How Can You Ask a Jihadi to be the Last One to Die For a Mistake?
Jesse Walker | August 31, 2006, 9:15am
Take this with all the salt you can muster. If it's true, it's mighty interesting. If it's disinformation, it's mighty interesting that someone's spreading it around:
A speech allegedly made by Sheikh Abu Abdul Rahman has surfaced on a jihadi pro al-Qaeda website in which Rahman is cited as condemning the "infidel Hizbullah" and "the most corrupted regimes of Syria and Iran."...The statement [represents] the seething resentment of Sunni al-Qaeda, directed at what it sees as an attempted Shiite takeover of the jihad campaign in the Middle East.
In the speech, Rahman espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories inspired by the Russian forgery, the protocols of the elders of Zion: "We know very well from our history that the Jews target to occupy Lebanon, Syria and even the north of the Arabian peninsula even up to Iraq to the river of Furaat (Euphrates)."
However, he then turns his wrath to Hizbullah, Iran, and Syria, calling them "infidel entities," and arguing that they are preventing Sunni jihadis from attacking Israel....
"We need to know the reality, and we already know how Hizbullah do not fight for the sake of Allah. They declare themselves that they fight for the sake of Lebanon, are backed by the most corrupted regimes -- Syria and Iran -- and backed by the most evil people," Abdul Rahman was cited as saying.
"We cannot be fools to die for nationalism and tribalism, if two entities of Kuffar (infidels) fight that does not bother us. What bothers us is if we side with any one of them," he added.
Cugel | August 31, 2006, 11:35am | #
Of course we see Bush-level comprehension in Bush war supporters, along with open calls for genocide to "wipe out" the problem.
Short of the Roman solution of killing all the men, seizing all the women and selling them into slavery and pouring salt into the fields -- in short outright genocide against tens of millions of people there is NO military solution that involves "killing them." It's like trying to kill a vial filled with Ebola Virus by smashing it with a hammer. All you accomplish is to spread the disease around.
This has to be said over and over as another U.S. retired major general has just done: "Terrorism is a tactic. It makes as much sense to say that you're going to win a 'war on terrorism' as to say you're going to 'win a war on night attacks.'"
The only actual solutions involve convincing the muslims of the middle east to stop supporting terrorists and the only way to do that is to address their legitimate concerns for peace and self-determination.
And putting hundreds of thousands of troops into their countries and bombing their cities into rubble isn't going to accomplish that.
Don't like that? Prefer the macho posturing of "strength" because it makes you feel better emotionally to be strking around in a blind rage and ignoring reality? Too bad! We've had three years of that stupidity and it's only making things worse!
Yet after 3 years of beating their heads against the wall and making things palpably worse all the time, all we see out of Bushco and their supporters is that we have to "stay the course." Forget the splitting headache! Keep pounding our brains out! We have to be "strong".
Everything seems to be about the perception of weakness and Munich analogies abound. Only people in the middle east don't care a fig about the perception of American strength, they just want to run their own lives without us interfering. And the more we interfere and bomb their cities the more they will resist and support terrorists to attack us.
Showing them how "tough" we are by killing large numbers of people and destroying country after country in the region isn't going to make them quit. It's an endless cycle of madness.
And it will never stop until we stop doing things the Stupid Way.
It's simple: are things better or worse than they were in March 2003? If you say "better" then you REALLY haven't been paying attention!
