What Kind of War?

 
The California National Guard made the mistake of reaching out a welcoming hand to its opponents. According to a July 11 story in Mercury News (Hat tip: LGF), the Guard invited a group of antiwar activists to visit its headquarters in Sacramento, in order to demonstrate that the Guardsmen were normal, decent human beings, and not the ravening bloodthirsty baby-killers of wide repute.

Big mistake.

As it happened, one of the Guard members had posted a flyer on his cubicle featuring the hoary old story about General Pershing and the Muslim terrorists.

	The Pershing flyer recounts a tale -- which may have been embellished or entirely woven of legend -- that resurfaced after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. According to the tale, Pershing captured 50 Muslim extremists before World War I while stationed in the Philippines. He tied 49 of the men up, slaughtered two pigs in front of them, dipped bullets in the pig’s blood and had the men executed, believing that by doing so they would doom the men to hell.
	The extremists were then buried in pig’s blood and parts while one survivor was set free to relate the horrifying tale. For the next 42 years, the flyer states, there were no Muslim terrorist attacks in the world.
	Whether the story is true remains unclear. Pershing is said to have threatened to bury Philippine rebels in pig skins and splatter pig’s blood on their houses, but some historians have been unable to verify the story of Pershing overseeing the controversial execution.

Now, to those of us who are concerned about actually winning this war, and who don’t have to worry about winning re-election or holding down a job in academia, this does not seem like a terribly controversial idea. A little bit over the top, maybe, but nothing we all haven’t contemplated with secret pleasure in the privacy of our vile Crusader hearts.

But to the antiwar activists, it is a misfeasance of the highest order.

	“It’s troubling to see a governmental organization dedicated to the security of our country promoting culturally and religiously insensitive ideas,” said William Youmans, media relations manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Santa Clara. “It’s very possible to combat terrorism without offending the cultural values of a major world religion.”
	[…]
	Below the Pershing tribute is a second flyer with the wings and tail of a bomber forming the legs of a peace sign with the slogan: Peace the old fashioned way. There’s also a cartoon from a Web site known as www.stopislam.com that depicts a Red Crescent ambulance stuffed with weapons and a cartoon figure that looks like the late-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat unloading the cargo.

Once again, most of us wouldn’t have a problem with this. In an allegorical way, the cartoon simply speaks the truth: Islamist jihadis in the West Bank and Gaza have repeatedly used ambulances to transport weapons for terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. If this “offend[s] the cultural values of a major world religion,” well, then maybe “a major world religion” is offended by the truth.

But, predictably, the Guard caved under the pressure and took the flyer down.

	On Monday, Islamic, Arab-American and anti-war groups called the Pershing flyer reprehensible. They praised the Guard for taking the flyer down, but said more may need to be done to educate the citizen soldiers.
	“Muslims are not our enemies,” said Ruth Robertson, a member of Raging Grannies who saw the flyer.

I’m willing to stipulate to the possibility that not all Muslims are our enemies. However, it is an ineluctable fact that a significant percentage of them are indeed our enemies.

Here’s the clincher:

“It makes it sound like what we are doing is some sort of religious war,” said [Jackie] Thomason…

Well, DUH. I wonder why that is?

Ms. Thomason is a volunteer for the GI Rights Hotline, “a coalition of nonprofit groups that offers advice and help to soldiers”. If I were offering advice to a soldier, it would be that he is fighting a religious war. I would assert that it is a religious war because the enemy is fighting a religious war. He wants to kill us because of what he perceives to our religion; if we believed exactly as he does, then he would not be fighting us.

And when the Great Islamic Jihad eventually arrives at the Left Coast — as it has in Israel, Iraq, Spain, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Thailand, and, most recently, London — it will do the well-meaning peace activist no good whatsoever to protest that he is an atheist, or an agnostic, or secular, or a lapsed whatever. He can keep repeating his non-religious mantra right up to the moment when the hooded mujahid holding the bloody scimitar hoists his severed head high up before the video camera.

Or, if he is lucky, he can become a dhimmi, and pay the jizyah. Then his life will be spared.

For a while.