Chesler Chronicles

April 14th, 2009 8:06 pm

Children of the Taliban, Teenage Somali Pirates: Defeat Them Or Save Them All?

To me, it is clear as day.

Although they are pathetically young, the Muslim Somali pirates are outlaws, thugs, war lords in training; they are like al-Aqsa (the allegedly “moderate”) Palestinian terrorists, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Egyptian Brotherhood, and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. They will never stop coming after us until we stop them cold; indeed, a second American vessel has just escaped a new Somali pirate attack.

Leftists view all these men as oppressed and impoverished, not by their own leaders, (which they are), but primarily by the imperial western powers. As such, they are indiscriminately and subconsciously viewed as 17th century African slaves under the lash, or 19th century native American Indians, being genocidally slaughtered and penned up in reservations.

When I look at Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, I do not see a trembling Jean Valjean, forced to steal his loaf of bread and flee unjust, superior military powers. To me, these men and their way of thinking are dangerous, and we must roundly defeat them and their ideas.

But, here are some troubling questions: Do we deal with Muslim terrorists, their child-martyr weapons, the civilians behind whom they hide, simply by defeating them all militarily–or are we also obliged to feed, house, and re-educate our sworn enemies—a reprise of the Marshall Plan but this time on every continent? Or, can we just defeat those who are threatening our way of life, (or holding an American ship captain hostage), and return home for another 100-500 years?

What if the pirate is a teenager? What if the suicide bomber is an Afghan or Pakistani male child between the ages of five and twelve? PBS just ran an excellent program about this by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy: Children of the Taliban. These child martyrs killed from twenty to twenty eight people apiece, themselves included, and wounded many more.

Are we our brothers keepers? What about our sisters—are we their keepers too? Unsurprisingly, as a female journalist, Pakistani-born Obaid-Chinoy was told that she’d be killed if she came herself to interview Taliban leaders in Pakistan and in the tribal territories. She was allowed to send a male cameraman. Obaid-Chinoy introduces us to a young male “handler,” his eyes fetchinginly rimmed with kohl, who himself trains and dispatches boys as young as five. Rocking back and forth, madrassa-style, as if in a trance, he tells her that “God provides (the boys) that you need to sacrifice.” He is proud of his religious work, not ashamed of forcing young children to kill themselves.

Ah yes, Obaid-Chinoy herself interviews the head of a Taliban madrassa (Muslim religious school) in Karachi, Pakistan. When the camera is close, he engages in taqquiya, telling her that at the madrassa, the students only learn about “peace, love, and harmony.” He does so engagingly, soulfully. Then, when the interviewer has the camera retreat, he changes his story. Killing and dying for Allah “is in our blood. Muslims will never lack for sacrificial lambs.” The switch from a lie to the truth is flawless, effortless.

Most important, we meet a 14 year-old in the film who, like all the other boys, only studies the Arabic language Qu’ran. He does not understand a word of it, it is the only book he is allowed to read, and he must memorize it. One feels sorry for him–that is, until he begins spouting the party line about women. Women are supposed to stay at home and attend to domestic matters, the problem in the world is that women and girls are “wandering around.”

Obaid-Chinoy also interviews eight to twelve year-old boys who are from the same family or from the same village. Some want to join the Taliban, others want to join the Pakistani Army. She asks each one whether they would actually kill their friend/relative if they found themselves facing each other in battle. Heartbreakingly, without any hesitation, future Taliban, future Army men emphatically told her that they would have to do so.

What if the cost of re-educating every single brainwashed student in every madrassa in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the West Bank, etc.; every single impoverished Somali pirate and warlord; every single terrorist, world-wide, means that America will inevitably sink below the horizon into horrible poverty and become a failed state?

Because that is what may happen—and more. Are we, too, ready to commit national, cultural and civilizational suicide because our children and grandchildren have been taught to feel incredibly guilty about how unfair life is, and how privileged they are (or recently thought they were), as compared to the agony and screaming poverty elsewhere?

Are we so sure that every brainwashed martyr-in-training, every barbarian, can be turned around, redeemed?

This is not possible. I also think that western civilization has its’ mind and heart set precisely upon this idealistic, compassionate mission.

Fellow-citizens: Quo Vadis, what road shall we take?

Pajamas Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:

1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.

2. Stay on topic.

3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.

4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.

5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.

The clause regarding "hate speech" has been deleted because readers criticized it as being too loosely defined. We agreed.

These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that Pajamas Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pajamasmedia.com.

