Alan Caruba echoes and underscores points I have made many times in this Insight piece (thanks to Nicolei):
I think a lot of Americans, certainly those favoring withdrawal from Iraq and efforts to negotiate with al-Qaeda and the nations supporting its holy war, have not yet figured out that the Islamic fundamentalists who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg, who attacked this nation on 9/11, and who represent the insurgents in Iraq, want us dead. Unless, of course, we convert to Islam. ...According to the extremists, the prophet left a trail of assassinations and other bloody acts behind him until his own death, all of which they insist are recorded by Muslim historians. This is cited as a tradition among Muslims in the early centuries of Islamic development. As the Internet essay notes, these are not just isolated incidents or aberrations. "Such violence in fact goes to the very roots of Islam as found in the Quran and the actions and teachers of the prophet of Islam himself." And that is the view of the extremists who have declared a war of terror on all those who do not see the world as they do.
The holy war that has been declared against us leaves us no choice but to fight for our lives.
Well the word is getting out (slowly).
But the question os, even if we come to realise this awful reality... are we capable of defending ourselves?
This is not a was against enemies wearing uniforms in another country.
They are here amongst us, so no army of "professionals" can be sent overseas to defend us.
We will ultimately have to deal with it PERSONALLY. Each and everyone of us.
On another forum I quickly rebuked someone who was ridiculing the Bush administration for pushing forward research of new tactical nuclear weapons.
Here's how I did it and why it helps illustrate very clearly what we are facing -- and I spit this list out in all of 5 minutes, just from memory of incidents I have read chronicled in The New York Times, in many books and from AP new reports. That fact alone is very chilling.:
Thanks to Islam, we are facing war with:
1) An enemy that does not understand the word compromise .
2) An enemy that does not honor ceasefires.
3) An enemy that does not give women equal rights.
4) An enemy that is racist towards blacks and whites.
5) An enemy whose major contribution to the world in the past 2 centuries has been global terrorism.
6) An enemy that does not wear a uniform to do battle.
7) An enemy that kills innocents deliberatly.
8) An enemy that does not allow religious freedom.
9) An enemy that believes every word of their holy book verbatim to the damnation of the planet.
10) An enemy that hides behind children and even kills its own children in order to pass blame onto the enemy.
11) An enemy that believes it is just to burn or behead rape victims in order to cleanse them.
12) An enemy that believes it is just to kill women in their own family who so much as befriend an infidel or someone of the wrong race.
13) An enemy that rationalizes war based on religious grounds alone.
14) An enemy that seeks not peace but subjugation and then peace.
15) An enemy that tells the world "Come to Allah and you have nothing to fear."
16) An enemy that will not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, despite the fact that Israel has offered them half of Jerusalem and all of the occupied territories at two different points in the 20th century. Arab Muslims do not want peace with Israel. To believe otherwise is Polyanna appeasement and not looking at historical record.
17) An enemy that is fueled by the teachings of a false prophet that was a murderer, a polygamist, and a liar.
And you thought the Cold War was bad, eh? I feel like buying Russians vodka and inviting them to fight along with us right now.
One caveat to the forthright Caruba, whose name sounds like the ideal cruise-ship destination: it is possible to want the United States to withdraw from Iraq not because one fails to understand, but because one does understand, the scope and nature of the threat that the belief-system of Islam poses, and will always pose, to non-Muslims.
It was right and proper to invade Iraq, so as to disrupt, seize, and otherwise destroy Iraq's capacity to cause major damage -- including the damage that any Muslim state might cause, simply because of ties, official or unofficial, formal or informal, sanctioned or not-sanctioned, with Muslim terrorists. The whole brouhaha over whethere or not Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda is silly. His Ba'athist state was only superficially secular; it was not secular in the Kemalist sense; any Muslim country's armaments must be assumed to be avaiable, by accident or by design, to Muslim terror groups. It may be Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, Laskar Jihad or Hamas, Abu Sayyaf or (fill in here the group you are sure you can spell correctly), or just the lone individual, maddened by something, and out to see justice done by killing as many Infidels as he can. Islam is one of the most powerful, totalitarian, and dangerous belief-systems, deliberately constructed over time, by the composers of its sacred texts and by the commentators on those texts, to regulate every area of life, down to the most intimate detail, and to assert, and reassert, the supremacist ideology of Islam, the need for "Islam to dominate and not to be dominated" which is the First Commandment, in a sense, of Islam as a geopolitical system. And there naturally flows from that the requirement to kill, or convert, or suppress, or humiliate, all Infidels -- so that throughout the world Islam may reign, and the sharia be imposed.
