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 Apologizing
For Being Infidels
Tolerance doesn’t
cut both ways...
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 10/26/05
The stories
about the video of US troops burning the bodies of dead Taliban
are disgusting––but not because of anything our
troops may have done to the corpses of fanatical murderers.
What’s disturbing is the groveling reaction of our government
and military officials, who are falling all over themselves
to apologize to people who cheer every time an American is
killed.
Remember
what type of people the Taliban are? Like the jihadists we
are fighting in Iraq, they are murderers whose religious beliefs
warrant any kind of brutality and atrocity against the “infidel.” These
are the people who, when they ran Afghanistan, tortured and
murdered their own citizens in a soccer stadium built with
Western money. These are the people who behead and murder,
the people who kill women and children. And these are the people
whose corpses we are supposed to worry about mistreating, whose
religious beliefs, the ones that justify murder, we are supposed
to be respecting.
I know all
the rationales for the apologies and investigations and anxious
assertions
of how much we respect Islam. We need
to win the “hearts and minds” of all those alleged “moderate” Muslims
who hate us only because they don’t understand us, don’t
realize how much we admire their wonderful religion, don’t
quite get everything we’re doing for them, and who are
abetted in their misunderstanding by the bad behavior of some
of our troops. So the State Department has issued “talking
points” to US embassies “to explain to foreign journalists
and officials that the alleged misconduct was an aberration that
did not reflect American values,” as the New York Times
reported.
The idea that all
those millions cheering for the terrorists in Iraq, cheering
for bin Laden, cheering for the Taliban are
all just misinformed is a monumental delusion, and the most dangerous
mistake we are making the war against jihad. The millions of
Muslims who support jihadist murder do so not because they’re
ignorant of our beneficent intentions and enlightened tolerance,
but because of spiritual beliefs that validate jihad, beliefs
ratified by 14 centuries of Islamic jurisprudence and theology.
We need to get over the peculiar arrogant belief that everything
the enemy does is a mere reaction to what we do, as though these
people don’t have their own motivations for their actions.
They know that we rescued the Muslims of Kuwait, the Muslims
of Bosnia, and the Muslims of Iraq. They know that we are sacrificing
our own citizens to create an ordered society that will allow
Muslims to worship in peace and prosper in freedom. They know
that Muslims are killing Muslims all over the world, that the
greatest threats to the safety and well-being of Muslims are
other Muslims, as we currently see in Sudan. They know all these
things, but they don’t care, for what’s important
is the jihad against the infidel, the divinely sanctioned struggle
to compel the people of the world to accept Islam, live as second-class
citizens, or die.
This false belief
that Muslims only react to Western deeds also puts a powerful
weapon into the hands our enemies, who can then
deflect their true intentions and manipulate our behavior, as
the jihadists of Palestine have been doing for decades. How else
explain the bizarre spectacle of the terrorist Mahmoud Abbas
being welcomed to the White House, at the very moment we claim
to the world that we are at war with those who use and endorse
terrorism? When has Abbas ever condemned terrorism as categorically
evil and unacceptable in any circumstance, rather than condemning
terrorism for being the wrong tactic at the wrong time? How can
we keep saying terrorism “won’t work” when
we are giving financial and moral support to a Palestinian regime
that incorporates terrorists like Hamas that say explicitly they
want to destroy Israel and will use any means necessary to do
so?
More important, when our enemies compel us to apologize and
investigate and assure the world how much we really respect Islam,
they validate their estimation of our spiritual weakness and
corruption. From their perspective, why else would we apologize,
unless we had doubts about the rightness of our cause and the
beliefs that drive our actions? The jihadists, after all, are
convinced of the rightness of their belief, one validated by
Islam and its traditional intolerant and arrogant disdain for
the infidel. So why should they ever apologize? They believe
they are right, and that Allah sanctions their slaughter. Christians
can be brutalized, as is happening right now in Alexandria, where
Egyptian Copts are being murdered and terrorized by Muslim mobs.
Christian churches can be desecrated, Christians and Jews murdered
and mutilated on videotape, and we never hear even from secular
Muslim leaders the sort of anxious protestations of regret that
the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth indulge in.
We may think we are
projecting the strength of our values when we chastise our
troops for sometimes resorting to unpleasant
actions in order to win against a brutal enemy. But in fact,
the message we send is that because we have doubts about our
cause and our beliefs, we will second-guess and scrutinize our
own behavior in the midst of a hard fight. Wars are ugly and
cruel, as all violence is. To think that one can fight a brutal
enemy within utopian parameters is to court failure and defeat.
This does not mean that anything goes, obviously. But we have
to be realistic about where those impassable limits lie, given
the sort of irregular war being fought. We can argue about those
limits later, but burning the bodies of dead murderers to my
mind is a long way from actions completely out of bounds, especially
if such actions will save the life of even one American and take
us one step closer to achieving our goal. After all, we’ve
had ample proof for decades that being nice and tolerant doesn’t
cut any ice with those who fancy themselves the warriors of Allah.
All means cannot justify
all ends, but some means can justify the right ends. Every
war this country has fought employed terrible
means that none of us would want to choose, but that were justified
by the rightness and goodness of the end. If we truly believe
that our goals in Iraq are just enough to kill and die for, then
we should stop undercutting and second-guessing our troops in
the field who are laying their lives on the line to achieve those
noble ends. And if we don’t really believe in those goals
enough to grit our teeth and do what must be done, as our fathers
and grandfathers did in World War II, then we should pack up
right now and go home. TOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
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