Thursday, September 28, 2006

Root Cause

It is fairly discouraging to think that a columnist has to write this after five years at war:

If America is ever to triumph in its war against Islamic terrorism, we must get past the idea that we are its root cause. Specifically, we must get past the idea that a suicide bomber is just a peace-loving Muslim who, if we hadn’t set him off, would be growing figs and building sandcastles. Strapping explosives to your torso, marching yourself into a crowded marketplace and blowing yourself up in order to slaughter as many civilians, including women and children, as you can is a profoundly demented act, an act which undoes a dozen or so millennia in the moral evolution of the human species.

Such an act is not triggered by America’s sociopolitical landscape or by its foreign policy. Rather, it is nurtured by an intellectually degenerate culture, sponsored by sleazy kleptocratic regimes and authorized by a once-honorable religious tradition perverted to serve the pipedreams of an apocalyptic death cult.

It’s Muslim civilization, not America, that must change in order for Islamic terrorism to cease.


We aren't the problem, people. They are the problem. The bigger problem that logically flows from this, in my mind, is whether we can help Moslem civilization to change before we get tired of being killed and just destroy them all.

I don't want it to get to that point. But I want to risk nuclear terrorism against our people even less.