I guess my kudos for Cardinal Renato Martino last week was premature. At the time I praised him for recognizing that the war against terrorism is the “Fourth World War.” I assumed that he meant that we should actually fight that war. But it looks like he meant we should surrender.
The cardinal told an Italian magazine that we should fight terror by .... disarming ourselves! Right, because terrorists are reasonable people who, when confronted by innocent unarmed people, put down their own weapons and start giving out hugs.
He says, “To respond to terrorism and violence with another form of violence begins a perverse spiral.” Not always. If we kill or imprison all of today’s terrorists and cut off funding and support for tomorrow’s, the terrorism stops. If Osama shoots at me, then I shoot at him, killing him, no spiral. It stops right there.
Dom, there is a problem with your no-spiral logic. If you kill Osama, you may stir up other Osamas to take his place. The problem with a statement like “Lets just kill all the terrorists”, is that terrorism is a method of fighting not an ethnicity. Anyone is potentially a terrorist. We must find out why do some people choose to use this method of fighting and why do they choose us as a target. Yes we must stop the “bad guys”, but we also need a plan for dealing with situation that drives people to terrorism.
I knew someone would try that line of reasoning. The reality is that terrorists don’t pop up out of the ground. They are trained and indoctrinated … by other terrorists. Take out the indoctrinators and you’re less likely to get more of them. Oh sure, there will still be angry young men, but you won’t have a sophisticated worldwide terrorist network.
As for going after the root causes, I’m not against that, but we also have to temper our expectations. The reason we have terrorists is not because there is crushing poverty in the nations where they rise up. For one thing, the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers were middle- and upper-class Saudis. No, the poverty in Arab countries is a result of their terror-loving masters keeping them in the Stone Age.
Someone else had the order of things right: First, defend yourself from the terrorists using a military response, if necessary. Second, drain the “fever swamps” that train and indoctrinate them. Third, go after the “root causes” that provide fertile ground for terrorists. Fourth, “dialogue and peace-talk.”
we also need a plan for dealing with situation that drives people to terrorism.
This statement assumes that people are driven to terrorism in spite of their best impulses. It also assumes that there is something WE can do to fix the “underlying causes.”
Well the terrorists blew up the Spanish train station because they thought they could influence the election through intimidation. And they were right.
They choose us as a target because they see America – falsely – as the souirce of their problems and also because they want to expand the Islamic world by conquest. Being weak they attack the weak and defenseless.
If you pursue Osama and his followers and those who give them cover relentlessly and with no quarter, you may disuade new Osamas from following his path. At least you will put these people on the defensive.
Or we can kiss the Koran and show these people that we are not willing to defend our patrimony.
Mitred dhimmis, the lot of them.
The Cardinal is entitled to “turn the other cheek”—but only on his OWN behalf.
Unlike the Cardinal, the President of the United States is OBLIGATED (not optioned) to defend US citizens ‘from all enemies, foreign and domestic.’
The analogy holds this way, too: while I may personally decide to ‘turn the other cheek’ when attacked, I am OBLIGATED to defend otherwise defenseless members of my family—with armed force, if necessary—from attacks.
Big difference, Cardinal. Best go back to Moral Theo 101 and get the terms and definitions straight this time.
Mother Theresa said “The fruit of Abortion is nuclear War”. It’s getting very close.
Hello Dan,
I can only say that I don’t see a lot of Albigensians running around these days.
best regards
Richard,
Do you mean we are to kill all heretics?
I don’t really know how to deal with Islam in general or the Islamic terrorists specifically. I understand that they want the whole world to be Muslim. But Catholics would like the whole world to be Catholic. But we have come to the conclusion that you can’t force people to convert or kill them. The Islamic fundamentalists are having difficulty coming to this conclusion. So we need to stop them from killing people and that means that sometimes they must be killed.
But the right path, I believe, is to first try to get muslims of good will(and I think there are some) to come to the same conclusion that Catholicism came to about religious freedom and then to get them to pressure the fundamentalists to cease and desist.
Ultimately we would want all muslims to convert to Catholicism and we should hope and pray for that to happen for it is a gift from God.
But the right path, I believe, is to first try to get muslims of good will(and I think there are some) to come to the same conclusion that Catholicism came to about religious freedom and then to get them to pressure the fundamentalists to cease and desist.
Dan,
The problem is that the very foundational doctrines of Christianity lead us to believe that someone cannot be forced to convert or be killed if he doesn’t. But Islam’s founding principles specifically state that infidels must convert or die.
If anybody wants to know why some people in Rome (such as Martino) think the way they do, I suggest you do a Google search on my name and “Jerusalem Post” and click on the following (registration may be required):
“Vatican appeasement”
“Catholic moral confusion”
Also do a Google search on my name and “Front Page Magazine” and click on the following:
“The Vatican’s Pro-Saddam Tilt”
“Abu Ghraib Worse Than 9/11?”
Dan, it would be great if the “muslims of good will [could] pressure the fundamentalists to cease and desist.” Unfortunately, those muslims of good will are too often killed by the Islamfascists before they can convince anyone of anything. And that still leaves us with Islamofascists who want to destroy us.
This, it strikes me, leaves us right back at square one. Dialogue and peace talk come at the end of the war, not in the middle of it.
Correct, Daniel. War is about getting to dialogue and peace. We’re nowhere near there yet. We have to give them a reason to want peace first.