A vile litany gains another entry in Libya [updated]

“If your religion is worth killing for, start with yourself.”
- Gerry Duggan

With yesterday’s vile atrocity in Benghazi, we can add another entry to a long list beginning more than half-a-century ago.

• Seizure and nationalisation of American and British oil fields in the Middle East -- oil fields developed and owned by British and American companies -- and the subsequent capitulation of Truman and Eisenhower to the seizures. (1940s and 50s)
• Seizure and nationalisation of Suez Canal, and the subsequent capitulation of Eisenhower (1956)
• Seizure of US Embassy and taking of hostages in Tehran, and the craven capitulation of Carter (1979)
• Shooting of police-woman Yvonne Fletcher from Libyan Embassy in London (1984)
• EgyptAir 648 hjacking (1985)
• Bombing of Beirut's marine barracks (1983)
• Bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie (1988)
• The fatwah on Salman Rushdie (1989 to present).
• EgyptAir 990 (1990)
• World Trade Center Bombing (1993)
• Embassy Bombings (1998)
• Indian Air 814 (1999)
• Project Megiddo (Dec 31, 1999)
• USS Cole (2001)

Each of these direct attacks on the west was met with appeasement, apology and capitulation. Each of them resulted in the (correct) assessment that the west was morally weak, that there would be no negative consequences for either perpetrators or supporter, and emboldened further escalation. By surrender, each of them invited escalation.

The invitation was enthusiastically taken up.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 and after saw the culmination of this attitude, and an outbreak of massive, violent and orchestrated attacks on civilians.

• Anthrax attacks (2001)
• Richard Reid (2001)
• Dirty Bomb Plot (2002)
• Charles Bishop (2002)
• French Tanker (2002)
• Bali bombing (2002)
• Morocco bombing (2002)
• Daniel Pearl (2002)
• Ricin threats (2003)|
• Riyadh Bombing (2003)
• Murder of Dick and Enid Eyeington (2003)
• 2003 Casablanca bombings
• Beheading of Paul Marshall Johnson beheading (2004)
• Murder of Theo Van Gogh (2004)
• Murder of Simon Cumbers (2004)
• 2004 Yanbu attack
• Murder of Fabrizio Quatrocchi (2004)
• Beheading of Nick Berg (2004)
• Beheading of Eugene Armstrong (2004)
• Beheading of Jack Hensley (2004)
• Beheading of Kim Sun-Il (2004)
• Beheading of Kenneth Bigley (2004)
• Beheading of Shosei Koda (2004)
• Madrid bombing (2004)
• Sharm-el Sheikh bomb (2004)
• Murder of Fabrizio Quattrocchi (2004)
• Murder of Margaret Hassan (2004)
• 2005 Delhi bombings
• London tube attacks (2005)
• 2005 Amman bombings
• Cairo bombing (2005)
• 2005 Bali bombings
• Ongoing Threats
• Plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners
• Ongoing Iranian plans for nuclear weapons, and two fingers to UN nuclear inspectors, Israel, US and entirety of western world
• Ongoing Iranian-supported Shi'ite bombings in Iraq
• Ongoing Iranian funding and supply of Hezbollah paramilitary organisation
• Seattle Jewish Federation shooting
• Fatwah on Danish cartoonists and all those who republish their work (2005)
• 2007 London car bombs
• 2007 Glasgow International Airport attack
• 2008 Damascus car bombing
• 22 May 2008 Exeter bombing
• 2008 Mumbai massacre
• 2008 American Embassy attack in Yemen
• 2008 Issers bombing
• March 6, 2008 Times Square bombing
• 2009 Bronx terrorism plot
• 2009 Khan el-Khalili bombing
• 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt
• 2010 Lakki Marwat murders
• 2011 Marrakech bombing
• 2011 Moscow Airport bombing
• 2012 Midi-Pyrénées shootings
• ….

These are just a few, a very few, of the murders of innocent people perpetrated by followers of Islam.

There have been several blood-soaked new entries in recent years in this litany of Islamist-driven death and destruction.

The latest is the murder in his country’s Libyan Embassy yesterday, in other words on American soil, of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three colleagues, by a mob wielding rocket-propelled grenades—an armed calling itself the ‘Islamic Law Supporters,’ who were said to have been directed towards the Embassy by Libyan police.

Killed over what?

A satiric movie about Mohammad and the poisonous fraud of Islam that few Americans even knew about? Or was it about the death by drone of a Libyan Al-Qada leader?
Who knows? Who cares? This is Islam at its best. This is Islam and Muslims shining through. Muslims don’t need an excuse. The Koran tells them so.
Trying to sift through the multifaceted motives for the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi is as pointless as sorting through the ruins of the World Trade Center on 9/11, 2001 searching for the identities of the plane hijackers. Once it was known who supported, funded, recruited, and triggered the attacks, why waste any time trying to identify the expendable "martyrs"?
It was the ideology that launched the attacks, in 2001 and in 2012. It was the ideology that has launched such attacks ever since the plane hijackings of the 1970's. It was behind the Munich massacre and every casualty-strewn bombing and murder spree committed in the name of Islam for the last five decades…
[T]he cause was immaterial. This was just Islam doing what it does best: killing and destroying.

