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[jordan179]

There is an undercurrent in our nation right now that we should do something to prevent people from "provoking" the Muslims by engaging in behavior or speech that is critical or disrespectfal of Islam.  The argument is "It's rude anyway, I certainly wouldn't want to make a movie like The Innocence of Muslims or burn a Koran, so why should we face

Comments

[zornhau]

You are of course right.

However, I worry that thanks to globalisation, there is a danger of crowdsourcing our diplomacy and strategy. Sometimes you do need to suck up to lunatic regimes or to exponents of odd expressions of the religious urge. In the past, this meant getting the ambassador to play nice, or - in our case - shunting over a minor royal. Now it's all or nothing.

All that said, the people who deliberately set out to provoke the Jihadis are for the most part not the ones being shot at. This makes them arses.

[cutelildrow]

Our response to them killing is to kill them back.

If ONLY. That it ISN'T is what will kill us.

http://news.yahoo.com/muslim-protesters-torch-buddhist-temples-homes-bangladesh-081616609.html

When dealing with people who respond to arguments-in-kind by trying to kill you, you shoot them. oh how I wish that were the case. That's the only rational response, and it may fill graveyards, but I'd rather Islamist bodies fill the graves, not those of civilized peoples.

Not taking the killing back to them is what will cause our bodies to be in the graves instead.

[headnoises]

I was responding to zornhau's shock that it was the "best" thing we had.

As pathetic as it sounds, things haven't gotten "big" and "close" enough to trigger a real response. It takes something like 9/11 for that.

[cutelildrow]

oh I know. But honestly? After Mumbai, I became exceedingly cynical that it would take a 9-11 level attack to get a response out of the West as it is now. It'd take something WORSE.

[melvin_udall]

ford_prefect42 said it better, of course. I would add one small thing specific to too much of Islam.

People whose religion is based on force and submission can not understand a kind word. Adams and Jefferson learned that in London in 1785, and said so. Too many touchy-feely morons in the West are equally incapable of understanding that their Valentines cards won't be accepted. The elite then use that.

[jordan179]

People whose religion is based on force and submission can not understand a kind word.

What's more, their religion explicitly tells them that in a just world, they would enjoy explicit and extreme dominance over all non-Muslims, all over the world. They only accept that they cannot with the outrage that we would accept a situation in which, say, we had to give one of our children over to be the slaves of foreigners. We must, therefore, impose such supremacy of force upon them that they will be willing to accept such an outrage, and in time, their culture will change so that they will consider it an outrage no longer.

We must in short break their culture, lest it break ours.