Author: Phil Lucas
Publication: The News Herald
Date: May 7, 2004
If straight talk of savagery offends
you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of
thought or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and
evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too.
This piece is not for you.
We published pictures Thursday of
burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning
Muslims.
Some readers didn't like it.
Mothers said it frightened their
children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend
or endanger them.
Well, we sure don't want to frighten,
offend or endanger anybody, do we? That's just too much diversity to handle.
I mean, somebody might get hurt.
We could fill the newspaper every
morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can't get along with their
neighbors on much of the planet: France, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain,
Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia, etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three
ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where
there is war, there are fanatical Muslims. We might quibble about who started
what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them.
One thing is sure. Muslim killers
started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more than 3,000 people,
including fellow Muslims, in New York City.
Madeline Albright, the former secretary
of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last
week Muslims still resented the Crusades. Well, Madame Albright, if Westerners
were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.
Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims
invaded Europe and when they reached sufficient numbers they imposed their
intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove
them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple
of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years.
Now, a millennium later, Muslims
have expanded forth again. Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half
years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious.
Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle
to the Islamic homeland. Sound familiar?
Let's consider the concept of a
"long war." Last time it was 200 years, give or take.
Anybody catch Lord of the Rings?
You know, the good part, the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew
us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic
struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between
the individual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping
of death.
That's the fight we are in, and
it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys.
There may be a silent majority of
peaceful Muslims - some live here - but that did not save 3,000 people
in the World Trade Centers, the millions gassed and butchered in the Middle
East, the tens of thousands slain in Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds
blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned
and hung like sausage over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims
did the joyful dance of death.
Maybe we are so tolerant, we are
so bent on "diversity," we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in
our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous
behinds. Maybe we're so addled on Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of
a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes,
one that would help us grow a backbone.
It doesn't take a Darwin to figure
out that in this world the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and the
most committed always win. No exceptions.
Look at your spouse and children.
Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper
last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill
you.
Who do you think will win? You?
Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you
alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year,
and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years.
Nobody hides from this fight.
Like it or not, that's the way it
was and that's the way it is.
But many Americans don't get it.
That's why we published those pictures.
If they jarred you off the sofa,
if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a
rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start.
