Lunacy Reigns
Loutraki, Greece, January 6, 2010.
Salaroche

A few embassies in the city of Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, recently had to close down for a couple of days because of threats from the same group of lunatics that trained the failed Christmas-Day bomber. The closed embassies included those of the US, the UK, France and Japan.

Meanwhile, up in the region around the city of Saada, in Yemen’s north-western tip, resentful Zaydi Shia under the leadership of the Houthi clan, have been waging guerrilla warfare against the central government for the past 5 years or so. The Houthi-led Zaydi want more religious authonomy and recognition from the Sunny-led Sana’a government.

At the same time, Al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia recently got out of the Saudi kingdom to join forces with their Yemeni counterpart, thus forming what is now known as Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. This enlarged Al-Qaida front has been causing plenty of trouble within and outside the Yemeni borders.

Added to that ominous mix is the separatist movement waged against Yemen’s central government from the South, who wants to go back to their independent 1990’s status. And if to that you add the occasional but deadly Yemeni-Saudi border skirmishes of the very recent past, you get the necessary ingredients for the chaotic gunk presently brewing in Yemen.

Anyway you look at it, solving the internal problems of the “Republic” of Yemen, a country located in the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula, shouldn’t look like a pleasant walk in the park to anyone.

That’s understood.

But, why should we in the rest of the world, and particularly those who live in, or want to go to, the United States, have to suffer the consequences of Yemen’s present politico-religious pandemonium? Why should the particular sectarian or separatist quests of the Yemeni people affect the free cross-country movement of the rest of us?

Why? For the simple reason that the main ideology behind such rebellious Yemeni movements sprang up from Islam. Or from a distorted version of it.

Islam. What’s the matter with Islam!? How did some followers of Allah turned themselves into some of the best-known mass-murderers of the beginning of the 21st century? What kind of disappointment, frustration or desperation may drive Muslim Jihadists to spurn human life, including their own, as much as they do? Can anybody articulate any plausible answer to these questions?

Apparently, that answer is not too difficult to elucidate: Instill some feeble minds like that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with plenty of hatred against those westerners who seem to enjoy life more that they do, add a bit of racial resentment against predominantly white countries like the US, spice it with a strong measure of desire for revenge and then finish the mix with a heavy dose of self-righteous religious zeal.

Before you serve that mad, explosive cocktail to the world, add a very good measure of “salvation-through-immolation-and-killing-infidels” lunacy and the result is a Muslim Jihadist.

Does that motivation for action sound like something totally irrational to you? It does to me. But, something very close to that is what’s motivating the guys who, as we speak, are holding the world hostage to their lunatic acts of terror.

But what about us? Is there anything the rest of us can do about that? Not really. Thus far, all we have been trying to do is show our Muslim brethren that we like them and tolerate them, even as we know that some of their beliefs are incompatible with western civilization.

How often have you heard in the past few years someone saying that we should better tolerate some of those intolerable but moderate Muslim rules, like their blatant discrimination against women, because if we don’t tolerate Muslim moderates they will turn into extremists and will come back to blow themselves up in our local markets and plazas?

How often have you heard something like that in the past few years?

If you’re someone who doesn’t only mingle with your closest friends on a regular basis, I bet you’ve heard something of that sort more than a few times in the recent past. Perhaps even you, yourself, have said something similar too. But wouldn’t that be like saying that you’ve got to give some of your meager sheep to the local Wolf, lest he comes down to your farm in the middle of the night to take some of your fattest ones away?

The analogy between a Wolf and a Muslim extremist, however, doesn’t fit quite well. For a Wolf to try to steal some sheep from a farm is perfectly understandable. A Wolf lives in the woods in your vicinity, gets hungry and comes down to your farm looking for food. But what about a Jihadist? What is he hungry for? A Jihadist lives in the world woods; he gets mad at the western world and comes out of his den looking to kill as many people as possible.

Including his own Muslim Arab brethren!

The Wolf has a survival rationale behind him when he comes looking for your sheep: He’s hungry. There’s nothing rational about Jihadists. Everything about them is sheer madness. There’s no way to deal with them either, short of joining them in their madness and becoming as rabidly irrational against them as they’ve proven to be against us.

