Unapologetic Bloodlust. The New York Post published today the most blatant proof of the evil of its editorial policy, a column titled "Kill, Don't Capture: How to Solve Our Prisoner Problem". I sent the following short emailed letter to the editor in response:

The Post's resident bloodthirsty psychopath [Ralph Peters] has revealed the utter evil of the New York Post and all other Radical Zionists. I have a much better solution than killing "terrorists": kill the Radical Zionists who have produced Radical Islamism, starting with Ralph Peters and the entire editorial staff of the New York Post. Once we have shown our good faith in wanting to make peace with Islam by destroying Zionism and merging "Israel" into a multiethnic and multireligious United Palestine, the tumult in the Moslem world will subside, and we can end the "permanent war" the RadZi's have set us on.

Peters asserts that only people who wear uniforms are "legal combatants" entitled to the protection of the Geneva Conventions, so we are entitled to slaughter nonuniformed combatants because they are (by his own definition) "terrorists".
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I'm very sure I have seen American movies in which U.S. soldiers disguise themselves in, for instance, German uniforms to spring ambushes and kill "enemy" soldiers with impunity, yet still regard themselves as legal combatants subject to humane treatment under the Geneva Convention if captured. The audience is presumed to regard such ambushes as heroic, the behavior of good guys, and cheer each "Nazi" killed by stealth and deceit.
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Did the maquis (French Resistance) wear uniforms or at least armbands to identify themselves in every military or quasi-military action against the occupying German army? They did no such thing. They dressed in civilian clothes in carrying out their espionage, sabotage, and armed attacks. The mere fact that those clothes were business suits and housewives' dresses rather than kaftans or burkas makes not one whit of difference.
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Palestinians and, alas, some of Iraq's insurgents are merely an Arab maquis, heroically fiting a Radical Zionist (RadZi) occupying army. No principle of justice requires people fiting an occupying army guilty of horrendous crimes against prostrate, defenseless people, to identify themselves and thus make themselves easy targets for an overpowering but utterly unjust conqueror. Did the citizen-soldiers who assembled at Concord Green and then attacked the retreating British from behind walls and trees all wear proper uniforms or armbands? Or did they just rush out into the nite when roused by Paul Revere and other riders to defend their homes and traditional liberties from a foreign invader?
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Peters utterly falsifies the issue here, as he falsifies the issue almost everywhere:

Some of my former peers [active-duty military] will wring their hands and babble about "winning hearts and minds." But we'll never win the hearts and minds of terrorists. And if we hope to win the minds, if not the hearts, of foreign populations, we must be willing to kill the violent, lawless fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population determined to terrorize the rest.

If he were writing for a British audience in 1776 — which I can easily envision — Peters would doubtless make the same claim: that the ragtag rabble resorting to violence against the Crown are the tiniest "fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population" and the Crown must keep them from "terroriz[ing] the rest" into treason.
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But the reality in 1776 in the Thirteen States is the reality now in Iraq: you can't have an insurgency without at least the passive support of the populace, because a hostile people will alert the authorities to movements of insurgents and point out their hiding places for government attack.
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Who wrote this, Usama bin Laden, or Ralph Peters?

[W]e must kill our enemies wherever we encounter them.

Impossible to tell, isn't it? Here is the giveaway, a rationalizing addendum:

He who commits an act of terror forfeits every right he once possessed.

