I mentioned on Monday that there are some sick bastards out there, specifically the Saudi Royal Family's personal security personnel. In the process, I noted that one could use the phrase "these animals" to describe a far wider array of folks than just the nutjobs mentioned in the story. In response, one of my faithful readers, the movie god known to us mortals as "word slinger", had the following response:

Personally, I think you'll find "these men" all over the globe. "These men"...these savages who beat a man just for kicks are the same demons as the teenager who blows up a cat for the hell of it, or the middle-aged man who kidnaps, sexually assaults, and murders a little girl. There are no differences between these people: they're all Hitler or Pol Pot, only without the power or influence. "These men" exist in every country across the world, and they are sick.

And I hope that was the implication in your rant, because to say otherwise (or to say what I suspect you were going to say) would be erroneous and wrong: to implicate a whole people because of race, religion, or geography is just plain ignorant. Hopefully that wasn't going to be the hypothesis of your rant, because I have been around plenty of people who've made that claim and it offends me deeply.

Also, Ibrahim clearly had a severe Napoleonic Complex, that jumped out at me right away..."He's 5' 5" and he's a torturer?" Hmmm.

Now, it's not often I respond to comments. Hell, it's not often that I even get them. But this one merits an answer.

Warning: the following may offend you. This concerns me very little, as placating your sensibilities doesn’t rank particularly high on my list of priorities, but I feel I at least owe you the courtesy of letting you know to stop reading now if you don’t want to run the risk of having your feelings hurt.

When I originally wrote the little aside about "these animals", my intent was to include a wide-ranging collection of Middle East All-Stars, among them the Saudi Royal family, Saddam Hussein, the mullahs in Tehran (think Khameni, Khatami, Aref, et al), Yasser Arafat (my his soul eternally burn in the fiery pits of hell), and Bashar al-Asad, not to mention the non-official celebrities like al-Zarqawi, Abdel Aziz Rantisi (may his soul share a seat next to Yasser’s), Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (ditto), Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and the list goes on and on. The point being that lost in all the self-hating that is so fashionable in America today is that we are the good guys. Sure, we screw up and have our own shallow end of the gene pool (take a bow, Pvt. England), but to equate what happened at Abu Ghraib while under Allied control to what went on there when the Baathists were in charge requires one’s head to be so far up one’s ass that he’s giving his teeth a tongue bath. Or how about those who reflexively believe the worst about the American military *cough* Newsweek *cough* while unscrupulously assuming the very best about our adversaries? Happens all the damn time.

All that said, given the Word Slinger’s response, I’ve decided that I would like to stir the pot and go a little deeper than naming specific people. I may even make some generalizations! Scandalous! For there is nothing that I dislike more than being preached to from a faux position of moral authority (that's not entirely true...I dislike stinky tofu, Leonardo DiCaprio movies, and those Umpa Lumpa things from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory a lot more, actually, but you catch my drift); and offending people’s delicate sensibilities doesn’t happen enough these days, so I’ll see what I can do on that front, too. If you hadn't noticed, I'm making an extra effort to be inflammatory here (kind of defeats the point, advertising it, but I wouldn't want my word-slinging friends to take it the wrong way).

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of it, let me just say this. I won’t waste anyone's time going into the absurdity of equating angry teen cat killers with Hitler, but I will say that it’s an exercise in moral equivalency that is pretty brash, even by today’s standards.

On a more serious note, there is a difference between the Khamer Rouge, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, child molesters, et al, despite what Word Slinger says. To bundle them all together neatly and say “well, they’re all equally evil, save for their access to power and influence” is an intellectual cop-out. Doing so conveniently glosses over the ideologies each used to perpetrate his killings (with the exception individuals like child molesters, who I really don't think belong in this debate), a point which would be worth noting, even if it wasn’t pertinent to my argument below. Sure, the fact that Stalin murdered over 20 million in the name of communism while Hitler knocked off 7 million or so in the name of Nationalist Socialism doesn’t make one’s atrocities any less appalling or wrong than the other’s. But failing to notice the underlying causes of this sort of moral depravity does a disservice to everyone, because in so doing, we make no judgments about the value of political, ideological, and religious belief systems. This is good if your goal in life is to not offend anyone, but it is bad if you hope to learn anything from history in order to avoid a repeat performance.

