Since I get my marching orders from Hugh Hewitt, I have to say Congressman Tancredo’s remark that we should retaliate by bombing Mecca if we’re attacked by Nukes by Islamic terrorists is wrong and unhelpful, and well, shameful.
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#1 by Jim Durban on July 19, 0205 - 7:10 pm
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I have to admit – when I first heard Tancredo’s remarks, I was not as worked up as you.
I’ve heard many times that we should rebuild the WTC towers and nickname them Mecca and Medina. As long as our “Mecca and Medina” stand…
I do agree, after the red vision clears, that the destruction of Mecca is not fair retribution, and would be tantamount to declaring war on Islam by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents.
If and when the radical Muslims ever reach a level of power that rivals our own – that story would change. That’s what we’re striving to stop. If we are threatened, and the moderate Muslims of the world have not stepped forward to reclaim their faith – at what point do we start asking when we cross that threshhold?
At what point in World War II were we saying that we were only going fight the bad fascists?
#2 by Chris on July 19, 2005 - 4:36 pm
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I wonder if it has a deterrent effect. If the terrorists don’t mind dying for their cause, does it cause them a moment of pause? Or, does it confirm that we are infidels? It’s hard to tell.
Personally, if we were attacked, I’d want our government to retaliate. That must be part of our human nature.
Let’s hope that people come to their senses before that would ever happen.
Deliberate Chaos
#3 by Robert Lee on July 19, 2005 - 5:56 pm
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Personally I think that his comments were not shameful but much needed. The United States has become a “softy” home. Terrorists and their kind only respect power and the only way to show them power is to retaliate and make their own people hate them. If we throw out some of these threats it could lead to some people saying “oh look they are so evil and blah blah blah” but in all honesty their leaders would be saying “hey um guys better back off…they just blew up Mecca and are targeting some other areas.”
#4 by Kevin Murphy on July 19, 2005 - 6:52 pm
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I don’t think it would have a deterrent effect because the al Qaida people seem lost in their own world – wanting Andalusia back and expecting non-stop sex with virgins in the next life in return for killing innocent women and children.
If we were attacked, I want retaliation against those who did it, and not against all of Islam, and I’d want measures taken to lessen the chances of it happening again. Bombing Mecca does nothing for either of those wants.
If your response to the terrorists is to bomb Mecca, then you must think all Muslims are responsible. I don’t think so – only a small subset is, with a larger group who are sympathetic. I think the best way to handle them is like we are in Iraq, where everyday the average muslim can see that al Qaida doesn’t give a fig for the average muslim, and we do. My response would be to restructure more countries, not a butcher and bolt.
If we say the terrorists are responsible for 9-11, and then flatten Mecca, aren’t we responsible? Shouldn’t we expect all muslims to hate us for it, not al Qaida?
I don’t think we’re ever going to find common ground with the kind of people who think nothing of deliberately killing innocent men, women and children. Hunting them down without quarter doesn’t bother me a bit. But to simply lash out and respond to the deliberate killing of innocents by killing more innocents is not moral to me….
#5 by Gerald Buckley on July 19, 2005 - 8:12 pm
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Go go Tancredo!
Hit them where it matters most to them and deprive them of any and all oxygen. Holy war is back for a while. Get used to it.
#6 by Cheeseit on July 19, 2005 - 8:45 pm
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What a bunch of myopic people you all are. The mosquitoes of terrorism come from the swamp of worldwide poverty and war. Has it ever occured to you that terrorism is the last, desperate act of a person (or people) who are utterly powerless to retaliate in any other way? Has it occured to you that Al Qaeda isn’t actually an organization but simply and ideology that attracts people who are engraged at what is happening to their people — but feel powerless to stop it — turn to when they have no other way of fighting back?
Has it occured to you to look at the history of how Osama Bin Laden came to adopt his ideology? Of the endless U.S. meddling in the Middle East that led to his philisophy? He was one on our side, in Afghanistan, during the Soviet occupation. How did he come to hate the West so much?
The infamous Lebanon marine barracks attack, the attack on the U.S. Cole in Yemen… Have is it ever occured to you to ask: wait, why do we have soldiers and ships stationed in all these countries around the world? How would you feel if Saudi Arabian soldiers, better armed than your own police or military paraded around the streets of your city, armed to the teeth, and there was a barracks of hundreds of them right near your house, and their battleships were in every port of your home country. In other words, if you were surrounded by a militant empire hundreds of times more powerful than you, a nation that has been running on a wartime economy for 60 years, who goes to war for profit over and over again. One of that nation’s own great generals said that that cycle of feeding the military industrial complex needed to stop. That America needed to stop constantly preparing for war, or it would be constantly going to war.
Bombing Mecca would turn millions of Muslims who are now good, law-abiding citizens into terrorists. We’re not fighting a finite group of people in Iraq. There are no people out there known as “the terrorists” and after we kill them all terrorism will stop. The people who are now terrorists and insurgents in Iraq used to be regular people, until we killed 100,000 of their countrymen. And the longer we occupy them, the more innocent people are killed (and if you don’t think innocent people are being killed in large numbers by both sides, you know nothing of war), the more terrorists that will spring up.
Take a look at the endless Israel/Palestine conflict. Gee, bombing them and bulldozing their houses — that stops suicide bombers, right? Um, no, clearly it just gives suicide bombers more enraged people to recruit. And the cycle goes on and on and on.
Please, can we have a citizenry and a government that doesn’t see the world in shades of only black and white? Because if we don’t, our world will come to look just like Gaza does now. And we will all be consumed, on all sides. “Holy war” is the dumbest thing I can think of as a solution to this vastly complex problem.
#7 by Kevin Murphy on July 19, 2005 - 9:29 pm
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Jim, I agree that if somehow an islamofascist regime came to power in the Middle East, made Mecca it’s capitol, and attacked us, then counter attacking Mecca would be on the table. If Iran were to go nuclear, and attack us directly or indirectly with such, I don’t think we should obliterate Qom and call it even, we should remove that regime with extreme prejudice and replace it with one that won’t attack it’s neighbors just like we did in Germany and Japan.
Cheeseit, I can’t speak for the others, but you pegged me — I’m extremely myopic with 20/400 vision. With contacts, I can get that to 20/15 although at my age that means I need reading glasses without bright light to read. I also think the swamps of terrorism should be drained, but they won’t just drain themselves.
#8 by Jim Durban on July 20, 2005 - 8:45 am
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100,000 innocents killed? Insurgents rising up out of a formerly tame populace?
Cheeseit isn’t going to be worth debating if these are his facts.