11 Comments

1. George Jochnowitz:

During the Hitler years, the overwhelming majority of Germans sincerely believed in the beauty and justice of genocide. A few of them were merely “obeying orders,” but most were enthusiastic about what they were doing. And this was in Germany, the country that gave us higher education and classical music, among other things. A quarter of a century later, the overwhelming majority of Germans were sincerely horrified by what their country had done. Nowadyas, unfortunately, some of them are shifting to the idiotic view that Israel is repeating what Germany did, although this view is less common in Germany than in France or England.

Does this tell us anything about what is going in in the Islamic world? I really don’t know. I am very happy that I am not the President of the United States.

Apr 15, 2009 - 7:20 am 2. Greenconsciousness:

Why cant we set up schools, with western thought just as the Saudis fund their Madrases? Not expensive schools but schools comparable to the Madrases and peace corp economic development projects? While using our aid money to pressure countries in to disbanding schools which teach blood?

Of course this would be a change in foreign policy from the filth we do now. Too bad we don’t have a sec of state with real power.

Apr 15, 2009 - 7:44 am 3. TalkinKamel:

Good article, Phyllis. I, for one, am not willing to commit cultural suicide, all for the sake of our “brothers/sisters” in third-world hell holes, who hate our guts and want to bring us down to their level.

If our society, as a whole, wants to survive, the left, in its entirety, must be rejected.

The Left considers anyone who opposes America to be “oppressed”. Trust me, if we were to go into those countries, give everybody money, schools, aid, try to re-educate them, the Left would immediately start screaming that we’re bloody imperialists, destroying their wonderful indigenous culture, which is so much more wonderful than our own allegedly soulless, materialistic one.

And I hope people do realize that many of our sailors and soldiers are in their late teens, not much older than those “oppressed” and “abused” young pirates.

Apr 15, 2009 - 8:13 am 4. Greenconsciousness:

Let the left scream — who cares — they screamed all during the Iraq war and we did good there — they will destroy freedom in Afghanistan — then we can compare the two strategies.

To let the left or the right continue determine foreign policy is to cut our own throats. Only the hated neo cons and repub feminists got it right. Condi Rice got it right. 8 regional women’s centers in Afghanistan, economic development projects, women’s hospitals and schools, legal and media training for women, constitutional rights…

Apr 15, 2009 - 12:32 pm 5. Dr S McCosker:

If they’re 17 through 19, they’re adults. My eldest son is 18 and legally an adult – he can go into a pub, he can marry (but he’s too shy – he’d need a matchmaker if we were Jewish), and he can vote. He’s a gentle creature, an artist; but I *know* that had he been kidnapped and brutalised from age 7 or 10, by jihadists, he would almost certainly be a soulless killer.

Given what I know about teenagers, when I hear about teenage Muslim boys chewing khat and waving AK-47s around, I don’t think, ‘pooor darlings’, I think – “Loose cannon”.

I have read a bit about ‘child soldiers’, not only those recruited and brainwashed for Jihad (I recall the Janissaries of old), but those trained by Pol Pot, for example, or the children Mao used to destroy China in the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, the younger they are when seized and ‘trained’, the more dangerous they are; for a 5 year old or 7 year old has even less ability they have to withstand brainwashing or to question or disobey an evil order. They are subjected to extreme abuse expressly designed to *destroy* their moral sense, *destroy* what we might call their sense of ‘boundaries’, for those who make and use them want them to be robots who will do anything, absolutely anything, up to and including killing their parents if the order is given.

When one meets such zombified ‘children’ on the battlefield, there is nothing to be done but to stop them, as fast as one can, by all means necessary. I applaud the three brilliant head shots that took out the three jihad gang members and rescued the American captain. I do not condemn, at all, the Israeli border policemen who shot that 16 year old Beduin girl jihadist who was trying to kill them; she might have been wired up to explode.

But I think the deepest, hottest place in hell is surely reserved for the evil people who take children and teenagers and kill their souls and turn them into assassins.

Whether the young assassins themselves, if captured alive, can be deprogrammed – perhaps the term ‘exorcism’ is appropriate here, or ‘raising the dead’ – I do not know. I don’t think anyone has seriously made the experiment.

Apr 15, 2009 - 1:31 pm 6. Norman Simms:

Alas, Phyllis, when we are faced with a relentless enemy who trains its young from the most tender ages in hatred of western civilization, there is no way to accommodate to them–or to be under any obligation to take care of them so as to hope in their eventual correction. I fear the time has come to withdraw all “humanitarian” aid, to isolate the terrorists and their supporters with a “cordon sanitaire”, and defend our borders strictly. Aid in the way of food, health-care and economic development must come at the price of acceptance of civilized values. We cannot believe in a benevolent and correctable world.

