This excellent post by Baseball Crank, and particularly this point within it, got me to thinking:
Isn't it obviously the fact that the bulk of the American people don't much care to complain about a little rough treatment for actual, bona fide terrorists who would slit the throat of a young child if they could?Yes. These people saw off heads! They use a limb saw to cut through the neck of a living person, and they enjoy the victim's screaming. They, quite literally, live for it. They believe they are rewarded in heaven for it. Let's run through that again, out loud, real slow.
They believe they are rewarded in heaven for sawing through the neck of any non-Muslim, and watching the blood spurt all over the room and themselves, and then triumphantly holding up the head of the still-alive-but-not-for-long victim.
Durbin thinks we should go easy on these people, that turning the air conditioning up way high is too harsh for them.
If he isn't a shill for the jihadis, he sure talks like one.
We don't really need U.S. Senators providing propaganda for Islamic terrorists; call me crazy.
Durbin, like so many others these days, has missed the clue train. So I'll point it out to them:
The only thing stopping further mass murder of Americans is our national will to prevent it. OK, two things. National will, and the current lack of ability to deliver nukes upon our shores. Which the Iranians and North Koreans are working on.
Durbin and his cohorts are doing their best to kill that national will. Which makes him, and here I'm paraphrasing Orwell, "objectively pro-jihadi".
Is that inflammatory? Oops. Tough shit. It's what he is. Prove me wrong.
So I'd go much further on this point: those who focus on any of these alleged mistreatments need a Big Frosty Glass of Perspective. War creates conditions that lead to occasional lapses. Focusing on those lapses, during the war, rather than on shoring up national will to win the war, is suicide.
And yes, this war may last decades. Too bad. It ain't 1978 any more, and we can't engulf ourselves in self-loathing from the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam eras, and have a pity party, about how mean we are, and how we screw up the lives of all the little brown people. To quote the Dems: Move on!
Self-loathing is for losers.
Cowboy up. We still have a debt to pay for 243 dead Marines in Beirut in 1983, for God's sake.
Islam, and the Arab world in general, understand one thing really well: power. Those who have it, use it, and those who use it, gain respect.
They have two things that help them: religious zealotry, and a nihilistic death cult, shown as a willingness to both kill innocents and die themselves. They are lacking only the means to commit mass murder of Americans. Oh, wait, they already did! Multiple times. And they would do so again, forever, and ever, because it's how they think. Our increased sense of national will to prevent attacks on our shores has stopped multiple attempts already. This is a good thing, no?
The terrorists and unlawful combatants captured and imprisosed at Gitmo are quite simply not like Americans. They don't value freedom, or Western liberal traditions. They will do anything in their power to kill any American they can.
As "unlawful combatants", they could have been shot when they were taken into custody; they are entitled to no Geneva Convention protections. There is well-established precedent for such things. I would like to think the only reason they were imprisoned, instead, is for the intel they could provide; this intel has been of great value, from what I've read.
You have to be ruthless against such people. If you're too wrapped up in hand-wringing and self-examination, you've lost the battle of wills already, and it's probably just a matter of time before you lose the big battles too. Self-loathing is not good for us as a country. Hence, we should stop doing it.
So, please shut the hell up, Dick Durbin. For the good of the country.