Stumble it!Tancredo is bloody insane
posted in Colorado, Politics, Terrorism by themaiden |Of course I’m no doctor and my pronouncements as to the Colorado politician’s sanity should not be taken as medical advice, but…
“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina…”
…bomb 1) civilian cities (and hence bomb civilians) that are 2) sites of religious pilgrimage located in 3) a nation with which we are not at war and with which we are nominally allied in order to 4) deter the activities of miscellaneous fringe groups? That is like Great Britain threatening to bomb the Vatican to deter the activities of the IRA. That is cracked. Or, I don’t know, let’s blow up churches that are attended by KKK members. That’ll deter ‘em.
It is ironic that in another report has the politician invoking the idea of ‘principles’.
“I like mavericks, but I like mavericks who are doing what they’re doing in defense of a principle,” Tancredo told a reporter for KGRN-AM.
What principle justifies– I quote as I couldn’t say it better– “his revolting, outrageous, despicable and deeply un-American proposal: that American forces should indiscriminately bomb religious sites in response to another terrorist attack on our soil“? Answer: No principle I have any interest in advocating, promoting, or defending.
Of course, Tancredo doesn’t really believe that we are war with terrorism. “Terrorism is a tactic. It is not the thing with which we are at war.” True enough. I’d agree. Terrorism is a tactic and isn’t really the thing we ought to be fighting strictly speaking. We ought to be fighting the people who use terrorism, though it is something of a nit-picky point.
Who ought we be fighting? According to Tancredo we are in a clash of civilizations, by which he means we are fighting a religious war. We are fighting Islam itself.
I chose the example of the IRA for a reason. As stated by Karen Armstrong in The Guardian:
We rarely, if ever, called the IRA bombings “Catholic” terrorism because we knew enough to realise that this was not essentially a religious campaign. Indeed, like the Irish republican movement, many fundamentalist movements worldwide are simply new forms of nationalism in a highly unorthodox religious guise. This is obviously the case with Zionist fundamentalism in Israel and the fervently patriotic Christian right in the US.
We are not at war with Islam. What we face is an assortment of radicals numbering in the ten-thousands at most, out of a billion to a billion and a half Muslims. Such numbers do not a clash of civilizations make.
Of those radicals a fair share are local nationalists, which means the fight is about regional control and not about world conquest, attacking the great satan, or other such nonsense. Painting the fight in those terms obscures what is really happening. The fact that western meddling in– I’m tempted to say ‘brutal rape of’– the middle east over the past century, especially, has greatly contributed to the problem complicates the equation to be sure. Our behavior has radicalized the people who now want to harm us, which is no surprise given the circumstances. Fixing the problem– winning the war, if you will– is going to mean stopping the abuse. It is going to mean, in effect, acting like adults and not like bullies.
Tancredo’s proposal, if enacted– and it looks like nearly everyone realizes it is cracked–, would do nothing but further irritate the situation. How do you create a radical? Start blowing up things like churches. The Muslim states, now largely at odds, would certainly unite over that one. Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson stated that “I sincerely believe that bombing religious artifacts and religious holy sites would do nothing but unify 1 billion Muslims against us.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, commented that “historically, we’ve tried to avoid doing what the Nazis did, and that’s bombing every kind of possible target… We’ve had this attitude (that) we don’t do these things. There are some things that are off limits.” What Huckabee is talking about, Tom, are ‘principles’.
Tancredo’s proposal, in fact, just by being uttered has probably already generated a few more radicals. Thanks Tom.
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