30 Comments

1. AZM:

” It would be such a tragedy if it just served to fuel the jihadist cause.”

– Susanna Miller

The tragedy is that Ms. Miller and the BBC are providing a propaganda boost for the jihadist cause.

Nov 8, 2008 - 8:06 pm 2. Alexis:

I, for one, don’t think the executions will necessarily give a propaganda boost to al-Qaeda. Islam and Christianity are different religions with vastly different moral overtones concerning the meaning of the death penalty. So long as the executions are painless, I don’t expect much Muslim outrage.

Their deaths won’t be anything like what Mansur al-Hallaj went through.

Nov 8, 2008 - 8:09 pm 3. Jamie Irons:

The real crisis facing the West is the absolutely nonnegotiable public demand for comfort without the price of guilt or responsibility in any form; which in its extremity amounts to a rejection of life. We don’t want the earth with its intemperate seasons and gritty soil; with its unrequited love or shattered hopes. We want it just so.

Wretchard, this is one of the deepest pieces of analysis of our current dilemma that I have read.

Jamie Irons

Nov 8, 2008 - 8:09 pm 4. vb:

I second Jamie’s comment.

Nov 8, 2008 - 8:43 pm 5. Uncle Jefe:

The actions of the Left during the last 8 years showed that the suicide of the West was picking up speed.
The election of obammy has just sent it into overdrive.

Nov 8, 2008 - 8:52 pm 6. mika2k1:

The real crisis facing the West is that people like Richard pay any attention to what the BBC or The Guardian say.

Nov 8, 2008 - 8:53 pm 7. 3Case:

“All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.”

Benjamin Franklin

Nov 8, 2008 - 9:19 pm 8. Mike_W:

A widely accepted and rational approach in the West to understanding just what it is about the teachings of Islam that might lead to:
“some relatives of the victims insisting that the death penalty was ‘anomalous’ with what they believed.”, would be great.

Tabari IX:69 “Killing disbelievers is a small matter to us.”

For thousands of other quotes from Islamic literature, check out:
Fighting
Terrorism
War
Jihad
Martyrs/Mercenaries
Militants
Murder,
among other headers, at:

http://www.prophetofdoom.net/Islamic_Quotes_Murder.Islam

Yes, Islam teaches conversion, subjugation or murder of unbelievers and it should be outlawed in any civilised country.
It aint rocket science; and Islamic jihad will not disappear because it conflicts with what people would like to believe Islam teaches.
And jihad will continue with or without a “propaganda boost”; so in my view the death penalty for jihadists makes wonderful sense.

Nov 8, 2008 - 9:24 pm 9. Alexis:

To paraphrase Milan Kundera, the crisis of the West comes from the triumph of kitsch over shit. The crisis of the West stems from a resolute unwillingness to recognize mundane reality, for recognition of the existence of shit may undermine the illusion of modernity.

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes are made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nov 8, 2008 - 9:28 pm 10. whiskey:

Old line Communists would have wiped out every last Muslim they could lay their hands on. God knows Stalin, Mao, and pretty much all the other Communists did so as much as possible.

This is not about Communism. This is about how society has changed, from a relatively balanced, men-women sharing equal power, to one where single women and their concerns dominate.

If you are a married couple, it does not matter, if you are a man or a woman, you have concerns for your family and have investment in the future. You want your children to avoid this so you support whatever ruthless objectives need accomplishing to make Jihad stop. Even if that means say, forbidding Muslims to enter, and deporting the rest from your nation, regardless of citizenship. This would have been the reaction of Victorian, Edwardian, and yes, Georgian Britain. Or Ike’s America.

NOW, however, the pill and condom and radically improved ability of women to live on their own their entire lives, even form single mother families that are as financially successful as married couples, means a sea-change in attitudes towards threats.

Something like this … well it’s better just to be comfortable. Since social status and positioning count just as much as the investment in the future. Perhaps even more.

Married people move beyond the endless dance of status in the mating game, single people never do. This is why it’s important for marriage as an institution to survive, and why it’s disaster when it dies.

You get attitudes like this, spread throughout society as the dominant mode of response to threats. Let’s all be “nice.”

Nov 8, 2008 - 10:11 pm 11. bogie wheel:

The English Are So Nice! – D. H. Lawrence
.
The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they’re the nicest people in the world.
And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you’re not nice, they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on
they’re all very well
but they’re not really nice, you know
They’re not as nice in our sense of the word are they now?

That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally––
But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
they don’t really understand––
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just be nice––
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn’t understand
just be nice, you know! oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage––
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be.

Nov 8, 2008 - 10:23 pm 12. Alexis:

Pacifism can be a form of murder. When a fire is raging, those who obstruct the fireman are as responsible for the fire as the arsonist.

