The 15 minute video, “Fitna,” is being circulated. It’s available on Google video, here. Others are posting the video on their sites, all in hopes that it doesn’t vanish altogether. (If you don’t stop calling me violent, I’ll kill you.) Of course the video was taken down from the original site after the site employees received death threats. And after viewing the video, one can understand why they would take death threats seriously.
I understand that the head of the U.N. has labeled the video as hate speech. Well, it does have very disturbing images, but none of the images are staged and all of the disturbing images were the product of religious nuttery, times two, squared. It wasn’t Christians, Jews, or infidels who cut off poor Nick Berg’s head and video’d the event for publication on the web. It wasn’t Christians, Jews, or infidels who took loaded passenger planes and steered them into the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Virginia.
At least one person has called the video amateurish. Well, perhaps, but isn’t artistic merit kind of besides the point here?
Others say that the video is unfair to Muslims. Well, perhaps, it’s unfair to some or maybe even most. But not all. And if you get to the end, you find that that’s what the video is about — it’s a message to the kind of Muslims that the video doesn’t show. The ones who don’t necessarily believe they are required by the Koran to extinguish unbelievers.
Hate them? No, I don’t think the video inspires hatred, at least in any degree beyond the hatred that one would expect to be inspired by the doing of hateful deeds. But neither do I think the video should be ignored. It argues that there’s a certain significant population who, based on the Koran, is capable and willing to kill non-believers for being non-believers.
It isn’t as if they haven’t done it before. It isn’t as if they haven’t been doing it for about a thousand years. Historically, they damn near took Vienna and Paris, and they took Spain.
And we’ve been up against them before. President Thomas Jefferson read the Koran and then sent the Marines to clean out a nest of Islamic pirates in Tripoli.
No, I don’t hate them but they damn sure shouldn’t be ignored. You don’t hate a tiger for killing the villagers, but that doesn’t mean you don’t shoot a tiger that’s on the loose.
Negotiate? What common ground do we have, what can we compromise on, when the objective of the enemy is to kill us not for any gain in property, liberty, or political power, or anything we can concede, but just because we are not them? It seems the choice they give us is join them or fight them. Kind of like the Borg on Star Trek, we must be assimilated into the collective. The people who flew planes into the World Trade Center weren’t doing it because there was something they wanted so bad that they were willing to fly planes into buildings. They flew planes into the buildings because that’s what they wanted to do.
Negotiate? What do you say? Hey Pal. How about you not fly planes into buildings and we’ll give you a free trip to Disneyland. Hows that sound to you?
I think these people, the violent jihadists, represent a present danger not only to us in the West, but to the world. They have been busy in more than the mideast and the Twin Towers. They are busy in Africa, Russia and the U.S.S.R. breakaways, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and probably onward from there in places I haven’t heard from yet.
It looks to me like we either beat them, or we beat them back and hope that future generations can handle the threat when it returns. As it has been doing for a thousand years.
Posted by junewick59 