Thoughts on 9/11

Warning: The start of this post contains material that some people on the political right will find objectionable. I suggest people on the political right read the whole post, because they will find my change of heart most gratifying.

In the Islam War blog industry, one is required to make some comments about September 11 five years ago. In honesty, I didn’t really realize the problem five years ago. The stock market was doing so well that I thought everyone would be rich. Paradoxically given my love of capitalism, I was hanging out with leftist kids who cheered the fall of the WTC. I loved these kids rejection of normalcy, but still the leftist kids shocked even me by saying they didn’t care if businessmen died at the WTC. When they went into the woods to burn flags that night, I warned them not to let anyone see them. In one of their few outbreaks of good sense, they said they would be discrete. When they started stealing flags in the patriotic aftermath, I urged them to sell them. It was the time of the flag shortage, but they didn’t want to violate their socialist purity. I even offered to sell them and give them a 50-50 cut, but they realized that I am Capitalism's demon, even when fencing stolen goods.

A couple of weeks after 9/11, I invited the leftist kids for dinner. My dishes rivaled the art in many museums of modern art: World Trade Center Flambé and Ground Zero Tabouli. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to use chicken, instead of pork for the flambé. I used red tomato, red pepper, and red onion in the tabouli. My leftist retard friends still laugh at those dishes, and I suppose I do too, but I no longer seek to trivialize September 11. I have learned about Islam since then and it scares me what we are up against.

We confront a murder cult that has been trying to kill off our Western Judeo-Christian/Secular society for the last 1400 years. We cannot sit around pretending everything is alright or indulge in fantasies that Bush is the cause of all evil. On the other hand, I do wonder if any person in a position of power who says Islam is a Religion of Peace should be tried for treason and executed. Do I, too, have Bush Derangement Syndrome?

Thinking back on human history, it was ok for us to ignore the threat of Islam before September 11 in the United States. It really wasn’t affecting us enough, though we should we should been picking up hints since the events in Iran in 1979. After 9/11, there is no excuse for how we have ignored Islam. We have had ample time to honestly evaluate Islam’s goals and aims and react accordingly. Since Islam has declared war on us, we should begin to fight back. President Bush has wished to escape this logic with his hopes to secularize the Islamic countries, while ironically pushing theocracy here in America. While many bad things can be said about Bush’s approach, let us concentrate on the good. Bush’s intentions are honorable. I don’t think that last sentence can be repeated too often given the amount of outrageous lies flung against Bush. Bush is a decent guy who hopes to avoid the War the Muslims have declared, but Bush is naïve to believe that people brainwashed into a murder cult are going behave civilized because he gives them the opportunity to have a democracy. I suppose we had to try Bush’s nice guy approach first. Perhaps, we were even morally obligated to do so, before we go in and do what we need to do: slaughter them all. It's just that we need to explain much better how the War in Iraq represents an effort to be a loving, gentle people. I haven't even seen many conservatives many conservatives make this point, which is the best defence of what Bush has done. Ironically, I'm probably better positioned to see the necessity of making this defence of what is happening in Iraq than the conservatives, because I'm a political moderate who hates Bush. (There is no contradiction between hating a political figure and saying the political figure as a person is a decent man. We forget this all too often.)

In this anniversary of 9/11, we should honestly consider the probability that Muslims will act like anything besides murderous savages. Let’s consider at the behavior of fundamentalist Christians. For instance, would Pat Robertson ever admit that Creationism is nonsense? Though evolution is a proven fact by any reasonable criteria and Creationism is not essential to Christianity, we can be pretty certain that Christian fundamentalists aren’t going to renounce their Intelligent Design nonsense. How can we then possibly expect the Muslims to give up one of the key teachings of their religion, the obligation to kill or enslave everyone else in the name of Allah? It’s not like you prove them wrong by any objective criteria like Creationism/Intelligent Design can be shown wrong.

(I suppose I should come clean with a weak spot in my argument above. I believe that fundamentalist Christians will over the long run accept gay marriage, since there is so little discussion of homosexuality in the Bible and fundamentalist mothers of gay sons will demand gay marriage in their churches. On the other hand, jihad is a central tenet o the Koran and no powerful group internal to Islam with an organic interest to oppose it.)

If we harbor hatred towards any politicians, hatred towards Bush should be kept at rational level. If we feel a need for demonification, our demons should be the European political elite who gave away Europe to the Arabs. While I oppose torture for virtually every other human being, I would support torturing in barbaric ways Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Jacques Chirac, the entire leadership of the all European socialist parties, and similar traitors in other parties for how they enabled Arab immigration into Europe. Of course, Bush’s response to immigration is not in the any better than d'Estaing’s. Luckily, we have a civilized country to our south. I may strongly oppose the flood of Mexican immigrants, but permitting them in isn’t the suicide of our civilization.

Unrelated thoughts about Ahmad Shah Massoud illustrating why this is not a hate blog
I read up recently on Ahmad Shah Massoud who Al-Qaeda deliberately killed before the 9/11 attack. He seemed rather reasonable for a muslim, despite the whining by human rights groups. I would like to see a human rights activist ninny be appointed head of a political faction in a muslim country (and many other countries). He would get to decide whether he wants to die maintaining his human rights purity or live. As I continue to argue, we have to judge people in context and not simply according to abstract rules. This does not deny the importance of the abstract rules when making moral judgments. It is just to judge in a way suitable for living on Earth, instead of the ethereal, geometric kingdom.

Massoud has such perfect teeth, like he had braces. Where in his Afghan childhood, could one get braces? Anyway, in some of his younger photos, he’s really quite sexy. Sadly, there are no shirtless photos of him on the web. For that matter, why not mujahidin porn? It may not be Islamic, but it sure would be Afghan culture. Oh well, here I’m calling for the genocide of all who believe like the attractive Massoud, but I fear it is necessity in the era of cheap WMD. And there will always be other attractive men.