Overtly masculine “Stalinist” bullying isn’t the only form of aggression. Passive-aggressive behavior also exists in politics. That aggression will often take the form of actively undermining the West’s will to fight against terrorists, all in the name of making the world a better place to live. These enthusiasts believe in what they are doing.

Criminal regimes are the result of enthusiasts who think their good intentions justify their means. It hardly matters whether that enthusiasm is called Communism, Nazism, Islam, or Defeatism.

It would be a mistake to assume that Mr. Kundera was only talking about Communism. His real enemy was kitsch. Indeed, kitsch can often lead voters into delusion, with the effect that their elected leaders become either deluded and honest or knowledgeable and dishonest.

Nov 8, 2008 - 11:17 pm 13. Derek:

You hear the same thread when discussing Afghanistan.

People say that if the Canadian’s stay there for 15 years, the situation won’t be any better than it is now.

But what happens if they leave?

Why can’t we go back to 1995 where we could watch the siege of Sarajevo on TV, wring our hands, tut tut those unreasonable Balkan people, and go about our important business?

Like, we don’t want a war. What’s their problem?

Derek

Nov 8, 2008 - 11:52 pm 14. SpeakEasy:

Since they get a boost from either action the best course is to make it so bloody they face extinction. Refusing to tolerate the behavior and having the will to follow through without hesitation is the only way to force a reformation of the faith. Or its extinction. Either way it ends. The Israelis have the right idea; As Sean Connery said in the untouchables, “They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue.”

Nov 9, 2008 - 1:24 am 15. Rob Murphy:

6. mika2k1:
“The real crisis facing the West is that people like Richard pay any attention to what the BBC or The Guardian say.”

Do you think if we ignore them they will go away, Mika?

Great line, Wretchard.

Nov 9, 2008 - 4:26 am 16. Rob Murphy:

BTW limp dick lefties may whinge about dissing those three mongrels but we know for sure they won’t be murdering any more innocents.

I wish we could say that about the people in Guantanamo (though I am concerned that they are being held without trial).

Nov 9, 2008 - 4:28 am 17. davod:

“So long as the executions are painless, I don’t expect much Muslim outrage.”

WTF does this mean?

Nov 9, 2008 - 8:00 am 18. bogie wheel:

As Sean Connery said in the untouchables, “They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue.”

I think the jihadis have amply demonstrated that they understand “the Chicago way” quite well. The concern is that, ironically, most Americans may not.

We whinge (thanks, Rob, for reminding me of a great word) and make a national obsession about Abu Ghraib. They, meanwhile, continue to saw off heads with gusto and post the videos on the internet.

In the age of media and insta-news, enemies of Western civ have figured out Western civ’s Achilles heel: if you destroy our will to fight, you win. Terrorism, one could argue, is the perfection of precision warfare against Western societies, in that it aims, with laser-like focus, to win in the only arena it can: public opinion and morale.

The question on which Western civilization hangs, therefore, is whether those Western values that VDH has written about that have served the West so well in waging warfare in the past become a liability now that the enemy has fixed on our soft underbelly and has the available (and too-often willing accomplices in) media to act as a force multiplier.

In September 2006, pre-surge, Hanson himself wrote an essay called “Is the Western Way of War Dead?” Among his thoughts is this passage:

“… there are a variety of constraints on American power, but most are not military. In an ethical sense, Western publics object not merely to suffering losses, but increasingly to inflicting them on the enemy as well.

“But over the long duration of history, these are cyclical and often transitory phenomena.”

So he finds, historically, some hopeful evidence that the Western tendency towards whinging and self-doubt and political paralysis is cyclical and that this, too, shall pass.

My concern is: In the nuclear age, do we have enough time to wait for the wheel to turn back again?

Nov 9, 2008 - 8:32 am 19. Alexis:

Actually, even if the executions aren’t painless, I still don’t expect much Muslim outrage.

So far as I can tell, Muslim outrage doesn’t come from enforcing Islamic laws, but rather from the idea that Muslim states are somehow enforcing American policies. Interestingly, the more outrage there is against the death penalty in western countries, the more legitimacy its use would have in Indonesia.

Nov 9, 2008 - 8:34 am 20. slade:

Somewhere between “the kitsch and the shit” we have to find a way to be part of this world.

[h/t to Annoy Mouse for the first reference. (It's the tide. The dismal tide.)]

Nov 9, 2008 - 8:37 am 21. Voltimand:

“How do you win? You don’t. But the game goes like this: you can’t win and you’re not supposed to. The very question makes people upset. The real crisis facing the West is the absolutely nonnegotiable public demand for comfort without the price of guilt or responsibility in any form; which in its extremity amounts to a rejection of life. We don’t want the earth with its intemperate seasons and gritty soil; with its unrequited love or shattered hopes. We want it just so. And we want it from government, our new god.”

