"How has a false threat overtaken a real threat?"

Our friend at the Architecture and Morality blog asks a good question: "How has a false threat (extreme climate change) overtaken a real threat (terrorist states with nuclear capabilities)?"

I am reminded that the first stage of grief is denial. We saw a pretty clear case of denial this week when the House Armed Services Committee banned the phrases “global war on terror,” and “long war.” As the offensive “surge” seems to be working in Iraq ... it seems House Democrats need to deny any ... signs of progress. The best way to do so is to ignore the reality in which we are engaged: a long, global war on terror. It reminds me of the victim in horror movies who repeat lies to themselves over and over for comfort: “He’s gone,” or “It’s going to be okay,” or “It was just a bad dream”, all the while the audience knows a madman with a knife is hiding behind the curtains. So while they are quite literally denying the real war, they are embracing a false one.

He's right, isn't he [read it all in It Was a Long Cold Global War on Terror/Terrorists/Terrorism], but he does make one error: as Yaron Brook points out so tellingly in the panel discussion and article to which I linked on Sunday, the war in which the west is involuntarily engaged is a war against the followers of another world-changing, life-hating ideology, specifically Islamic totalitarianism. In defining the enemy more clearly than the US President has done to date, Brook points out, it becomes clear that the enemy can just as easily be found close to home, as it is he suggests in organisations such as the Council of Islamic Relations.

I wish Bush would take his own rhetoric seriously, [says Brook]because understanding this fact about the killers is crucial to achieving victory in the war. Only when the political aspiration of Islam—the imposition of its religious dogmas by force—has been shown to result in the deaths of Islamists, not their victims, will we be safe. Only when the cause of Islamic totalitarianism has been thoroughly discredited, will victory be achieved.

Islamic totalitarianism is a genuine threat. A real threat. But back to that false threat for a moment, and on this Tim Blair is right on the money with a story he's spotted in The Washington Post:

Young children are easily scared, which makes them particularly vulnerable to the politics of fear peddled by apocalyptic earth doomers. The Washington Post seems to get off on this:

The boy has drawn, in his third-grade class, a global warming timeline that is his equivalent of the mushroom cloud.

"That’s the Earth now,” the 9-year-old says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. “And then,” he says, tracing the progressively lighter stripes across the page, “it’s just starting to fade away."

Alex Hendel of Arlington County is talking about the end of life on our beleaguered planet.

What sort of parent would decline to intervene at this point? ... Alex would be in therapy if he’d drawn a graph illustrating the increase in Islamic terrorism and staged a similar “death”.

For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today. Fears of an environmental crisis are defining their generation in ways that the Depression, World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War’s lingering “War Games” etched souls in the 20th century.

At least they’re not bothered by 9/11. Maybe they’ve never been taught about it.Unfortunately, that is entirely possible.

Fake threats are always easier to deal with, aren't they, than confronting the scary reality.