Sunday, October 03, 2004

Taking It Personally

Author Edward Cline on how we should treat the Islamic assault on civilization:

Basayev said in 1995 to reporters of the Moscow Times, after a Beslan-like raid on Budennovsk, where he ordered his hostages doused with gasoline: “I thought, what difference is there, whatever means I use, if they are Russian, they are jackals. My people are more important to me than these Russian children and women.” There is your quintessential nihilist speaking. There is no difference, except that his victims must be civilized Westerners. His “people”? If Saudi Arabia and Iran are any measure of how he plans to govern them, rank-and-file Chechens will be treated as animals, as fodder for the glory of Allah.

This explains why schoolgirls and women teachers at Beslan could be raped, then shot in the head afterward by Basayev’s thugs, to express the efficacy of evil and the painful pointlessness of existence, and to erase whatever joy of existence may have moved the lives they ended. “I hate my existence. Why should you enjoy yours? If I suffer, it’s your fault. Now it’s your turn.” That is nihilism, disguised in political/religious garb. It is transparently evil. It explains the random, indiscriminate brutalization and killing of hostages at Beslan, then their wholesale slaughter with bombs, bullets and grenades when the crisis reached its apex.

It explains why planeloads of people can be blown out of the sky, or used as missiles to destroy the symbols of Western civilization, in the name of Allah. And why busloads of schoolchildren, workers, and housewives can be blown to pieces by Palestinian suicide bombers, or shredded by glass, nails, and ball bearings in pizza parlors and at weddings.

Every Westerner -- every American, especially -- should regard every such assault personally, as a personal attack on himself, and demand that our leaders fight this enemy ruthlessly, with no mercy, concession, or compromise granted to these new barbarians. It should be a moral crusade against a determined human carnivore. Ancient Rome thought it could bargain with Attila and Alaric. And that was the end of Rome.

Read it all here.

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