Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Thoughts on Islam and the West


I am writing something else on the current state of play in our never-ending struggle with Islam, but in the mean time I  re-run something I wrote on May 9, 2011, shortly after the killing of Osama. I think it holds up today, although some of my friends at State were appalled by it.  

"The SEAL raid on Osama's 'palace' in Abbottabad has a meaning well beyond the welcome elimination of a murderous weasel who killed thousands of innocents by his direct actions, and tens-of-thousands indirectly. I see his death as I would that of a serial murderer: does capital punishment necessarily produce a lower crime rate? No, but that particular person won't kill again, and, more important, it shows that some people commit certain acts that are so beyond the pale, that society cannot and will not tolerate them at all. Osama had forfeited his right to live. Society, acting in this case through an American SEAL, had the right and the obligation to terminate Osama's stay among us. That brilliant raid should be a lesson for Muslims on the perils of following the path laid out by Jihadi murderers. It should also be a lesson for the West: we can defeat the Jihadis as long as we realize it is a long process, requiring patience, and sacrifice--and if we can continue to produce the men who carried out that raid.

Islamic civilization is a rotten house. Constant outside pressure either will collapse it, or force its miserable occupants to begin a serious effort at reforming and rebuilding it.  Islam holds sway among some of the world's potentially richest and most advanced countries, but that, in fact, are among the poorest and most retrograde on the planet.  Islam as practiced is a failed ideology: it leads to slavery, stupidity, and poverty on a mass scale.  The greatest victims of Islam are the Muslims forced to live under its tyrannical, mind-numbing, and brutal rule.

Islamic civilization produces nothing. Yes, yes, what about algebra? Ok, Ok, it hasn't produced anything in modern times besides ignorance, death, despair, and poverty.  It is the MSNBC of religious faiths, but, admittedly, with higher ratings.

I have lived and worked in many Muslim countries over the course of my long career, and have never failed to be amazed by the damage Islam does to its practitioners or, better said, to its victims. It makes people stupid, intolerant, and violent. I found repeatedly that there was an inherent contradiction between being a good Muslim and being a good person.  I met lots of good Muslims, and lots of good persons:  there was VERY little intersection between the two groups. Islam requires breaking a person down and making him or her into a robot; it discourages and openly represses independent thought; and fosters a constant feeling of paranoia of and hatred for the outside world: non-Muslims should be allowed to exist only to the extent that they can be taken advantage of, and then converted or discarded.

Islamic civilization, ironically, can only be saved by constant and sharp defeat at the hands of the hated infidels.  The Islamists must be defeated in their war against Israel; their war against India; their war against Russia; and, of course, their war against the West and our friends. We must understand their totalitarian ideology and defeat it again, and again, and again. As long as we do not see our belief in freedom and liberty as requiring our suicide, we can and will defeat them, just as the SEALs did in Abbottabad.  Only then will it be possible for "good" Muslims who also  want to be "good" people, assuming they exist, to stand up and tell the Jihadis to take a hike.

Islam needs a major reformation and enlightenment, and if its practitioners are not willing or able to do it, then the SEALs will do it for them. That's the choice facing Muslims. That's the choice so starkly shown by events in Abbottabad."

12 comments:

  1. Just think, though, how useful bin Laden would be as a hostage right now, in addition to his value as a source of intelligence.

    He should have been captured not executed.

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  2. Dead islamfacists are forgotten. It's the live ones, including those who are in prisons, that cause the problems. What intelligence OBL was still privy to was minimal at best.

    He should have been tortured and then shot.

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  3. Winston Churchill reached the same opinion of Islam more than a hundred years ago. Thomas Jefferson was not too hot on it either.

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  4. Question: The UK paper "The Independent" claims that papers were taken from the American embassy which were secret in that they named the people working with the US in Libya. Is it not US embassy policy to encrypt such papers? And why even have papers in an age of laptops and virtually uncrackable codes?

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    1. While many of your points are good, "encryption" with uncrackable codes is not a panacea. It merely moves the problem to key distribution, and that tends to be iffy.

      To give you an analogous and related example, how many passwords are recorded on a Post-It(TM) note next to the computer the user regularly uses?

