Closets

No doubt someone will do a word search and find how many times our media has mentioned ‘Osama’ and ‘Obama’ since Osama was killed by SEAL team 6. I wonder who would win that particular contest. Since we don’t really have all that much useful to do, we might even try to find out how often reporters and talking heads have used these two names interchangeably. They’re really quite similar – the only difference being, that one is dead and one is still alive. Both have killed, after all. (And don’t let me go into degrees of killing – killing one, or thousands – and get all caught up in an argument to determine at which point killing actually becomes a menace.)

Now you might say that one is on our side while the other one wasn’t. Fair point; but let’s define ‘sides’. Let’s say there are ‘sides’. Our side demands submission; that is to say that we expect their side to refrain from killing us. Their side appears not yet convinced that such submission is to their benefit. In Islam, submission is the ultimate goal. They will kill enough of us to convince the rest to submit. The same is true of us (in a way).

Killing is the ultimate statement anyone can make. In taking a life we become god-like, and thus assert that we exist. After one has done it, there is no walking it back. It is the finality of it that should frighten those who subsist on the illusion of death. Submission, on the other hand, is to bow to one’s fate. One continues to live, but one might as well be dead. When the Palestinian suicide bomber (whose vest failed to detonate) was asked why he did it, he claimed that he was already dead; that the Israelis had rendered him dead long ago. Another example is the phrase, “Give me liberty, or give me death” – the American apple pie version of the same thought.

It’s difficult to work things out and enter into an understanding when one has abandoned all reason; when reason needs at the very least to have a foundation on which both sides can agree, such as life being better than death. Islam doesn’t work that way. Therefore, the default position is power. Islam has discovered that the slow action of water running over a stone will over time reduce that stone. Islam has seen the action of water create great canyons. It is committed to chip away at what it believes to be evil and transient. In fact, Islam demands it.

We cannot connect. We are far too busy with our own lives to grasp the abstractions on which Islam builds its theology. We see them simply as aggressive and unyielding, without realizing that we are unyielding as well. What we call ‘advanced’, Islam calls ‘evil’. We claim to be non-violent, but it is us they are reacting to. Our money is perceived as poison by them. It threatens the purity of their abstract view. It is we who are the bulls in their china closets. What we think of as our kind-hearted outreach only shatters more of their china. They see us as aggressors. It is we who fail to recognize their purity; who label their purity as dangerous and corrupt and threaten to overwhelm it. It is they who find themselves backed into a corner from which they snarl and fight …and wear away our belief in ourselves like the stone at the edge of the ocean that eventually becomes sand.

We stand at a crossroads. Will we stand up and fight as Krishna demanded of Arjuna during the epic battle of Kurukshetra, or will we continue to appease, knowing that appeasement – like valium - becomes addictive? We too have a right to practice what we believe. In our ever shrinking world, can we really afford to build enough closets for everyone to live separately?
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Picture: Arjuna's Penance, Mahabalipuram, India.

Short Bits: Killing Osama

I seem to remember a soldier being court-martialed for giving a captured terrorist, a fat lip. Now I could be wrong; I never heard anything about it again. I understand, the rules of engagement are really quite stringent – unless, of course, they are overruled by the Commander-in-Chief.

A police officer who has killed in the course of duty often requires many hours of counseling. Now that Obama has a targeted kill under his belt, he cannot help being a changed man. (Somebody must have given the order to ‘kill on sight’.) He can now go one of two ways. Either he will grow hesitant and indecisive, or he will take on the role of mob boss with renewed gusto.

Killing has always been the ultimate wet dream of the Left. I remember people incessantly toying with the idea while Bush was still in office. And just this week liberal talk show host, Mike Malloy, proposed on air that the Navy Seals kill “mass-murderer” George W. Bush.

Despite the apparent applause from all virtually quarters, I cannot shake a distinct sense of unease.
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Now for a different view by Corlyss D, Guest Contributer, responding to John Batchelor's question, "Why not capture him (OBL)?"

Hypothesize me no hypotheticals. They are frankly less than worthless. Reality demands response. You can sit and think and think all day long about "what ifs."

I say good on SEAL Team 6! We need more of that kind of covert assassination rather than a moralizing epitaph for the dead. A writer who fancies himself a historian and moralist declared a couple of years ago that the only "winners" of WW2 were the European Jews because most of them died and, in so doing, aquired a sort of beatification of the defenseless. The writer implied that was a state that all peoples should aspire to if they want their reputations to survive conflict. Bugger that.

"Why not capture him?" (John Batchelor asks.) "Infamous war criminals make for epochal landmark war crimes prosecution (the delusional, deprraved, stupid Martin Borman: and surely the Nuremberg gang was far more frightening the Bin Laden)."

Why capture him? The Nuremberg trials might have been epochal, but they were a huge political mistake. They gave the illusion of state action without a legitmate state. They polluted the judicial process with a star chamber whose outcome was never in doubt. They wasted a lot of money creating the impression that there was such a thing as consensus in an international community that was hardly more developed than the Libyan resistence is today. Churchill was right: the trials have indeed come back to haunt the hell out of us, establishing a precedent that lives in the feckless ICC and the misguided internationalist blather that motivates many policy makers in the EU and other trend-setters seeking legitimacy for an international community incapable of doing anything but relief work by consensus. Quasi-states are impotent in so many categories of critical civil society functions that to bestow on them serious state functions like law enforcement and war-making capability is simply delusional.
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Final thought: I guess what has me upset is that this Osama killing accrues to Obama. It’s just one more way for Obama to maintain the illusion that he is an ‘American’. He is not. Everything he’s done has been detrimental to our nation. I say it’s deliberate. Read Kimberly A. Strassel’s opinion piece entitled “Obama’s ‘Gangster Politics’” in today’s WSJ; and then go on to read Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.’s “Barney Frank’s Latest Bad Idea”. Then turn the page and read Michael B. Mukasey’s “The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden”. And that’s just today! Every day brings a fresh outrage or more. And now we’re supposed to forget it all and say he’s the best thing since sliced bread? Not me, brother!

Perhaps Cicero said it best:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

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