Up Against Fanaticism
By Phil Lucas, Executive Editor, Panama City New Herald
If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and
gender diversity but not diversity of thought, or if you think there is
an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny
pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you.
We published pictures Thursday of burnt American corpses hanging from an
Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims. Some readers didn't like
it. Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with
Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them.
Well, we sure don't want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we?
That's just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get
hurt.
We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims.
They can't get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France,
Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia,
etc., etc., etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which
Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical
Muslims.
We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer
number of them. One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we
are in now when they slaughtered more than 3,000 people, including fellow
Muslims, in New York City.
Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser
who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the
Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving
people, we might resent them too.
Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached
sufficient numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon
Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the
battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we
bottled them up for 1,000 years.
Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France.
Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims
laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it
would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland.
Sound Familiar?
Let's consider the concept of a "long war." Last time it was 200 years,
give or take. Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part,
the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew us to the books and
movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good
and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between the individual and the
state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death.
That's the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and
valleys.
There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims - some live here - but
that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the million
gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in
Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and
Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausage over the
Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of
death.
Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on "diversity," we are so
nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that
our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we're so addled on
Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new
drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a
backbone.
It doesn't take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest,
the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No
exceptions!
Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then
look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at
them. Those are the people out to kill you.
Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball
and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start
with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half
a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.
Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is. But many
Americans don't get it. That's why we published those pictures.
If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared
your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless
editors, then I say, it's a start
"He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."-----Thomas Paine |
