BOMBED IF YOU DO, BOMBED IF YOU DON'T

Amazing how many of the comments on the New York Times article reporting on Tancredo's recent statement bluster with such horror that the US may bomb a few holy sites in response to a nuclear attack on America. Be assured there are Islamic imperialists plotting this very minute how they may obtain a nuclear weapon and set it off in the heart of America.

Where is the outrage that these "hijackers" are planning on murdering upward of a million American citizens, leaving our own nation in economic and political disarray? We must imagine these bloggers feel America deserves it. The people who would attack the United States do not give a fig about blowing up sacred sites in Iraq, school children, mosques.

Is Mecca holier than Portland or Los Angeles? Are there more civilians who would be murdered by a dirty bomb in Mecca than in Los Angeles? The radicals are not going to be detered by threatening to bomb their children. They strap bombs to their own children. The only thing the radicals value as holy or cherish is public religious display. If the Muslims explode a dirty bomb in the US, say Los Angeles, will you feel safe in Des Moines? Will you wonder how many bombs they have and when they will strike again.

Many seem to have forgotten some of the Allied tactics of World War II. Everyone knows the Germans bombed civilians in London and environs, but memory fogs over in regard to the extensive and demoralizing bombing that was carried-out against civilians in various German cities. Dresden. Heidelberg. Berlin. Purely shock and horror bombing, meant to help defeat a very real and determined enemy. Any citizen of the West should reflect on this before preaching about what we should be morally precluded from doing.

To point to acts of sectarian violence in Iraq and elsewhere indicates a lack of the most basic knowledge. Just because Sunni extremists destroy Shiite holy places (which they do not recognize as legitimate or sacred) doesn’t mean that they will not be bothered by the destruction of the two holiest sites in all of Islam. In fact, the revered nature of Mecca and Medina as holy sites that every single Islamic sect accepts and embraces, is probably the only thing the Sunnis and Shi'ites hold in agreement.

We are not at war with Islam, but current (and historical) indications in that direction are overwhelming. Tancredo’s statement was not the most brilliant approach, but then most of us have deceived ourselves into believing that nothing like World War II will ever, or could ever, revisit us. It does not take two crazy parties to get a war going, just one.