Norman

Apr 15, 2009 - 2:14 pm 7. George Jochnowitz:

The story of the Somali pirates has gotten into the newspapers. On the other hand, a different story bvarely got reported at all. A young couple in Afghanistan eloped and got married. He was 21; she was 19. They were caught, tried, sentenced to death, and executed. The press should have had screaming headlines about this.

Apr 15, 2009 - 3:40 pm 8. bbloom:

I have been trying to forward an e-mail to you that had very graphic photos of an eight year old Iranian boy who was caught stealing a loaf of bread. The child’s arm is destroyed on the spot. The look of resignation on the child’s face is very telling of childhood in Iran. These children are never loved as westerners would define it. The adults who met out the punishment are devoid of compassion.
Unfortunately, our compassion will be our downfall. Children who are raised to hate will do just that. They must be dealt with just as harshly as any other killers.

Apr 15, 2009 - 7:02 pm 9. Alice:

I am very inclined toward ‘we just defeat those who are threatening our way of life, (or holding an American ship captain hostage), and return home for another 100-500 years’.

Doing more than that should depend on the group or nation posing the threat. Iraq posed a significant threat, in my opinion, and had a lot of potential for becoming friendly or neutral, like Kuwait. Its location gives it high strategic importance.

Less developed areas and nations like Somalia and Afghanistan are questionable, debatable. (The two cauldrons of hate produced by the Palestinians are especially so.)

As adults go, so will children. While I sadly agree that it is morally permissible to defend yourself against a child posing imminent threat, it is morally wrong to condemn all small children who have been taught to hate. (I do not think I could kill a child in self-defense, and I hope never to find out.)

So our efforts should be to militarily defeat enemy adults and teenagers, support friendly adults and teenagers, and let them turn the children around or deal with them if they turn into criminals or terrorists. I am sad to include teenagers with adults, but remember, teens used to be considered young adults and still are in the majority of cultures in the world.

Apr 16, 2009 - 10:17 am 10. Children of the Taliban, Teenage Somali Pirates: Defeat Them Or Save Them All? « ACT Northern Virginia/Richmond/DC Metro Chapter. Dedicated to the Defense of our freedom from Islamic Ideology.:

[...] Pajama’s Media Comments [...]

Apr 16, 2009 - 3:55 pm 11. joeblough:

… are we also obliged to feed, house, and re-educate our sworn enemies …

Obliged by whom? By what?

==========

The cold fact of reality is that a 7 year old wearing a bomb vest is just as lethal as a 30 year old wearing the same device. And one might have to kill either to save oneself or others whom one is responsible to protect.

The moral responsibility for that child’s death would lie with the monsters that strapped on the bomb.

Saving and educating that child is a luxury that one might or might not wish to indulge in, or even be able to afford if desired.

===========

Taking on oneself the responsibility for educating the entire world is at best like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, and at worst suicidal.

There is an endless and constantly renewed supply of ignorance and error in the world. There is no way for a single person, community or even nation to keep up.

Minds can only be changed one at a time, and only by their possessor. To think otherwise is to engage in fantasies of omnipotence.

==========

A nation might occasionally decide to engage in a sort of Marshall Plan. But only if that nation is willing to undertake unbreakable imperial control of the subject nation, with all the brutality that such a course is likely to require.

We’ve done an amazing, but nonetheless rather half-assed job in Iraq and Afghanistan, where sharia law is still enshrined in their constitutions, meaning that the injustices of sharia theocracy can raise their heads again at any moment. We just didn’t want to undertake the rough task of crushing their traditional culture. The next generation after us will have to deal with the results.

==========

So far as the teenage Somali pirates are concerned, it is worth bearing in mind that through most of human history, roving bands of male “teenagers” have been responsible for much if not most of the murder and mayhem. Even in our own culture, we bring boys into the army at 18. I wouldn’t get too moist and sentimental about the innocence of 15 year old bandits. They can be damned dangerous, cold as steel and as serious as cancer.

We may consider them children (see The Death of the Grown-Up – Diana West) but by most of the world and by the standards of most of human history they are just young men. And to the extent that they have been mentally neglected or twisted by their home cultures, well the moral responsibility lies with their home cultures, not us. They are not pets. They are men. Dangerous men.

And they will leave a trail of weeping widows in their wake if they are not forcefully dealt with.

Our #1 responsibility is the defense of our own interests and civilization. Anything after that is luxury, possibly dangerous luxury.

==========

Bottom line: We must defeat them, in that we have no choice. We cannot save them all, even if we want to.

We are not gods.

May 5, 2009 - 3:13 am