.
I am convinced any other way will cost far more.
We have heard the enemy state, in no uncertain terms, it has the right and will to use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons against soldiers and civilians. How many losses do you intend to accept before stopping such men with the only solutions that have ever worked when there is no self-defined restraint or limit for their evil? |
