Head Start

Attempting to insulate myself from the “culture” has left me somewhat uninformed about what passes for generic entertainment.

Presumably it’s still some mix of situation comedies, reality shows, talk, and the gold standard; violence and vulgarity.

However, though it’s not included in my basic cable package, I know what’s hot in home viewing in the Holy Land.

It’s Hamas TV.

Hamas has brought their signature standard of excellence to children’s programming.

The same attention to detail and quality that they bring to assassinations, terrorism and crimes against humanity.

A fusion of Sesame Street and the “Protocols of … Zion” these cartoons depict grotesquely caricatured Jews killing Palestinian children and drinking their blood.

Childhood is one long learning moment.

Some academics would call this the “generational transmission of extremist views”.

Most of us would call it the calculated corruption of a soul.

Friedman Knows Best

We mustn’t let this “war on terrorism” consume us.

So said Thomas Friedman, in a recent column, “Father knows best”.

“We can’t let our country become just the United States of Fighting Terrorism and nothing more. We are the people of July 4th _____ not September 11th”.

Yeah, he said that.

Presumably he is urging us to suspend all public executions, close the internment camps and stop the wholesale persecutions.

Besides, according to Friedman, it’s all hopelessly unavailing.

Our deliverance requires that the Muslim and Arab world attach a certain stigma, historically absent, to the mass murder of innocents. Though it sounds a bit bourgeois, apparently it’s still all the rage in the “global community of shared values”.

Yeah, he said that too.

For all of Friedman’s attempts at equivalence, “Every faith has its violent extremes” and equivocation, his implausibly flawed column makes the case that the Muslim world has yet to be civilization’s ally in its struggle to preserve those “shared values”

What he didn’t say,  and should have, is …

We are the people of July 4th when we celebrate our liberty.

And we are the people of September 11th when we recommit ourselves to its defense.

Crayons, Ping Pong and a Light Lunch

There are ideas, Orwell observed, that are so absurd, they could only be embraced by an intellectual (a status typically self conferred)

The Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Center for Care and Counseling in Saudi Arabia is one of those ideas.

It presumes that Jihadists, disproportionately represented among the criminally insane, will respond favorably to religious re-education in a resort setting.

Admittedly, those who consider mass murder an appropriate response to modernity have issues.

They also have convictions, that rest upon an unassailable certainty.

We trivialize their faith, the inhumanity it condones and the threat it poses by imagining we can “cure” them with therapies more suitably applied to someone with an eating disorder or nervous affliction.

Evil is not amenable to expertise, however credentialed and self-regarding.

Take Three

This time with a little more feeling… Mr. President.

Fortunately we’re not making a movie, merely conducting the affairs of a still great nation.

A nation at war with an implacable, irredeemably insane foe (who shall remain nameless)

As the President made successive attempts at correcting his first, belated, comments, his often remarked style seemed remarkably sterile.

His characterization of  an aspiring mass murderer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, as a “suspect” who “alledgedly” attempted to destroy an aircraft in flight, is either a departure from or willfull distortion of reality.

Abdulmutallab is not a criminal, though he’s been charged as one, in the conventional sense, but a war criminal whose “crime” is against humanity.

Obama’s embrace of legalistic proprieties as an appropriate response to chaos and carnage (our enemies weapons of choice) is Pavlovian, perverse, political or all the above.

Perhaps the President believes he can manipulate our perception of reality, if not reality itself, the way he has manipulated the gullible, uninformed or psychologically needy all his life …

Internet Insurgency

Those who reject modernity don’t necessarily reject its innovations.

Thanks to the internet Jihadism’s  outreach promises a sufficiency, if not a glut, of starry eyed, slack jawed soldiers of Allah.

Online is the new frontline.

Such is the stuff of Thomas Friedman’s recent column, www.jihad.com

So far so good.

He then makes a point of blunting the point.

In the war of ideas, being waged on “virtual” battlefields, the leadership of the Arab and Muslim world remain non-combatants.

Is it fear or fraternity?

The violent fundamentalist “minority”, in all their sanguinary splendor, ironically enjoys the greatest legitimacy within the Muslim world.

Though their acts and advocacy are manifestly at odds with the alleged teachings of Islam.

Yet this heresy fails to provoke a reaction.

Friedman analogizes.

America fought a civil war to defeat an idea in all its morally indefensible applications.

It was not just a war of ideas but a sustained exercise in killing those who chose to defend those ideas.

He stops short of suggesting the obvious of the “majority” in the Muslim world.

Raise an army, do battle with those who have defamed and defiled your faith.

As for challenging ideas with ideas, Friedman’s emphasis, I think deeds will prove the more compelling argument.

Particularly dispelling certain ideas about us; that we are fundamentally corrupt and bereft of conviction, so wedded to life we are  unwilling to risk it to defend our way of life.

Friedman is altogether wrong.

We do need to kill them, if only to disabuse them of one idea: inevitability.