I agree with the author, as an individual citizen I can have little to no impact on the terrorists. I rely on my government and my military to keep them at bay. Electing leaders who understand the enemy and the threat is crucial. Even being the best person/Christian I can be will have no effect on the evil we face. Madrassahs are indoctrinating children to hate us and our culture, so being a good Christian example will not change or even slow this growing evil that poisons the minds of Islamists. I can make sure my vote counts to elect leaders who believe in a Constitutional Republic and returning us to a nation of laws under God ('Will our political leaders encourage us to honor the Ten Commandments by honoring the case laws [of Exodus], or will they encourage us to break the Ten Commandments by ignoring the case laws?' --Tools of Dominion, front flap, Gary North). I can also prepare for the inevitable hometown terrorist attack in order to keep my family safe.
...What is the difference between this and all other threats?
I have sensed, since it began, that it is different. I have accepted that, because it is different, in a way that I could not until now describe, then our response to it has been appropriate. Not because I was told so in a speech or by a columnist. For me to form an opinion I need information and evidence. And if these don’t point to a clear path of thinking, then I need inspiration.
I don’t subscribe to the opinions of people who demand that I believe because they told me so or because they have the more worthy emotions or because they are justified by their superior intellect, connections, or purity of motive. I don’t subscribe to an opinion because it is widely held, supported by polls, or for the common good.
So in searching for the answer to this deepening ethical dilemma – How can I support a war that confutes the teaching of Jesus? – I have drawn upon the evidence that I have been accumulating for decades: the instruction of my own church. For inspiration, I have looked to my own faith. For facts, I have read the Bible. And what follows is what I see.
...But the enemies everyone could identify with in that era were, for all their power and arrogance, civil people. Throughout history, there have been many organized forces which descended upon the innocent and conquered without mercy, but their objective was to control and subjugate a nation, a region, or the known world, not to annihilate, and especially not to annihilate out of apoplectic hatred for their chosen enemy. In present time, apoplectic hatred of all Americans is the motive of those who started this.
Attempts at conquest involve nation rising against nation, either to settle a grievance or to satisfy a charismatic if arrogant, self-appointed, self-worshipping ruler. Even though Hitler and Stalin were perhaps the most sinister and duplicitous of them all, they still made a pretense of civility and honor. They needed to be glorified and, even though they made mockery of it, they pretended at diplomacy....
Islam suffers from the same sort of self-destructive forces in the person of a few ruling do-no-wrong clerics. But Islam is not a country or an ethnic group. Nor is it a unified religious body such as the Roman Catholic Church. Islam is a body of ideas, some of them religious, some even grounded in faith (as opposed to religion or dogma), but not the property of any orderly clerical hierarchy. The high priests of Islam don’t even appear to be interested in finding their own common ground or representing their teaching to the world....
The high priests of Islam’s most self-destructive splinter groups aren’t interested in civility amongst themselves or representing their teaching to the world because it is not their objective to win converts. They are preaching hatred for anything and anyone who is not themselves. They don’t want slaves. There is no place in their world for converted followers or repentant non-Muslims. It is ironic that they now have a few tools that they did not have a century or even a quarter century ago, and all are the products of civilized societies: Broadcast media to spread their message, money from oil or plunder (whatever the difference might be), the armaments that their money can buy, and most diabolical of all, the open borders that free societies have permitted in the name of humanity. Ironically, too, they have the complicity of a fawning American communications media, motivated not by love for radical Islam but by hatred for a common enemy, George Bush.
It is with the tools made possible by our prosperity and generosity that we are being attacked. This time in history, though, the enemy is anywhere and everywhere. There is no leader who, by our taking him out, leaves the movement stalled or stopped. Since it is not a nationalist movement, there is no single country to overpower to stall or stop the movement.
And since the movement is not interested in our subservience, our gold, our conversion, or our appeasement, there may be no stopping it. It was easier to wipe out smallpox than it will be to put down radical militant Islam.
Regardless which way we react, with guns or with olive branches, we face one choice and that is to wait it out. Turning the other cheek will have no influence on their loathing for all things American or Jewish or Christian. So what do we do while their fury runs its course?....
America has been attacked by these indistinct forces somewhat due to our own indifference toward the nations that they come from, but moreso due to their envy, the misinformation fed to them by their own leaders, and the machinations of their own minds, steeped in ignorance of us. When mosquitoes swarm, I swat. I don’t kill or chase them all away, but fewer get to poke me. I don't try to talk them out of it. They want my blood. I am definitely less efficient in whatever I’m doing if I’m flailing at them, but the alternative – simply letting them all stick me – is unthinkable. Let that be an analogy.
Continue reading:
When accessing the blog, scroll to the 1/18/2012 post.
WWJD About Global Terrorism? - The Evil that is Upon Us
A nicely related article:
“Islam-on-Christian Persecution Around the World”
