Civilization Politically Impossible?

What a surprise:

A HARDLINE cleric linked to Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement has called for Muslims to “hunt down” and kill Pope Benedict XVI for his controversial comments about Islam.
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“We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements [oh, that's rich... -- ed.] as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion,” he said in Friday evening prayers.

“Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim,” Malin, a prominent cleric in the Somali capital, told worshippers at a mosque in southern Mogadishu.

We hear this phrase a lot, don't we? That's nearly exactly what Cat "Peace Train" Stevens, now known as Yusef Islam after his "reversion" (not conversion, they consider everyone born a muslim and thus converts are really "reverts"), said about the Rushdie affair at the time: "Whoever defames the Prophet must die."

Where are the "moderates" coming out to counter this? Maybe, just maybe, that's really what this "religion" is all about?

I mean, that's what its leaders and vocal adherents keep saying over and over through the centuries.

If they are all wrong, somehow, then one must be using a funny defintion of "muslim."

Here is Cat Stevens' official statement on the Rushdie affair:

By Yusuf Islam
March 2nd, 1989

Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the person found guilty of it must be put to death. Only under certain circumstances can repentance be accepted.

On 21st February, I was speaking to a group of students at the Kingston Polytechnic, and in response to a question, I simply stated the Islamic ruling on the Rushdie affair. Suddenly. my picture was splashed on the front page of newspapers all over the world next to the headline: 'Kill Rushdie says Cat Stevens (Bio)'. It is very sad to see such irresponsibility from the 'free press' and I am totally abhorred.

My only crime was, I suppose, in being honest. I stood up and expressed my belief and I am in no way apologizing for it. I expressed the Islamic view based on the Qur'an, the Prophet's sayings (peace and blessings be upon him) and the rulings of the Caliphs and renowned schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

When will people listen to their own ears?

But I digress from my main point. Back to the Somali cleric:

“We call on all Islamic Communities across the world to take revenge on the baseless critic called the pope,” he said.

These ravings would all be ludicrous if not for the fact they are striving with all their might to obtain atomic bombs.

Such devices can only come with the support of a state.

It is a many-headed, but finite, hydra. The list of possible state sources is North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran. Iraq's program, outsourced to Libya, has been shut down, but at a terrible political cost.

The whole list has to be shut down, soon, to stop the otherwise inevitable.
No matter where we started on that list, it's likely the same political cost would be in effect right now.

The central question of our time is: Do we act to pre-empt this list, or sit back and wait to take at least one 10-kt hit (or worse) first?

And, to then have to respond in the face of hyper-proliferation.

If politics has made pre-emption impossible, then politics has ultimately made civilization impossible.

The people trying to gum up the GWOT should worry more about preventing the scenario in which suddenly the only authority is a brigadier general having looters and dissenters shot on the spot.

These thoughts were partly sparked by some comments seen at Belmont Club:

The Mad Fiddler said...
The great thing about a culture that honors freedom is that people are willing to declare where they stand on contentious issues.

This helps identify the idiots.
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In Tom Clancy’s novel “The Sum of All Fears” arabs recovered a nuclear warhead from a crashed Israeli jet, and used it to build a terrorist bomb. By the time Hollywood money sensed Clancy’s story as a vehicle for Hotness Ben Affleck, CAIR had waged a vehement and successful campaign to coerce the industry away from depicting Islamic Arabs as terrorists. (Ironic, ain’t it?) Despite that thousands of terrorist acts around the world each year are done by Islamic Jihadists, Hollywood executives didn’t have to look far from their own favorite list of “usual suspects” to replace the Islamic Arabs with NeoNazis.

Well, sure, I accept that NeoNazis can be insane mass murderers.

But that tautology was clarified over six decades ago.

The threat we need to deal with now is that of the resurgent Jihad, which has only been dormant for a time.

Not the threat of a resurgent Reich, but Dar al Islam.

How might things have gone in World War II if Hollywood and the Left had spent the 1930’s striving to convince America that our chief danger was from, say, Quechua fanatics intent on re-establishing Atahualpa’s Inca Empire from out of the mists of time, and not from the Axis powers?

And:

Pyrthroes said...
Just after the Trade Center towers were completed, John McPhee (a prolific writer for The New Yorker) authored "The Curve of Binding Energy". Therein he and a nuclear-weapons engineer instrumental in developing the H-bomb walked the Twin Towers with a waste-basket containing a concealed basketball -- the size of a hydrogen warhead, according to the engineer.

Not once we they accosted or questioned, of course, though neither had made any effort to disguise themselves as businessmen or tenants. But even in the mid-1970s, nuclear terrorism, "proxy war" if you prefer, was very much on certain peoples' minds.

Against this, sorry-- there is no defense.

The civilized world will either take stringent preventive measures NOW, or the basketball will come.

What "measures"? -- well, beginning yesterday, the Nuclear Club is closed.

Any Iranian, North Korean, or other regime found developing a nuclear WMD should be "outlawed" in the classic sense. No diplomatic pussy-footing: The Chief of State and his enablers are terminated by any means; their State scoured for any vestige of fissionable material; regardless of ideological, nationalist, or other yawps, that entity WILL NOT possess the basketball.

"Politically impossible"? Then so is civilization.

Trading in anonymity, nuclear terrorists assume that because their origins are obscure, civilized communities must dither and waffle until culprits are "exposed". Not so. Extortion on this scale is preventable, before catastrophe takes everything down with it. Who grunts and fusses against "imperial hubris" et.al. in the face of McPhee's insights going back a generation deserves to perish utterly.

The rest of us need not enslave ourselves to death.

But for short-term political gain, those shackles are being put upon us.