The War on Civilians
By Joe Carter
"There are 5,000 mosques in the region calling for jihad," said Dr. Ali Aldabbagh.
That wasn’t the answer I expected when I asked Aldabbagh about his country’s biggest internal threat. Like many others conservatives gathered at the Heritage Foundation last year, I wasn’t prepared for the official spokesman for the government of Iraq to credit so much of the violence in his country to radical Islam. But Aldabbagh wanted to ensure we Americans recognized what is at stake and the reason why the violence will continue. "Iraq is not fighting a civil war," he said. "We are defending against a war on civilians."
I was reminded of Aldabbagh’s comment by the recent terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel. In a bizarre — though not uncommon — display of moral relativism, Israel is being criticized for killing Palestinian civilians while attempting to defend themselves against a war on civilians.
The Prussian military genius Carl von Clausewitz, claimed that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” But for Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas, politics is merely the continuation of war by other means.” The political maneuvering over land or statehood is merely a way to mau-mau the gullible Europeans and other Westerners into supporting their phony aims while the true mission of Hamas – a party duly elected to represent the Palestinians — is to slaughter the Jewish people.
It is often said that generals always fight the last war. A similar claim could be made about the American attitude toward warfare, whether engaged by us or our allies. Having been shaped by our experiences in the Cold War, we prefer to adopt similar measures: containment, isolationism, democracy-promotion. But we’ve also made the mistake of believing that Islamic radicals are as rational as the Soviets. Even under the threat of nuclear annihilation, we were optimistic that our enemy shared, if not our basic sense of morality, then at least our instinct for self-preservation. As Sting sang in "Russians": "What might save us, me, and you/Is if the Russians love their children too."
No doubt the Islamacists love their children too. But that fact won’t save us — me, you, or even the Russians — when the radicals are willing to make suicide bombers of their sons and daughters. Remember the “music video” broadcast on a Palestinian Hamas TV station in 2007? It featured a young Palestinian girl singing to her mother who is preparing to carry out a suicide bomb attack. The caption of the video reads, "Duha, daughter of suicide bomber Reem Riyashi, sings to her mother." In 2004, Riyashi killed four Israelis after blowing herself up on a border crossing between Israel and Gaza.
Initially the little girl is frightened (“Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me.") but after seeing her mom on TV, the daughter has a change of heart: “Instead of me you carried a bomb in your hands. Only now, I know what was more precious than us. May your steps be blessed, and may you be flawless for Jerusalem. Send greetings to our messenger Muhammad.”
By the end of the video the girl decides to become a bomber herself. After finding explosives in her mother’s drawer she says, “My love will not be (merely) words. I am following mommy in her steps.”
Unable to comprehend such utter disregard for human life, we refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the threat. We fail to realize that while we are fighting a "war on terror", the enemy is fighting a "war on civilians." They don’t want us dead because we are in Iraq, or because we support Israel, or because they want a “homeland”, or because we have a decadent culture, or because of any other "root cause." They want us dead because we –like all the Jews in Israel — are infidels. We refuse to submit to the will of their god and, therefore, deserve to be slaughtered like swine.
culture11.com
We can pull the troops out of Iraq. We can pressure Israel to pull out of Gaza. We can pull the cover over our heads and cower. But there is nowhere to hide when the enemy is willing to kill innocent women and children — even their own — for the glory of martyrdom.
There are 5,000 mosques in the Middle East calling for jihad. The radicals are answering that call by the thousands. How will we respond? When the war is on civilians, there is no place to retreat, no way to surrender, and no safe haven for conscientious objectors. |
