I swiped this video of congressional candidate Lt. Col. Allen West from Drew M’s post at AoSHQ about the mosque at Ground Zero. Ace’s post is a must-read as well.
What West said, if you don’t want to watch the video:
“The first thing you’ve got to do is study and understand what we’re up against. You must realize that this is not a religion that you’re fighting against. You’re fighting against a theo-political belief system and construct. You’re fighting against something that’s been doing this thing since 622 AD – 7th century – 1388 years. You want to dig up Charles Martel and ask him why he was fighting the Muslim army at the battle of Tours in 732? You want to ask the Venetian fleet at LePonto why they were fighting a Muslim fleet in 1571? You want to ask the Christian – I mean the Germanic and Austrian – knights why they were fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683? You want to ask people what happened at Constantinople and why today it’s called Istanbul because they lost that fight in 1543? You need to get into the Quran, you need to understand their precepts, you need to read the Sura, you need to read the Hadiths and then you can really understand this is not a perversion. They are doing exactly what this book says. I want to close by saying this, and I think we’ve have said this all through this morning so far: until we get principled leadership in the United States that is willing to say that, we will continue to chase our tail because we will never clearly define who this enemy is and then understand their goals and objectives which is on any jihadist website and then come up with the right and proper goals and objectives to not only secure our republic but to secure western civilization.”
Both of those posts – and the video, as well – reminded me of Dan Simmon’s very hard-hitting short story about the Time Traveler and the century war with Islam. (Go read it now. I’ll wait….) One of the reasons I love that story so much is Simmon’s forthright treatment of a problem that Lt. Col. West summed up in about a minute and a half but our politically correct postmodern leadership can’t seem to grasp:
“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,” said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”
It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college” to be able to concentrate fully.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”
I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”
The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”
God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.
“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.”
“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .”
I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.
The War on Terror, radical extremists, man-caused disasters… the terminology gets sillier every year… as the attacks escalate and Iran moves closer to getting nuclear weapons and continues to fight a proxy war against us in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting insurgencies. As I wrote back in 2006 in 101st Fighting Keyboardists, Chairborne Division and Chickenhawk Christians, I do wholeheartedly support defending ourselves in Islam’s war against us. And that’s what it is, although our erstwhile leaders can’t bring themselves to admit it. They pretend that history started on 9/11/2001, and somehow 1998, 1996, 1988, 1983, and 1979 have been magically erased from the history books… not to mention the lengthy list provided by Lt. Col. West. This mosque at Ground Zero is as much a memorial to the terrorists as the Islamic crescent memorial at the Flight 93 crash site
Are we at war with all Muslims? No. Just the, ahem, tiny percentage of those who are at war with western civilization because they believe what the Quran and Hadiths say on the topics of sharia, dhimmis, jizya, taqiyya and hudud.