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    2. I would be surprised that this sort of documentation would be at a lock-and-leave facility. If that were the case this would be a major security issue.

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  5. Diplomad: Thanks for the answer. I wonder if ordinary correspondence would qualify to identify those "friendly" to the US? In which case this might be considered excusable, if short sighted.

    hga: Leaving notes with keys on them would be as big a security fail as leaving classified papers laying around. Of course, you could torture the keys out of your hostages, but ultimately, you can use a wire brush (amongst other things) to completely destroy the information on an encrypted DVD in a few seconds.

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  6. I can't claim any expertise in the various flavors of Islam, nor do I have a sense of how many "good Muslims" there are compared to "good people" in the Muslim world, but I do have this feeling: We are already seeing a Muslim "reformation" in progress. The problem is, that "reformation" is being led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, and the prominent imams and mullahs, abetted by al Qaeda and its political and ideological allies. The arrow of history in that part of the world, it seems to me, is pointed in the wrong direction.

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  7. Yes, they gave us Algebra...a mathematical concept perfectly inline with the bitter ideology of Islam. That you MUST arrive at the answer ONLY through the exact step by step formula as described and you MUST show all your work.
    It does not matter if someone has a better, faster, or different method to achieve the answer. An insight that works for them and the way they think.
    You MUST comply with the strictures of the method with zero outside creativity.
    I hated Algebra.

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  8. OK, I'm gonna get static for this, but:

    (1) Islam WILL NOT reform until it CANNOT continue as-is.
    (2) The Koran is seen as God's literal-perfect-eternal plan for mankind. Not a syllable of it can (currently) be changed or reinterpreted.
    (3) If "something" happens that proves the Koran false, or renders any of the 5 "pillars of Islam" unworkable, Islam must die or change.
    (4) My suggestion is to vitrify Mecca. No Mecca= no seat of Islam per the "infallible" Koran, =no possibility of hajj (-one of the pillars of Islam, the requirement for Muslims to do their utmost to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their life).
    (5) Yes, the downside is that there would be Muslim riots for decades. The upside is that Islamic clerics would have to "reopen the door of ijtihad" (= allow debate on What Is Islam) and find a way to reconcile the "absolute literal truth" of the Koran with the absolute verifiable reality of a vanished Mecca. Presumably, the solution is as other religions have managed- move the exhortations of the scriptures to the realm of the will, the soul, the spirit -- and not the temporal/ physical. The Caliphate (where all men live in harmony under Islamic rule) would then become a place of the mind-and-spirit of a perfected Muslim, not a political goal requiring the total destruction of all other belief systems on earth.

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  9. "Islam needs a major reformation and enlightenment,..."

    That would be almost impossible since the Muslims believe that Allah revealed the Koran to Muhammad - his words are immutable. They even believe that the Koran as they know now is an exact copy of the original thing in heaven.

    Unless the powers that be in the West recognizes the fact that Islam is a religion, a way of life and an ideology; unless they separate the ideology from the rest, we will never see the end of these upheavels we see in the Muslim world. How could we fight them if we don't even want to recognize the real enemy?

    I've always said that it's easier to defeat communism, after all it's only an ideology, but it would be a lot harder if not impossible to defeat Islam barbarism unless we separate the ideology from the religious part.

    Believe me, that if in the future we have enough Muslims in the US, we will have mobs like this here as well. If we continue on this wilfully blind course, I fear for my children and grandchildren.

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  10. GREAT post Diplomad. Its amazing to me opinion leaders are still not willing to call out Islam as the root cause of most Middle East problems.

    I also agree with the previous poster, and fear for my Children and Grandchildren's future. I live in Santa Clara Ca, and the number of un-assimilating Muslims walking the streets and praying in parks is accelerating. Most seem nice enough, but Sudden Jihad Syndrome is always a threat. One kid from Santa Clara got nailed in an FBI sting trying to blow up some building in Dallas. My Neighbors are oblivious to the barbarity of the religion of peace. They think the Naquibs are quaint - and just add to the color and diversity of Silicon Valley.

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