Improved Clinch

Ridicule Them, They Deserve It

The war on terrorism. Do those words actually have much meaning? No, they are too generalized.

When we read accounts of terrorist atrocities committed, supposedly for the greater glory of Islam, we read “Islamic Jihadists,” did such and such, rather than “cowardly cold hearted bastards, under the tutelage of mis-guided charlatans of the Islamic faith, once again slaughtered a score of innocent individuals in Iraq.”

Politicians especially, in addition to most major media outlets, offer up concilatory phrases, because, you know, “we” don’t want to offend Islamic sensibilities.

A couple of pieces I’ve read today comment on this subject, noting that ridicule should be utilized in this struggle against the “scum” of Islam. And if you cannot deduce the difference between the scum of Islam, and the neighborly of Islam, well, I’d say your moral compass is just plain broken.

The Chronicle published one piece I read titled If We Don’t Call Them Names, the Terrorists Win, which was written by Carlin Romano. From Romano’s piece.

Yet the vast majority of statesmen believe in purely operational talk after terrorist acts. On July 4, Franco Frattini, the EU’s top justice official, announced a wide array of new antiterrorist measures, including an EU-wide passenger-data-recording system, and criminalization of bomb-making instructions on the Internet. “We will find a better way to discourage and detect terrorists,” Frattini said.

Why does such a better way not include a call for sterner moral judgment, forcefully expressed?...What might we argue in favor of calling terrorists names?

Let’s mention just one key goal: the education of the world’s Muslim youth. Instead of hearing moral praise and encouragement for terrorism from jihadists, which then gets mixed in their minds with the nonjudgmental, tactical talk of Western officials and media, they’d have to absorb a steady stream of insults of terrorists’ intelligence, morality, decency, and reasoning. Young Muslims would have to get used to hearing jihadist heroes described as savages, scum, and uncivilized losers, along with the reasons why. It would intellectually force them, far more than they are forced today, to choose between two visions of the world.

The second piece I read today is actually an online book, in pdf format which I magnified to 130% for easier reading, under the title Fighting the War of Ideas Like a Real War.

This 148 page book, written by J. Michael Waller, and published by The Institute of World Politics Press, also notes that words should be utilized as weapons against those bastardized sons of Islam who, like a pack of wild dogs, kill and maim indiscriminately. A quote from Waller’s book regarding the use of ridicule.

Ridicule is an under-appreciated weapon not only against terrorists, but against weapons proliferators, despots, and international undesirables in general. Ridicule serves several purposes:

• Ridicule raises morale at home;
• Ridicule strips the enemy/adversary of his mystique and
prestige;
• Ridicule erodes the enemy’s claim to justice;
• Ridicule deprives the enemy of his ability to terrorize;
• Ridicule eliminates the enemy’s image of invincibility; and
• Directed properly at an enemy, ridicule can be a fate worse
than death.

Ridicule away.

Link to Waller’s book via the Chicago Boyz.

Posted by on 07/18 at 06:17 AM