My friend Jed sent me this
link. It's reprinted here.
Our Shrinkage in the Global War on TerrorBy Doug Giles
Bill O’Reilly stated this week on “The Factor” (Tuesday, 12/5/06) that the West is failing to confront evil. Failing to confront evil? Heck, we’re scared to define it, much less take it head-on.
We won’t even draw cartoons regarding this enemy, lest we offend our killers. Wow! Murderous Muslims all over the world must be making girlie man, wussy, limp wrist jokes about the West, as they bounce their combies down whatever dirt road they’re on en route to secure a nuke (or two) with our name on it.
The failure to define what is “evil” is causing us to capitulate to the apex (or nadir, I guess) of political correctness in a “No %$@&” time of crisis. Go ahead; ask someone at the next Winter Solstice office party to define “evil.” You’ll get the typical “it’s all relative” slop, or “there is no objective standard of right or wrong”, or “all absolute truth claims are nothing more than powerplays, man.” Y’know, the same emblematic drivel your pot smoking, liberal prof taught you at the University of You-Just-Wasted-A-Ton-Of-Your-Parent’s- Cash-And-Got-Brain-Washed-In-The-Process.
The few who do have the cojones to say something is evil will be called evil themselves because judging something as wrong has become the sin of the 21st century—unless, of course, you’re a liberal; then you can judge, bring up Foley, Delay, Ted Haggard, other GOP inadequacies, evangelical inconsistencies and call a spade a shovel all you want.
Anyway, postmodernism, as Os Guinness says, has made it “worse to judge evil than to do evil.” Those who declare something to be damnable are evil themselves, at least according to grand wizards of secular progressive “thought.”
In addition to the West’s growing unwillingness to say the Islamofacist ideology is uncut crap to the third power and that their adherents need to be deleted like KFed’s website history, here are three more reasons why I think the West’s will to war has shrunk:
1. We couldn’t care less. We don’t want to be bothered with what’s going on with the war on Iraq or with other mean people. We don’t want to stay abreast about what militant Islam is up to these days. That’s complicated, depressing and just icky. No, our inquiring minds want to know the following: what’s up with Britney and her un-photogenic crotch? Is Brit gonna be OK? How come Jen and Vince broke up? Did Mischa Barton have a meltdown? What’s Nicole Ritchie’s plastic surgery secret behind her new sexy look? Why did Kidman put new hubby Keith on a short leash? Is a Nip/Tuck star really leaving the show? And what’s up with the Martha and Rachel Ray food fight?
2. We want to believe the spin coming from CAIR [The Council on American-Islamic Relations] because the truth about Muslim mayhem is too brutal. Because of our aversion to the rawness of what the West is really facing with militant Islam, we want to believe CAIR’s talking heads when they say that “everything is cool, and the radicals in the Islamic camp are few and far between.” The reality is that the danger we face is higher, deeper, wider and nearer than most of us would care to understand. Since reality bites and requires that we change, we’d just rather believe the fairy tales about our enemies from their propaganda/reality stylists. As far as I’m concerned, CAIR is to prevarication what Carrot Top is to red hair coloring, tie dyed T-Shirts, over exercising and unfunniness.
3. We think we can talk our way out of this mess. We believe we can Eddie Haskell militant Islam and bebop and scat our way out of their ill will. The only problem is that Islam is not some June Cleaver that can be manipulated by our impish charm. We are convinced that we can solve things with Iran and Syria with a little less talk and a little more conversation. Yes, the PoMo wannabe placaters of the implacable would like to sit down with Islamofascists (who will never help us, ever loathe us, and forever seek to kill us) and tell them that “You’re not evil; you simply have a hole in your soul that we would like to help you fill. We should not be fighting. Can’t we all get a long? We should talk more often . . . maybe get together play some checkers . . . and we’d love to have you over for dessert to eat a piece of strawberry pie.”
Militant Islam has got to be loving the indecision, division and erosion of the West’s will to war. They understand the ancient maxim that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. We’re increasingly becoming so divided and defeated that if we don’t watch it, as one comedian said, we could be approaching a long drawn out debate regarding which shade of white to use as our surrender flag.
I believe we can be united and that we will eventually wake up and deal with radical Islam; however, I also believe (and fear) that the cohesion, readiness and resolve we need now to truly hammer these death dealers will only come about after we get hammered once again. I’m talking 911-style or worse. And I’m thinking this will probably occur in the next one to three years. And I hope I’m wrong.