But what is "terror"? Is dropping bombs from so high that no ground-to-air missile can reach the bomber, warfare, or terrorism? Is sending 150,000 troops into a country that has never attacked either of the main partners to that invasion, war, or terrorism? Is taking the family of a girl-child you want to rape into another room and shooting them all dead, then gang-raping her with your buddies and then killing her and burning her house, war, or terrorism? Is shooting a whole bunch of villagers because one or two of your fellow fiters are killed in the vicinity, war or terrorism? Who is the warrior? who the terrorist?
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The reason "War is hell" is that it is not possible to draw distinctions between one form of savagery and another when everyone is seized by the madness of bloodlust. Each side claims justification. "We're only retaliating" for this, or that, or the other. "We were attacked on September 11th", implying we did nothing to incite such an attack. No, we have been angels to Islam. We didn't send $100 billion to prop up the State of Israel and buy ammunition for the guns and cannons, and fuel for the bulldozers, that have killed untold numbers of Arabs, inside and outside Palestine, and destroyed entire Arab neighborhoods. No, we're utter innocents, babes in the woods, who would never stain our hands with the blood of Palestinian children. No! Never!
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So Israelis are captured on video shooting at a father and the 12-year-old son he is trying to shield with his body. Both are unarmed, and begging, shouting for the shooting to stop. The Israelis don't stop shooting until the boy, who hasn't even reached puberty yet, is dead, after living in terror — yes, "terror" — for several minutes until murdered by Israeli monsters. The Israelis don't so much as apologize. Americans say nothing. The Moslem world flies into rage. We disown any responsibility, then send Israel more money to replenish the ammunition expended on killing that 12-year-old. And we resume our blind faith in our national decency, even as we have surrendered every claim to being decent people. We then fly into a rage ourselves when someone holds us to account and says, in effect, if you won't stop this behavior, if you won't use your precious "democracy" to end the crimes of your Government, then you are collectively, and individually, responsible for those crimes, and you collectively, and individually, can be killed for them, in all justice. So they hijack some planes and kill a few thousand Americans, and we pretend it was an "unprovoked attack". And then we invade a country that had nothing to do with that attack, using that attack as pretext to destroy the one credible enemy Israel had in the region, and kill ten times, fifteen times, twenty or thirty times as many innocent Iraqis as "innocent" Americans died on September 11th, and feel ourselves justified in our crimes.
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Once we're in this "war", which we started — that is, we chose to start it; it was not forced upon us by an attack by Saddam Hussein — we have to "support our troops", because it's the patriotic thing to do, and rationalize away every death those troops themselves inflict or make possible by others, in producing chaos: destroying the government that had successfully suppressed terrorism and thus creating the indispensable precondition to mass death thru terrorism.
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It's never our fault. We are angels. Israelis are angels, innocent "victims" — because Jews are always victims; just ask them — who are just "defending themselves". They must be, because we back them, and angels wouldn't back devils. Would they? Res ipse loquitur: the thing speaks for itself. We are angels, so the people we back must be angels, and anything we, or they, do in "self-defense" is justified. There's no need even to think about it. Why confuse yourself with questions?
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We produced the wartime emergency we now use to justify the continuation of an occupation we had no right to start. And as long as we're there, we have "no choice" but to "defend ourselves" and "back our boys" in everything they do. We must "stay the course", no matter whether we should ever have embarked upon that course — or not. We mustn't "cut and run". Killing must give rise to more killing, because to end the killing would be wrong.
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On one thing, Peters is correct:

If you wish to defend the many, you must be willing to kill the few.

In the present artificial emergency, the few we need to kill are the RadZi's, in Israel and Washington. Once we have killed them, we might recover from the madness that has seized us.
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Radical Zionism has strangled the conscience of the United States and made us an active participant in every single crime committed by Israel. We are now so utterly "in on it" that we can't even raise an objection when Israel causes hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to infrastructure in an area that was always at the edge of penury, even malnutrition or death from thirst, because it is willfully kept in misery by malicious neo-Nazistic RadZi's. The flow of money stolen from the pockets of Christian American taxpayers to be sent by the boatload to support the crimes of Israel hasn't been so much as interrupted for one hour in retaliation for the grotesque overreaction now devastating the Gaza Strip. And there is no organized indignation, no demonstrations in the streets, no fiery editorials in any major paper, to compel the U.S. Government to stop the astonishing savagery of the Israeli attack.
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I have been ashamed of the United States on many occasions, but there seemed, heretofore, always to be hope that the fundamental decency of the Nation would eventually triumph and force a change of direction. Now, I'm not so sure. The utter silence of American society at the latest outrages against Palestine, the lack of furious indignation at the rape and murder of Iraqis by "our boys", the bland, blind acceptance of endless, deadly chaos that we have caused in Iraq, the progressive takeover of American society by Radical Zionist Jews — New York State seems destined to elect a Jewish Governor in November; New York City's Jewish Mayor wants to run for President in 2008, making the takeover complete — makes me wonder if we have gone too far to recover.
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When you've sold your soul to the Devil, can you ever get it back?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,544.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:12 PM