Watcher’s Council Results for October 20th

Well, I’m late, as usual…

The Council winner on October 20th was Shrinkwrapped, with a superb post called Trauma, Passivity, & the Fear of Aggression. A snip:

When people are traumatized, their ability to cope is temporarily overwhelmed by both external and internal forces. The external forces are obvious. Someone pointing a gun at you and your friends and loved ones is likely to evoke terror, often paralyzing terror. However, the internal reaction is what takes the terror and makes it traumatic. The combination of terror and impotent rage is a particular combination guaranteed to destabilize a person’s ability to cope. Often, in emergencies, taking action, even if it in retrospect is not the best possible course of events, is almost always less traumatizing than doing nothing (ie, remaining passive.) Passivity is the stance of a dependent child, not an active agent who may not be able to control a frightening environment but at least can have some control over his internal environment and his own behavior.

Right Wing Nut House came in second with a very moving piece, No Greater Love, about the recent death of Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor in Iraq:

Garden Grove, California is a “stiller town” today. The city of 166,000 lost one of its favorite sons on September 29 when Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor, a Navy SEAL, performed one of those acts of selfless courage that defines the term heroism.

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Go over to Rick’s place and read the rest.

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Of the Non-Council side, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the The Weekly Standard came in first with a piece about radical Islamic indoctrination calle “Prison Jihad?”:

The Wahhabi/Salafi translation of the Koran was not the only piece of radical literature Al Haramain distributed to prisons. Another widely-distributed volume was Muhammad bin Jamil Zino’s Islamic Guidelines for Individual and Social Reform. Like the radical translation of the Koran, one of the themes in Zino’s book was jihad. Zino instructs his readers that children should be indoctrinated in the glories of jihad from an early age:

Teach your children the love of justice and revenge from the unjust like the Jews and the tyrants. Consequently our youth would know that Palestine should be freed and Jerusalem must be of the Muslims. They have to learn about Islam and Jihad as per the Qur’an and that the holy fighting for justice is supported by Allah the Almighty.

Second place went to Villainous Company with What It Means To Be a Conservative. My favorite quote:

Our fellow humans prey on the helpless and on children and liberals (in addition to championing some very valuable causes) have also championed some pretty worthless causes like the freedom to view child pornography (which is illegal) and the freedom of ten year old girls to get abortions without their parents finding out. Personally I am not convinced a ten year old girl really needs the freedom to have sex with pedophiles. She is not a “woman” yet, so it is neither a “woman’s right to choose” nor a “woman’s sexual privacy” that is at issue. But apparently this shocking opinion makes me some sort of snake handling Jesus freak, though I don’t attend church and am something of a libertarian.

Go over to the The Watcher’s Place for all the rest of the entries.