Zell, Chris wrote:
What horrified me most was hearing that the Muslim men involved might have attended college, gone to strip clubs and consumed alcohol. In short, they had every available benefit or pleasure western society offered - and still dedicated themselves to mass murder and suicide. If we cannot count on these sort of activities civilizing a person - or at least allowing them to release whatever intense emotion dominates them - I'm not sure what hope for humanity remains.
Don't fret too much. You can say the same thing for the officers and men of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. They had every available benefit of our society, but they attacked Pearl Harbor and as a group they committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in history, in China. They were aided, abetted and celebrated by the whole society for doing things such as cutting innocent civilian's heads off with swords, and torturing American POWs in unspeakable ways. Of course many of the individuals who did that got what they deserved -- they were hanged -- but the point is that society as a whole was in very much in favor of this savagery. They seemed incorrigible in 1945, but things changed and most of them lived decent, upstanding, civilized lives. I knew several of them, and they were fine people. Most of them sincerely came to believe in democracy and to want to live in peace. Only a few harbored animosity toward the U.S.
For that matter, it is pretty horrifying to think of the finest collection of scientists in history devising nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, which were used to kill 300,000 people with the utmost cruelty. I met some of those scientists, and I expect everyone here has read books and papers by them. They were not monsters. They were good, decent people doing what they thought was a moral imperative, and perhaps they were right.
People can change. Societies change, reform and progress. You must forgive and move on. The burden of history would be too heavy for any of us to bear otherwise. Yes, the 100 million people who support Al Qaeda will dance in the streets if 10 million of us are killed by nuclear weapons. But that may not happen, and sooner or later these people will come to their senses. Their hate will subside -- it always does. People in the past have often laid down their weapons and lived together peacefully even after long, bitter, terrible wars, such as the U.S. Civil War, which lasted 103 years from 1860 to 1963, counting the Jim Crow reign of terror against black people.
The thing is, in the meanwhile, before the Muslim extremists come to their senses, we must take steps to try to ensure they do not get nuclear bombs. We must capture and kill them whenever possible, and above all take away their money. All the anger and the world will avail them nothing if they have no money. We have to stop handing over billions of dollars to these people! It is like selling scrap metal to the Japanese when we know they plan to use it for shrapnel in bombs they drop on us. (That happened, by the way.)
- Jed