The west is increasingly held hostage by Muslim extremists and, according to the way things are going, such will continue to be our fate for the near future. But the truth is we’re increasingly hostage to our own western evolution, our own western rationality and our own western principles of human rights and civility.

For example, what do you do if a crazy pig gets out of the pigsty and slips through your backdoor into your living room to bite your feet? If you’re a western guy, you lasso the pig, pull it out of your house, take it back to the pigsty, secure it and make sure the pig doesn’t get out again. If it does get out again, you shoot it.

But the one thing you wouldn’t do is follow the crazy pig to the pigsty, wrestle with it in the mud, and then bite its foot. You don’t throw your human condition out the window and become a crazier pig than the pig that bit your feet. You’re a westerner living in the second decade of the 21st century. Madness of the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist kind is out of the question for us in this day and age.

We cannot afford to drop a few daisies in Kandahar in Afghanistan, or in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan or in the hills near Saad, in north-west Yemen, even though we may have good reasons to believe those are breeding grounds for potential anti-west suicidal lunatics. We just can’t do it, for if we did it we would no longer have grounds to call ourselves civilized people.

We cannot retaliate Mexican-mafia style either. We cannot afford to go shoot the families of every Jihadist so that all potential future Jihadists will think more than twice before blasting themselves off on a US-bound airplane, for in killing those passengers they would be killing their own families as well. We cannot afford to do that. Our state of evolution wouldn’t and shouldn’t permit it.

But Muslim extremists know this, and they take it as a trait of weakness on our side.

Other than spending billions of dollars in new scanning devices at airports, more sophisticated surveillance technology in the skies and more sophisticated means to infiltrate the enemy’s networks, there’s not much we can do. That is, unless we manage to persuade moderate Muslim Clerics and Muslim political leaders across the world to raise their voices against Jihadist madness.

If every time a Muslim extremist blew himself up anywhere in the world all moderate Muslim clerics condemned such act using unequivocally clear language, there would eventually be a significant decrease in Muslim terrorist acts across the globe. The same goes for Muslim political leaders. If every time there was an act of terror perpetrated by a Muslim anywhere in the world all Muslim political leaders stood together against it, there would eventually be a significant decrease in such acts of violent Muslim lunacy.

So, why don’t they do it? Why don’t they publicly condemn such murderous acts from the part of their own Muslim-Arab brethren? Does their silence amount to acquiescence of the approving kind? Or is it that they fear retaliation from Muslim extremists too?

Can Muslim Clerics and Muslim political leaders afford to stand against Muslim terror? Or do most of them fear deadly retaliation from the part of Muslim extremists as much as many of us do? Are moderate Muslim Clerics and political leaders hostage to extremist Muslim violence too?

Apparently so; for the only other explanation for their silence would be approval, and I would rather think they’re afraid of global Muslim terror than to think they’re happy it exists. Of course, you could always tell me that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Whatever the case, are we condemned to live like the characters in the 1980’s movie “Brazil,” who got so accustomed to violence that after a bomb goes off in a restaurant, the surviving characters just pull themselves together and go back to their tables pretending nothing happened?

The west can usefully spend billions of dollars annually improving airport security and developing more accurate technology for anti-terror surveillance and intelligence gathering, but none of that will ever erradicate the main cause for Muslim Terrorism, because the main cause for Muslim Terrorism resides in the lunatic ideas instilled in the feeble minds of some disoriented Muslims who look up to equally misguided clerics and leaders who preach a distorted version of Islam.

What Humanity is presently suffering from is an increasingly severe case of Extremist Islamitis, a disease whose virus was generated within Islam and that now has spread to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many diseases, the antidote that may protect us against such deadly virus can only be found in the same element that the virus first sprang up from. And that element is Islam itself.

As long as Muslim moderates, be they common people, clerics or politicians, don’t stand firmly and publicly against Muslim terror, there won’t be a solution for it. Their own Muslim faith has bred this distorted version of Islam and their own Muslim faith has allowed a murderous version of its doctrines to gain the upper hand in the Arab world. So it is only the Muslim community that can convince the extreme elements in their midst to abandon the mad lunacy of their terrorist ideology.

For if they don’t, will the west eventually be forced to throw its “civility” out the window to rightfully defend itself using methods that most of us have thus far been reluctant to propose?

Let's hope not.

In the meantime, Lunacy Reigns.

Salaroche