Mostly it's people who have no power or influence, who have all the answers. Well, no, I guess I'm wrong. Influencers have all the answers. My diction is imprecise. It's that everyone has opinions, duh, the same as everyone has nose hair. I think everyone does. Doesn't get talked about as much as it should.
What to do, what to do. Scum, rising to the top. It's like fermentation, rising and sinking. The pattern of history, decadence and renewal. So Hamas and their pro-terror protesters, enablers on campuses and the media.
And Israel, once again, and again, with its back toward the sea.
They did not see it coming. Well, if you see the monsters coming, you kill them before there's a problem. Doesn't even make the news. So maybe Israel has been doing a fantastic job, protecting pregnant women and school children from hamas. It's just THIS time.
Planning planning planning. Eternal vigilance.
My take is obvious. Wars, security, vigilance, these are messy, like making sausage. The most necessary step is butchering the pig.
Same with war. They don’t go according to plan. FDR had a plan that didn’t work, and Churchill had a plan -- but the matter was resolved in the particular by firebombing Dresden and killing 200,000 civilians, and nuking Japan, twice.
My take on plans, is that we don’t open up the Bible and find all the answers in, say, Psalm 23 -- to pick a random example. Wisdom is found where it’s found, and doesn’t appear in the index. Plans are necessary, but sometimes the opposition demurs.
My take is that fighting terrorism is like fighting crime. Sometimes “society” is all for giving convicts wifi and sensual massages, and sometimes it’s for solitary confinement for life. It goes in cycles, and neither one is wisdom. Is prison about rehabilitation? -- about punishment? -- about warehousing undesirables? Whatever.
Same with terrorism. Define it, and work out a competent-seeming plan, but understand that one size does not fit all, and that for all the care we might put into definitions, it’s really more than one thing.
There’s that 10% on the bell curve of human aggression, that will just be vile, given any excuse.
The islamist terrorist knows that Allah wants violence! They'll bring it to you. These are the Holy Martyrs and great heroes of the Lesser Jihad -- you know, the one that makes the news. And a heroic lot they are. Takes a real man to knife open pregnant women.
Then there are the camp followers, the blackguards, the mixed multitude, the cheering by-standers. In Islam, that’s about 89%. That the 10 percent monsters, and the 1 percent decent enlightened civilized courageous humane moslems.
As for that core islamist 10 percent, that ten, that minyan, I’ve said it before: some people simply need to be killed. By the beneficial example of their violent demise, others are chastened. If we can kill them under color of authority, with a clear path from cause to effect, a primal instinct is addressed in the human psyche, enough to evoke that cowardice necessary under some circumstances to survive. If you make bloody examples of the wolves, the goats will be tame.
The tag-along quasi Hamas fanboy will reconsider his allegiance to that sect, and he will convert on the spot to something more moderate and human. This is how liberals become conservatives: they get mugged. By reality. Because there is no race that is genetically fanatical. Given a choice between clearly different outcomes, negative or positive -- it’s a focuser of the mind. He can blow himself up while murdering Jews, and as a result his father also will be hunted down and killed … or, he can live and let live.
Maybe I’m not very American in this opinion. Maybe this isn't actually a serious and deeply thought-out opinion. But it does seem to be my opinion. For the moment, for purposes of this discussion.
I do not want an American Empire. But the British Raj, in India, wiped out the horror of Suttee (Sati, where a widow was expected to immolate herself burn himself alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband). And the British Raj wiped out the Thuggee cult of Kali (the Hinduist murder cult which at its height yearly strangled 40,000 innocents, totalling perhaps two million murders.
A Murder cult. Like the action wing, of islamism. The islamist Allah, it seems, is Kali with external genitalia -- a death god.
Suttee and Thuggee were extreme religious practices, certainly as deeply-ingrained and as evil as anti-Semitic Hamas and its several islamist clones. The price of wiping out monstrosity is that a certain brutality must be employed. You do not talk a demon to death. Informants, pardons and many public executions wiped out the Thugs, stranglers for Kali. Persuasion and criminal charges eventually dampened the ardor for Suttee, widow burning.
Maybe such measures couldn’t work today, what with CNN and the NY Times running interference for hamas and Iran and nameless and unnamed ghouls that support terror. Maybe such measures wouldn't work. But they usually work.
All sorts of things have been tried, the one that never works, over time, is appeasement. A glib but perhaps effective idea has to do with, of course, money. Greed and self interest might work. Oil independence, of course. Stop paying the enemy, or the people who enable the enemy. Money money money.
Sort of a passive, an indirect way, to deal with terrorists. Gently starve them of their petrodollars. Like boiling a frog, slowly. They wake up one morning, and find themselves only millionaires, rather than billions. Humility, then, would be humanizing.
I'm just making this up, though. Very glib. Just going with the sound of the words. But that's what plans are … first one thing, and then another, and hardly any of them are the right one. Turns out, we know what was wise only after the fact.
J
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