Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Great minds ...

... my colleague Carlin Romano and I are, once again, on the same page: If We Don't Call Them Names, the Terrorists Win.

Should Ayman al-Zawahri, deputy head of Al Qaeda, be the only "leader" quoted making moral judgments — that Arab regimes are "corrupt" — in a week of terrorist incidents? Why do media parrot this moral irresponsibility, as in The Boston Globe's post-Glasgow editorial that the terrorist threat can "be countered by means of sound intelligence, conventional police work, legal adaptations that do not create a law-free zone, and leadership that distinguishes law-abiding communities from the crazed Islamist ideologues that prey upon them"?

7 comments:

  1. Welcome back, Frank! This is a well-written piece. It reminds me of a piece on Salman Rushdie I read a while back, which said that the problem that western countries fail to notice is that they are essentially dealing with a view of the world which is drastically diferent from their own. To defend terror from the position of historical guilt at colonialism or any other such fancy, is a purely libertarian impulse, an impusle born in a "post-civilised" world. Islamic fundamentalism, on the other hand, is a violent idelogy that leaves no scope for giving space to the other. The very concepts of space and discussion that western socities take for granted are antithetical to the aims of the terrorists. We are fighting an enemy from two very different points, and if we continue to "produce the usual morally namby-pamby, logistics-heavy rhetoric" about terror, we risk annihilating ourselves by gifting the enemy very reliable weaponry.

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  2. Anonymous12:40 PM

    How was Tunkhannunk (sp?)???

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  3. Anonymous3:55 PM

    Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

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  4. This quote of MacArthur's pops up quite a bit, but never in any context that I have been able to find. Nevertheless, so what? Even if what he said were true - and the same people who cite it doubtless would not have approved of his wish to invade China during the Korean conflict (in other words, the general's fine when he agrees with them)- even if what he said were true, that would hardly prove that no genuine cause for alarm would ever come along. If you want to think that there is no danger facing the civilized world, go right ahead. I am not so sanguine - nor is Carlin. Also, the next time you think the government should pay for your medical care, remind yourself that this is the same government you think routinely trumps up fears of imaginary enemies.

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  5. Anonymous3:01 PM

    The government that pays for my medical care? Hmmm.....Ever heard of taxes, Frank.
    And to add

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

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  6. Anonymous3:31 PM

    The government simply has to create the illusion of the hobgoblins...like funding & fostering extremist Islamism...Oh no, what have we done...we've created a monster- lets give up our freedoms to a centralising government that will lead us to safety & start wonderful wars abroad. As I said before:
    "Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces."
    "Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people."
    "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it. ..If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war...our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

    Feel the sanity. Who do you think is the threat...people like me or people like "them".

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  7. Precisely which freedom has this government asked me to give up?

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