We are at war.

Like it or not, we, the people of the west, are at war with people—people? with inhuman savages!—who wish to see us bleed, beheaded, destroyed.

It's a different war than we're used to, an asymmetric war -- a so-called fourth-generation war -- so some folk still don't recognise we're even in a state of war (or don't want to recognise it), but the fact remains we are under sustained attack and have been for some time.
That's not scare-mongering, that's just the way it is. Like it or not, we are at war. We didn't start this war, but a litany of appeasement by those under attack has fanned its flames, encouraged the attackers and emboldened the growth of violence.
It's not caused by the war in Iraq, by an expansionist US foreign policy, by a search for new oil fields or pipe lines, any more than it is caused by the drawing of cartoons, the making of movies, or the public burning of copies of The Koran. It was started by Islamo-totalitarians who by their own admission "worship death" as we in the west worship life; who want the prosperous, freedom-loving west dead, as dead as their own dark souls; and who see the cowardly west as easy prey.

On these last point at least, they're right. We are easy prey. And there is an essential difference between the essentially individualistic, prosperous, freedom-loving civilisation of the west and the stone-age culture that has declared war on it. Said Osama bin Laden on behalf of those who declared war:

“We love death. The [west] loves life. That is the difference between us two.”

On that, we agree.

Allahu Akbar my arse.

In the name of those who do love life and who treasure the life-loving civilisation of the west, on this anniversary week of the most visible attack on the west and all it stands for we should consider all that led to it: a series of snubs, trial balloons and atrocities by Islamists and Islamist sympathisers, the tepid and pathetic response to most of which emboldened those who love death to even greater atrocities, and the supporters of the death-worshippers to even greater support, both financial and logistical.

Just as it did in the thirties, turning the cheek to violence led not to peace but greater savagery—with the savages secure in the knowledge that cheek-turning was the best the west would do. Purveyors of violence can smell fear; they can smell weakness; they smell it and they prey upon it—just as they can in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the unacknowledged sources of so much Islamic savagery; just as they can in Afghanistan where the weak-kneed “nation building” is coming to an end without any end to the savagery the Afghan mission was supposed to have wiped out; just as they have now in Benghazi where, with the revelation that Ambassador Stevens was slaughtered by the very jihadists who  had gone there to aid, in an embassy lying entirely unprotected against barbarian incursion, the failure of US foreign policy almost seems complete.

So, like cockroaches, the disciples of brutality will feed off another example of western weakness—just as they have for over fifty years, where they've had an awful lot of food to sustain them and make them stronger.

What will stop the savages? Recognition, for a start, that we have an enemy. That this enemy has a name, a specific religion, and a specific blood-soaked anti-human ideology. That this enemy has incubated this hatred of the west for centuries. That his savagery cannot be successfully resisted with appeasement, hand-holding and clumsy attempts to censor or airbrush away those who point out the truth about Islam, but only by continued resistance to the savagery of it adherents, and understanding they are emboldened by weakness to think they might succeed. Obama pledged yesterday:

“We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice will be done. Make no mistake, justice will be done.”

If he means it, that would be something. But meaning it, really meaning, and going through with it,needs a 180-degree U-turn.”

We have to reverse years of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan and Carter when it comes to the Middle East—and immediately.
    Until or unless that happens, the rising tide of Islam—a religion whose Koran actually calls for the literal genocide of non-Muslims worldwide—will continue to act as a moralistic and physical wrecking ball to civilization as we’ve known it. It's the Koran, stupid.

He, and all western leaders, must recognise that to 'respect' the religious beliefs of those who wish to kill us is suicidal nonsense.  Which is to say they will need to recognise Islam for what it is.

Which is Islam.

Which is not a religion of peace.

When it comes to the defeat of totalitarian Islam, there truly is no substitute for victory.

America successfully targeted, dismantled, and discredited a warring enemy's ideology once before. I fear however that the knowledge to do that again, to Islamism, is now long gone from the corridors of power.  But I fear too that there is no other way.

* * * *  *

Cartoon by Blunt

[Hat tips to Michael Caution, Edward Cline, Noodle Food, Bosch Fawstin, Harry Binswanger, TOS Blog, and the late John David Lewis. The opinions expressed here are, however, my own.]

UPDATE:  Hope?  Buzzfeed has 15 Photos Of Libyans Apologizing To Americans, (that’s one of them, on the right) about which Diana Hsieh says:

These signs make me just a tiny bit happy and hopeful. To anyone who thinks that Islam cannot fundamentally change because it's forever bound to its texts, you need to study the history of Judaism. The destruction of the second temple by Rome (after a hiccup or two) hugely transformed Judaism -- from an aggressive, fundamentalist, and political religion to a peaceful, and studious, and accommodating one. That was a win for civilization... and particularly for Jews. (Alas, the Christians were not as civilized as they could and should have been in response.)