Sunday, November 02, 2003
THE REAL WAR
Regular readers of this blog may think I'm obsessed with Islamofascism -- I'm constantly pointing to items about the dangerous craziness in the Muslim world. This item by a Jewish officer in the U.S. Army who served during the initial stage of combat operations in Iraq goes a long way to expressing the thoughts that have led me to this point:
While patrolling the streets of Baghdad, I often got involved in political conversations with secular, educated, and "moderate" Iraqis about the war against Iraq, Israel, the Jews, and America. To my surprise, most of them held wildly irrational beliefs about the world. For example, most of them would swear that Ariel Sharon pressured a reluctant President Bush to go to war against Iraq [or] that the CIA put Saddam Hussein, a CIA agent, in power to allow U.S. forces to take Iraqi oil and impoverish Iraq. Finally, they were convinced that the CIA is an organization controlled by the Mossad and that powerful Zionists dominate Washington, D.C.! In fact, most Arabs in the world believe these absurdities. These beliefs are the product of years of intense brainwashing by their education[al] system, mass media and political and religious leaders. These beliefs turn educated, intelligent Arab family men into hijackers that slam passenger planes into buildings and homicide bombers that murder as may Jews as possible on Israeli buses.
We are not at war against terrorism; we are at war against an ideology. I consider this ideology to be the product of a dangerous mental disease. It is a disease that has infected millions of Arabs into believing that by destroying the enemy -- the Jew, the State of Israel, and the "Great Satan" America -- past Arab pride and glory [will] be restored. This mental illness is slowly but deliberately plunging the world into World War III.
Read the whole article and then ask yourself whether the author isn't right that we are dealing with what the world faced in the 1930s: A dangerous ideology that has the potential to ignite another world war. Then ask yourself whether averting your gaze can possibly be the right reaction to what is happening. In one way, 911 was like lifting a rock and seeing that a nest of poisonous snakes had been breeding in our own backyard.
We can't "eradicate" this problem with force, per se. But kidding ourselves about how dangerous it is will only make it worse. We have to be realistic about what the world is facing: A threat to civilization itself, just as it did from the 1930s to the 1980s with other forms of totalitarianism.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:29 AM
