Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: "Once and for all."

Not true.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

You know Tom, I have to take that as fundamentally a defeatist position: The only way the fighting can end is with our defeat.

Not true. The only way the fighting can end is with someone's defeat.

I can't accept that. That's why I keep looking for a third way that solves the problem "once and for all".

Try and come up with a third way between Hitler's Nazis and the Jewish population of the nations under Hitler's rule. Where does one compromise between life and death?

Sometimes there is no third way.

We are at war with a culture that has a sickness at its center. It's much more than terrorism. It's schools where children are taught to hate and to believe that their way is worth killing infidels for. It's nations where their television shows depict the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's beliefs that think that it's okay to wrap a bomb around your kid, or kill your daughter for being raped. I don't know how we can deal with this. How do you change a world view?

Not every Muslim believes these things, but far too many believe them for comfort. If ten percent of the Christians in America firmly believed that we should use nuclear weapons to convert the rest of the world to Christianity by force, I would say the same things about our nation.

Maybe as it has become technologically possible to feed information across the planet, people will hear other views. Maybe some of these cultures can evolve on their own. Ours certainly did--European culture was no shining star of human rights a few hundred years ago either. But getting to where we are now was, if you'll pardon the expression, a long, hard slog. Can we wait generations?

The Muslim culture was once quite tolerant of other views and religions. Hundreds of years ago. But what was once true could obviously be true again.

But for right now we still need to convince the terrorists that what they are doing cannot get them what they want, and costs them too much. This requires force. And it won't be easy to raise the cost above the tolerance level for people who are perfectly happy to die for their cause.

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