Moreover, it gives the impression that “well, Stalin was one bad dude, but that whole communism thing wasn’t too shabby. If only someone who wasn’t such a moral train wreck had been in charge, things would’ve worked out.” Implicitly, it treats the ideologies that spawn Holocausts and gulags as amoral, when in fact they are the underlying foundation of the problem. Communism spawned 50 years of murder, political and religious intolerance, forced labor camps, and general misery among the people who lived within the USSR’s borders, regardless of whether it was Stalin, Brezhnev, or Gorbachev in charge. The Chinese brand of communism hasn’t served its people any better, be it Mao’s version, Deng Xiaoping’s version, or Jiang Zemin’s version. Lest you think I exaggerate, just do some studying up on the indoctrination job the Japanese did on their population, specifically soldiers, leading up to and during WWII, all in the name of good Confucian values, of course. The end result: some of the most atrocious war crimes in modern history, committed with the savagery of a pack of animals. Ignore the role of ideology--be it political, religious, nationalist, or a mix of all of the above--at your own peril. This ties in nicely to my main point, which is…

…at the root of the terrorist problem we’ve seen exported to the West in the last 30 plus years is Islam. Or more precisely, radical, extremist, Islam and all it’s oh-so-fun permutations like Wahhabism. And I have no qualms about saying that the followers of radical Islamic sects who fall hook, line, and sinker for its ideology of murder, depravity, discrimination, intolerance, and hatred toward the West, and then carry out acts of terrorism against us—be it our soldiers or innocent civilians—are nothing more than animals. All of them. This is not to say every country, ideology, religion, blah blah blah doesn’t have it’s own version of less-than-human extremists (although as noted above, I don’t throw cat, goose, dog or any other animal killers into that mix). Moreover, it’s not even all-inclusive; the sick former Baathists who are driving TNT-laden cars into groups of Iraqi children on the streets of Baghdad are also disgusting pieces of human excrement. But to ignore the fact that the sick bastards who have for years strapped explosives to their chests and walked into shopping malls or that the murderous thugs who have flown passenger jets into New York city skyscrapers have all been weaned on one specific, identifiable, religious ideology is an exercise in stupidity. Then there’s the stellar record radical Islam has in bringing down passenger airplanes over Scotland, murdering handicapped, incapacitated American citizens and dumping their bodies into the sea, murdering Israeli Olympic athletes (or any other type of Israeli, for that matter), blowing up American embassies in Africa, blowing holes in American warships while they’re in port, etc., etc., etc. In almost every major case of international terrorism against the West in the past 40 years, the common factor has been some brand of radical Islam. If admitting this obvious truth offends people or otherwise makes them feel not-so-chipper inside, tough.

It’s much like the current feel-good argument that we can’t subject Middle Eastern nationals to tougher security checks before they fly airplanes. Heaven forbid we require them to do an interview before granting them a visa! Sure, we’ve yet to see a Tibetan freedom fighter take down a jetliner in the middle of DC, but it could happen. Besides, what’s really more important, 5,000 more American lives or making sure no one from the Middle East gets offended?

But lest I get sidetracked, let me finish making my point. Look, I’m sure Islam’s all fine and dandy and really is a religion of peace and tolerance and whatnot (though I find the ringing silence by even the “mainstream” Islamic scholars following terrorist atrocities deafening at times). My limited class time spent studying the religion leads me to believe that such should be the case, and we should all just get along. Furthermore, most of the Muslim folks I’ve met and studied with, be they from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Singapore—wherever—are stand up fellows. But to turn a blind eye to radical Islam’s connection to Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah (did you know they have their own webpage?), Islamic Jihad, et al for fear of upsetting the good Muslims is ridiculous. Ditto when it comes to the role it plays in depraved “honor killings” in the Middle East and Europe. Thus, you simply cannot overlook the fact that a sizeable chunk of the Muslim world, specifically the theological leadership in the Middle East, can't seem to square the Koran’s teachings with the modern world. Theirs is the last of the world’s major religions that hasn’t moved out of the 14th Century, at least as it is practiced in many corners of the Middle East (and now, seemingly, in many parts of Europe).

So am I saying we should systematically abolish Islam or wipe out its practitioners the world over? Absolutely not. Moreover, there are voices of hope, albeit few and far between, in the Muslim world that give me reason to believe that this whole thing may be settled in my lifetime. But regardless, in our current fight, it would certainly be helpful if more people were less afraid of ruffling the PC Thought Police’s feathers and more concerned with simply identifying the root of the problem. Until you do that, solutions to are difficult to come by. You can’t win a war with radical Islam when only one side of the fight acknowledges who it’s adversary is (hint: as it stands today, only the other side makes this distinction). It’s been a while since I’ve heard President Bush hit hard on this like he did following 9/11. Methinks a refresher would be welcome right about now.