Caruba implies that opposition to remaining in Iraq comes from those who do not realize what the Believers want. But what if remaining in Iraq, now that the major weaponry has been destroyed, or seized, or moved to other countries, has become an obstacle to seeing the wider picture, an obstacle to the correct articulation of the problem (even if it must be snuck up on, by focusing on "only those who believe in the Jihad" as if that did not include almost all Muslims)? What if, at this point, in the summer of 2004, keeping the American army (the epithet of choice is "over-stretched")in Iraq, and spending enormous sums essentially to bribe the Iraqis into good behavior, is a misallocation of men, materiel, money, and attention, as I think it is? What if staying in Iraq prevents the American government from acting, as it should, to destroy Iran's nuclear capability? From seizing the southern Sudan and protecting its non-Muslim population until they can have a referendum, and then independence (a move that would signal a willingness to defend the Christians of Black Africa, would split those Christians from their tepid support of the Arab and Muslim political agenda, provide a place for American airbases with which both the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, and North Africa, with its assorted Salafists, would be easily reached -- and in a Christian domain, full of grateful black Christians and animists who, unlike the Iraqis, will not be sullenly or murderously hostile to those who have freed them), and other undertakings that have been noted at this site.
The idea that those who want to "get out of Iraq" fail to see the problem of Islam is false. The problem is in fact upside-down: those who think they are being "hard-headed" and "tough-minded" by "staying the course" (these quotation marks are all meant to imply a certain linguistic distancing from the phrases), are not hard-headed, nor tough-minded, enough. They are mushy, mushy about the idea of "democracy" leading to a lessening of Islamic fervor, unclear about the lessens of the example provided by Ataturk, unwilling, or insufficiently imaginative, to think of a vast strategy, involving many different instruments of war and propaganda and economic power, to create the conditions in which many Muslims -- not all, but many -- the economic, political, moral, and intellectual failures of Islam.
(If these fixed phrases weary some, with the Homeric epithets, the repeated litanies, the repetition, sorry! Pedagogic purposes take precedence over all else.
I never tired of hearing truth put forth in eloquent terms. If others can not abide the reality of it all, that's just part of the problem.
The writer (Alan Caruba) of the article that Robert Spencer excerpts from cites two articles on Answering-Islam's site. Here are the URLs:
http://answering-islam.org.uk/Terrorism/islam_and_violence.html)
and
http://www.answering-islam.org/Quran/Themes/jihad_passages.html
For more pictures of Muslim murder and mayham, go to Yahoo...........
type in....arab-racism+jihad
look the whole site over, it gives a complete history of all the conflict going on world wide with Muslims.......all current.
Go to the right side of the page
scroll down to .........Cruelty....the pictures are here, but they are VERY GRAPHIC.
It really is "about oil." But not the way the president's critics want us to believe. While we are rightly focused on the evil of the so-called Jihadists fomenting terror, murder and mutilations in the name of Allah, we also have to keep in view the big picture, that they are seeking to take control of the area where most of the world's oil is found. If they can do that they will have the rest of the world "by the throat" including the secularist liberals who are encouraging them by attacking our own government.
Foehammer,
That's actually quite a good list...post it often and everywhere. Mr. Spencer's site can document the specific quranic verses and hadiths...
Susan
That site got hit so many times that yahoo closed off access temporarily.
the error meessage says
The web site you are trying to access has exceeded its allocated data transfer.