Dealing With Religious Fanatics

Vodkapundit tells us how it shoud be done:

In the suburban American experience, "religious nuts" means people coming to your door to give you copies of "The Watchtower." Or in rare cases, people like Paul Hill, who assassinated an abortion doctor.

It's easy to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses. You can politely ask them to leave. Or you can answer the door holding a 12-gauge. Or there's my preferred method, which is to invite them in, sit them on the sofa, offer them a glass of lemonade, and return from the kitchen after having removed my pants. Do that, and they'll avoid your house in the exact same way a good Catholic avoids meat on Friday – with saintly fervor.

And Paul Hill? I don't mean to lessen his terrible crime, but he did seek his vengeance upon only one person, whom he considered guilty of murder. Frankly, I don't care what Hill's motivation was – he was a killer, and our justice system knows how to deal with killers. We try them, convict them, and jab them in the arm with poison. One killer, one victim, one tried and true way of dealing with him.

Absolutely God-Damned right!

But that isn't all.

Dread is for the weak; defiance is, perhaps, the American virtue.

I'm saddened for 10,000 children who lost a mommy or a daddy that day. I'm angered every time I see a picture of the altered New York skyline. I know a wearied irritation that this instinctively isolationist nation has been dragged into yet another world war. There is real, physical pain in my belly when that sound comes back, unbidden. You know the sound I mean – the thunk-splat of meat hitting pavement, of living people who chose to jump rather than be burned alive.

Americans are defiant, even regarding the manner of death chosen for us by others.

Now go on and let yourself relive that day, just a little.

Remember the first reports that "a small plane" had crashed into the World Trade Center. Firemen who didn't just run into a burning building, they ran up into collapsing skyscrapers. Grounded planes. The stock exchanges, closed. The doubt, the fear, the "what will they do next?" And the realization: Oh my God, we're at war. War in the Old Testament sense, when the barbarians came to rape and to slaughter.

Islam is rape and slaughter, robbery and murder.

Islam is barbarism given the veneer of divine sanction.

It is tempting to respond to the Jihad as if we were the Great Khan himself, to crush the muslims and listen to the wailing of their women. No, I just want them dead.

They want to die for the false god Allah. I just want them to die.

-- Les