Excellent, Fernandez. Gimlet-eyed truth in crystalline prose.

Nov 9, 2008 - 9:08 am 22. Unsk:

From Peter Hitchens:

” I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war.”

Let us hope that this “switch of sides’ will be temporary and reversible. The Obama fools have brought third World and Chicago Cronyism to Washington. Obama already apparently has quietly backed down from setting up SDI in Eastern Europe. The fit will hit the shan soon.

Nov 9, 2008 - 9:27 am 23. programmer:

There is no place for free spirits to go.

When I was young, not so long ago in geological time, if the world became too civilized, a young man could pack up his belongings and go west (I remember California before the hippies) or go north to Alaska. There always seemed to be work (usually hard labor, but it paid) to provide a “grub stake”.

I remember standing in areas in the northwest where I could truly believe that I was the first human to have stood there. Life in such places could be raw and primitive (even in the early ’60s). But as time passes and civilization creeps in from the edges, others came. Safe trails were blazed. Then roads were built to the top of mountains that before were only reachable by hard effort and risk. Subdivisions sprang up where previously only lonely winds howled along with the coyotes. Then the housing associations started complaining about the coyotes. The howling bothered their calm, peaceful sleep.

One of the things I like about coyotes is that they still bother the sleep of the civilized sheeple (a most appropriate phrase, that) huddled together inside their fenced hives of faux mansions. Screw them.

As you can tell, I’m still struggling with the monsters of the id and mangled metaphors. Ah well, more zazen required.

Nov 9, 2008 - 9:37 am 24. mika2k1:

Do you think if we ignore them they will go away, Mika?
==

That’s not what I said.

If you want the big media to go away, stop subsidizing their subsidizers. That means that you target the big money that subsidizes the big media, and you put them out of business. The big money subsidizing big media has been the car oil mafia with their Jihadi friends.

Nov 9, 2008 - 9:41 am 25. Meredith:

I think we can win in some sense by keeping truthful as possible about it all…

1. There are no virgins for them in the after life.

2. We aren’t racist bastards because the Bali or Indo or whoever it was, condemned The Bali Bombers to the firing squad.

3. A lot of these sad people have been educated by a crazy religion and not much else.

4. Death penalty is a deterrent and it works too… People, even no matter how much they say they want to die for Allah……….. do not want to get put to death. No one does!

5. Terrorism is the creepiest of crimes, it is cowardly and not within the relams ofa fair fight by our terms.

We well know this and more.

It is good to know Islamic belief, know the enemy etc, it is very different to our thinking and logic, but I think our truths, are what we should react from, not theirs.

I think we need to put effort into believing in, or more so, remembering ourselves again.

Nov 9, 2008 - 9:51 am 26. Jay:

Rather than single women I think that the weakness in our society comees from women who have never had children and single mothers. I know of couples who married late and could not have children where the wives live in a world of illusions. Single mothers suffer from the lack of a husband who balances the upbringing of the child or children.

Nov 10, 2008 - 12:30 pm 27. Beaglescout:

I agree with Jay. The weakness of society comes from the increasing lack of fathers who are involved with their children. It weakens both the children and the mothers involved. It all comes from the feminist war against patriarchy. The solution is to reverse all the changes that were made to wage that war. Repeal Title IX to allow more college men to engage in competitive sports. Restore dead white men to the corpus. Get rid of no-fault divorce. Rejigger the divorce rules so they no longer reflexively favor women in every single aspect. Get rid of affirmative action: it is a dagger in the heart of honest competition, and we just had proof with the election of Obama that tilting the playing field is no longer necessary.

Nov 10, 2008 - 3:37 pm 28. NahnCee:

“…that tilting the playing field is no longer necessary.”

You must have been napping and missed the tilted ballot box stuffing by ACORN and the tilted illegal overseas donations flowing unimpeded into O’s campaign, which will now result in McCain’s campaign being audited while the Great Black Hope gets a free (tilted) pass from the FEC. Although I do, vehemently, agree with the need to kill off affirmative action in all of its many politically correct variations.

Nov 11, 2008 - 12:45 pm 29. Ms. Know:

Affirmative action should be tabled, because now that history was made, everyone is presumed equal, despite the mainstream media illuminati who implemented race into the election every chance they got.

Nov 15, 2008 - 9:17 am 30. Ms. Know:

Now we have left-wing illuminati officials in office trying to close Gitmo and bring the terrorist here to stand trial.

Nov 26, 2008 - 8:12 am

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