Shapiro’s hard line on Islam: the good, the bad, and the ugly
Here are highlights from Ben Shapiro’s
article at TownHall, “Enough of Radical Islam,” along with my interspersed commentary.
Enough with the pseudonyms. Western civilization isn’t at war with terrorism any more than it is at war with grenades. Western civilization is at war with militant Islam, which dominates Muslim communities all over the world. Militant Islam isn’t a tiny minority of otherwise goodhearted Muslims. It’s a dominant strain of evil that runs rampant in a population of well over 1 billion.
[LA replies: ok, not bad, the enemy is “militant Islam” and this militant Islam dominates Islam. So militant Islam and Islam are practically the same.]
Enough with the niceties. We don’t lose our souls when we treat our enemies as enemies. We don’t undermine our principles when we post more police officers in vulnerable areas, or when we send Marines to kill bad guys, or when we torture terrorists for information. [LA replies: When one is talking about war and killing, which is a serious matter, one should use serious Language. “Killing bad guys” is kid language, not serious language, and strongly suggests that one will not treat seriously and responsibly the decision to kill people.] And we don’t redeem ourselves when we close Guantanamo Bay or try terrorists in civilian courts or censor anti-Islam comics. When it comes to war, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. [LA replies: Shapiro’s rehash of Barry Goldwater’s disastrous phrase from the 1964 presidential campaign is unfortunate. Sound defense policy is not about being “extreme,” which implies a transgression of moral and rational limitations; it’s about doing what is necessary to defend ourselves and remove our enemy’s ability to harm us.]
Enough with the faux allies. We don’t gain anything by pretending that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are true allies.
Enough with the myths. Not everyone on earth is crying out for freedom. There are plenty of people who are happy in their misery, believing that their suffering is part and parcel of a correct religious system. Those people direct their anger outward, targeting unbelievers. We cannot simply knock off dictators and expect indoctrinated populations to rise to the liberal democratic challenge. The election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is more a rule than an exception in the Islamic world. [LA replies: Great! But was Ben issuing this refutation of the Bush Democracy Doctrine in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, when it would have done some good—and would have cost him something with the conservative/neocon establishment?]
Enough with the lies. Stop telling us that Islam is a religion of peace. If it is, prove it through action.
Enough. After the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the plane downed in Pennsylvania, the endless suicide bombings, shootings and rocket attacks in Israel, the Bali bombings, the synagogue bombing in Tunisia, the LAX shootings, the Kenyan hotel bombing, the Casablanca attacks, the Turkey synagogue attacks, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, and the repeated attacks in India culminating in the Mumbai massacres—among literally thousands of others—its about time that the West got the point: were in a war. [LA replies: Like all the other mainstream conservatives, Shapiro demonstrates a catastrophic failure to think about the meaning of the words he’s using. If we were in a war, i.e., if we were waging the war he believes we must wage, then he wouldn’t have had to write this column. The whole point of the column is that we are NOT currently waging a war and that we NEED to wage a war. Saying, “we’re in a war,” suggests that we are already fully engaged, when the whole point is that we are not. So he should have said: “Our enemies are fighting us, but we are not fighting them.”] Our enemies are determined. They will not quit just because we offer them Big Macs, Christina Aguilera CDs, or even the freedom to vote. They will not quit just because we ensure that they have Korans in their Guantanamo cells, or because we offer to ban The Satanic Verses (as India did). They will only quit when they are dead. It is our job to make them so, and to eliminate every obstacle to their destruction.
LA replies:
This sounds like every hot-head talking about exterminating all Muslims, like that fellow Zenster at Gates of Vienna last summer. Shapiro has already said that our enemies, the enemies we must kill, are the “dominant strain of evil that runs rampant in a population of well over 1 billion.” The dominant strain running rampant in a population of 1.25 billion people has got to be at the very least, say, 100 million people. So Shapiro is advocating that we kill 100 million people. Such is the genocidal impulse that takes over neocons when they realize that the neocon idea of a single universal humanity is false. They go in one leap from universal democracy to genocide.
What is the alternative? Separation:
The only way the non-Muslim countries can make themselves safe from jihadism is by excluding Muslims and quarantining them in their own lands. If non-Muslim humanity is to be safe and free, Muslim humanity must be permanently separated from the rest of mankind and be deprived of any means [including, as I’ve said, the instant destruction of threatening Muslim regimes and groups] of having any effect on the rest of us. There is no other way.
________
(Note: Strangely, there are no apostrophes in the Shapiro article, as in the word “isn’t,” and I supplied them.)
- end of initial entry -
Rick Darby writes:
You wrote:
(Note: Strangely, there are no apostrophes in the Shapiro article, as in the word “isn’t,” and I supplied them.)
But Arabic, transliterated into English, involves apostrophes (shar’ia, etc.). Enough! No more using the punctuation that bad guys use.
LA replies:
Touché. :-)
You are, I believe, pulling my leg over my argument, in my post, “Orthographical Dhimmitude,” last summer, that the Arabic diacritical marks should be dropped in English as they convey no information to English readers and only serve to heighten the sense that Muslims are incomprehensible, and by using their strange spelling we are only deferring to them.
Van Wijk writes:
Mr. Shapiro said: “We don’t lose our souls when we treat our enemies as enemies. We don’t undermine our principles when we post more police officers in vulnerable areas, or when we send Marines to kill bad guys, or when we torture terrorists for information.”
While I agree with you that his wording is unfortunate, I think he is correct in substance. If the United States went to war with another Western power, certain conventions of warfare would likely be observed (e.g. the humane treatment of POW’s and not targeting civilians). Both sides would be signatories to one or more treaties regarding the laws of war.
However, if we went to war with a non-Western, alien culture, no such conventions would be observed by the enemy. ACLU lawyers and their ilk would hold us to the same standards regardless of the nature of the enemy, knowing full well that these would be exploited to the maximum. I even heard one such lawyer say “The United States will fight with one hand tied behind our backs, but we’ll always have the upper hand.”
Western men have fought savages before and won overwhelming victories partly because we did not treat them as we would Europeans. Rigidity in this will be our doom. We must know our enemy; we must learn what makes him fight, what he holds dear, and what is anathema to him. Then we must exploit these by any means available. Our tactics must depend on the enemy. By treating a savage enemy as an equal we sacrifice the initiative to him, and the superiority of our soul will be little comfort when we are hemmed in from all sides.
LA replies:
I essentially agree with Van Wijk. At the same time, while we must use the kind of force with an enemy that is appropriate to that enemy, that is not the same thing as a careless attitude of “Let’s just kill bad guys.” I really dislike that kind of talk, which is so common in pro-war American circles. It’s not a matter of just killing people. It’s a matter of using the amount and kind of force and coercion that is needed in any given situation and with any given enemy.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 03, 2008 02:29 PM | Send