I'm beginning to think I'm the only one who sees this.I've been accused in the past of over simplifying things and of being to narrow minded to see the 'big picture' and that couldn't be farther from the truth. I do look at the big picture and see what's really happening. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not.
Most times I take a look at things from a third prospective, sort of take a Devil's Advocate look and see things from both sides before making an opinion on a matter. Once I do make an opinion, I tend to stick with it until someone can show me something concrete that will change my mind.
Case in point. This whole Muhammad cartoon dustup.
Ok, the way I see it, these cartoons were published well over six months ago and only now people are getting upset? The way I'm seeing it now it's the radical Muslim imams and clerics fermenting disorder in order to feed the growing resentment towards the west, the US and Israel specifically.
From what I've learned, Muhammad's depiction has been around for hundreds of years... Go here:
That's from the San Francisco Chronicle, not exactly a Right-Wing rag.
We're in a war for our very survival people. A very real war and there's only going to be one winner. We have a very large group of people with a grand agenda and in our short-sightedness and willingness to capitulate with appeasement we will surely lose this fight.
These folks see appeasement as weakness.
In black & white, plain as day here is their agenda:
1) Convert all non-believers (infidels) over to Islam
2) Those who don't or won't convert to Islam will be killed
3) Erase Israel off the face of the map
In achieving the three goals above, will subject the world to their own brand of Islam and therefore subjugate the entire planet, and in my opinion bring on a whole new Dark Age. All forms of art and literature will be censored and banned, women will no longer be able to work or go to school, they will be beaten in the streets for any minor infraction the imams hand down... Free speech will be all but wiped out. No more voting or elections.
Sounds medieval? It is. Looks how things were in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. Looks at how things are in Iran & Saudi Arabia right now.
These people hate our very way of life and fiber of being. They want to destroy everything we hold dear, everything we hold so precious but yet take for granted every day. And still people want to appease them, maybe if we're nice and give them what they want they'll stop killing us.
I'll give you a news flash. They won't stop killing us.
Take a good hard look the next time you drive through the town where you live. Take a hard look and really see everything. Take it all in. In every town you go to, there's Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Anglican churches, Synagogues, Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines... Even Mosques. Every form of worship you can imagine all in one town or city and everyone is basically getting along fairly well. I have friends of all those faiths and even some wiccan and pagan ones. Although I may not agree with all of them, I respect their right to worship anyway they want and they respect my beliefs in the same way.
If we let these people win, take everything you have seen in your drive through town and erase all of it.
It'll all be gone, like Scarlett said, With the Wind...
Peace loving Islam?
I'll play Devil's Advocate here for a moment. Suppose that when the New York Times published pictures of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung and Jesus on the cross submerged in a jar of urine (which they did) The pope in Rome, Pat Robertson or Billy Graham pontificated and instigated mobs in American cities, burning down buildings, rioting in the streets, and demanding for the death of the publisher?
Sounds insane when you look at it that way, doesn't it? But that's exactly what they're doing.
Until we all get our heads collectively out of the sand, wake up and really fight back with every fiber of our being, surely everything we've worked and strived for these last 231 years will be for nothing.
9/11 should have been the big wakeup call. It was for a while until, as most Americans tend to do, we forgot. They took the footage of those towers falling, the people on the higher floors leaping out of windows holding eachother's hands, sure they were going to die... They took those pictures away but they're indelibly etched into my memory as they should for every American.
A few other regimes have tried this in the past... Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin... They all failed but the question is, do we have the same intestinal fortitude to win this one?
Looking back as a spectator, I seriously doubt it. That is unless we pull our thumbs out and stop fucking around. It's coming to a head, I can feel it... You don't have to read tea leaves to see it, just stop and look at the big picture.
They are trying to KILL us, and here we're all worried about offending them. I'm offended by that.
And the really sad part about it is that if we lose it'll be not because we couldn't, we just failed to act with decisiveness, we failed through indecision and inaction for fear we may offend someone.
And the most ironic thing of all is that the end of the world might be brought on by a cartoon.
Copyright 2006 Thomas J Wolfenden
2 comments:
I don't get the whole thing--the whole "can't hurt their feelings" thing that the press here in the US is doing. It just doesn't make any sense. But then, does ANY of this make any sense? What a world.
Tom, you really should be writing a column in a widely read newspaper. I love how succinctly you make your point. Well done.
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