Just read it: Sword Without Leniency

Sword Without Leniency
The West must scuttle arrogant materialism and take jihadists at their word.

Bruce Thornton puts into words what I've been thinking better than I ever could.

By refusing to take the jihadist at their word, we Westerners are indulging our own superstitions and received wisdom. We have accepted the unscientific assertion that all reality is material, and so we dismiss the spiritual as a superstitious fantasy, a hold-over from less enlightened times necessary for those benighted folks still mired in exploded beliefs and incapable of accepting the hard reality of God’s death. Afraid of facing the truth of their own repressions and neuroses, believers cling to these fantasies as bulwarks against all the changes they fear, especially the liberating progress and utopian boons that are mankind’s destiny once these old illusions are discarded.

This view of religious faith is on display everywhere in our culture, from television and movies and “high” art to the ruminations of “progressive” intellectuals and media pundits. The great irony is that this interpretation of religious faith is itself not a scientific truth but mere prejudice at best, bigotry at worst. And it is a stale cliché, the remnant of old Western ideas long discredited. With every expression of this received wisdom, we hear the ghost of Marx telling us that religion is “the opiate of the people,” the “illusory sun” we must discard, the instrument of oppression invented by the oppressor to keep his victims in check. We hear Nietzsche’s cry of liberating joy at God’s death: “We philosophers and ‘’free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone for us . . . . At long last the horizon appears free to us again.” And we hear another antitheist (because like the other two, he doesn’t so much disbelieve in God as dislike and resent Him), Freud, telling us that “religious ideas” are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.”

Armed with these old materialist prejudices, we then treat the Muslim as one sick or confused, a victim of Western crimes, a neurotic who resorts to misunderstandings and distortions of his own faith in order to cope with events whose causes he doesn’t understand. Or, as the press has done with Ahmadinejad’s letter, we explain away his belief as a Machiavellian political tactic. Either way, in the guise of rationalizing jihadist violence we display a curious Western arrogance that sweeps away the most cherished beliefs, that asserts we Westerners better understand Islam than do millions of its adherents, and that reduces Muslims to the status of children and dupes, the passive prey to material and psychological forces they can’t comprehend. How superior we are, we Westerners who see the true reality disguised from others by superstition and tradition!

Sun Tzu warned us long ago:

"(If) you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

But, he cautioned,

"If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat."

On the whole, we (liberal democracies) know neither ourselves nor the enemy. Draw your own conclusions. As the era of nuclear hyperproliferation in the Muslim nation (ummah) is dawning, we've blinked. They sense weakness and smell blood.

The greatest irony is that there could be no unified Muslim jihad effort without the technology of the West, from the printing press to the Internet, oil drilling, and the car (bomb) to the guided missile.

I hope I live long enough to see the ugly divorce of the Left, fascist, Islamist alliance. They only agree on who they hate the most: Jews and Americans.

Hell on Earth?

It must be better than North Korea. Every time a "human rights" organization wastes an hour criticizing nations with actual respect for human rights, how many North Koreans die in gulags, by summary execution, torture, human experimentation, or of starvation? Nobody knows.

Our interview over, the women relax and begin to talk about their first few days in America. "It's completely different from what we learned. It is difficult to accept that there is a world like this," Hannah says. "They [the North Korean government] teach us that America is a country that shouldn't be allowed to exist." "When we were in China," Naomi says, "we always had to hide. Now we don't feel that way anymore."

"We still do feel lonely," says Hannah, "but my heart feels free."

North Korea is a recent addition to "The Nuclear Club." China benefits from our enormous trade deficit and currency manipulation which saps the industrial bases of nations worldwide.

But I hear the United States government might be crunching phone numbers in a supercomputer to avoid another 9/11. Quick, call Human Rights Watch!

Should our enemies have greater rights than common criminals?

Based on recent articles I must conclude the mainstream media believes the answer is a resounding "YES!"

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

The test is "reasonable expectation of privacy." Every recent article from pen registers to this latest partisan attack has dealt with an issue which was settled during the unreal "War on Drugs." This is a REAL WAR, with WAR POWERS.

I never liked declaring fake wars on things like poverty or drugs. Now I'm seeing the results.

Florida v. Riley, settled law.

Let me explain something very briefly. War powers must be used to fight wars. That's the limit. The instant there is a real abuse for mere law enforcement, blackmail, or political advantage, I'll be all over it like a French prostitute.

But in the case of aerial surveillance, like pen registers, there is no limit on government power. Could anyone fly a Piper Cub over your house at 500'? Why, yes, yes they could. So if you want privacy, stay inside.

Passive Security, Isn't

Cargo containers are universal in our global economy. From factory, to truck, to ship, to distribution point, to retail, cargo containers do everything. Al Qaeda has smuggled in cargo containers. But unfortunately, this is true:

While nuclear smuggling is possible, so are dozens of other attack scenarios. Overinvesting in countering one tactic when terrorists could easily employ another is dangerously myopic.

Unless we get to the root of the problem - religious and ideological - our free and commercial society will always be vulnerable to attack. To make it completely safe we'd have to become a totalitarian and economically dysfunctional society like North Korea.** Terrorism in North Korea is owned by the government and used against the people, but they're "safe" from outside "threats."

It's time to face reality. Mosques and Islamic centers are the problem. Saudi Arabia, among many others, but especially Saudi Arabia, fund the jihad ideology being taught to those who want to kill us. Even in the United States, Saudi taught imams control over three quarters of the mosques. That's the root of terrorism: jihad against the kufr (unbelievers). Islamic imperialism and Islamic supremacism are already here. Screening containers is an important issue but not the most important issue.

**Recent report on worldwide religious freedom, and the lack thereof.