Friday, July 08, 2005

Sometimes I Kill Snakes, A Lesson For Islam

I don't usually kill Rattlesnakes when I see them, unless they're in the yard or some place where kids or my dogs play. I'm too fat for a rattlesnake to eat and unless I'm hunting, I make enough noise moving around in snake country to where they have plenty of time to avoid me. Rattlesnakes aren't all THAT aggressive, they won't bite something too big to eat unless, in their tiny reptilian brains, they feel cornered. I wouldn't ever kill them if not for the fact that kids and dogs can get into an accidental confrontation. I dislike killing anything without reason. The rule on rattlesnakes is that when I'm in their habitat I leave them be, they need to stay out of my habitat. If they don't, too bad for them.

Cottonmouths, on the other hand, will go out of their way to bite, even something too big to eat. They are the reason that the first round under the hammer is a shotshell. When I kill a snake it's not out of hatred, I actually think snakes are kind of cool. We don't have any giant anacondas or humongous boa constrictors so I leave non venomous snakes be, even in the yard. My rule is a simple one with snakes, if they aren't dangerous to me or mine, they go about their snakey business unmolested by me. If they are dangerous, I kill them. Without hatred, without anger and without regret. While I will kill the snakes that endanger me or mine, I'm equally aware of the role they play in nature. Kill them I will, though.

I am hardly unusual, most people living in snake country have more or less the same policy. The days of the indiscriminate killing of any snake seen are pretty well gone. Mature adults judge the danger and act accordingly. People living in Coral snake country learn to tell a venomous coral snake from the harmless, and beneficial, King Snake. There is a little rhyme..."Red touch yella, kill a fella, red touch black, friend of Jack". This rhyme refers to the stripes on Coral Snakes and the harmless other kinds of stripey snakes. If the red stripes touch the black stripe, it's a non venomous snake. Red and yellow, it's venomous. Don't ask me who Jack is.

Here's how this relates to Islamic terrorism. Snakes are easily recognizable. I can tell a venomous snake by sight. Most, like the Rattlesnakes of my home range, have a peculiar head shape. Others, like the Coral snake have a distinctive color scheme and there ain't nothin' but a Cottonmouth that looks like a Cottonmouth. The trouble with Islamic terrorists is that they have no such distinctive appearance. If they did, it would be very easy to root them out. They don't have a distinctive head shape, nor color scheme. This is how they manage to present a danger. Unfortunately they don't just present a danger to us Infidels. There was a time, before we learned to differentiate between venomous snakes and harmless ones, snakes, of any kind, were killed on sight. If there was no easy way to distinguish the harmless from the venomous, they still would be.

My father's generation did not have the precision weaponry of today. In order to stop the German armaments industry they destroyed whole cities. Same with the Japanese. We slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to break the backs of the war machines. It worked. We, knowing that the vast majority of those we killed were not our targets, accepted the useless slaughter in order to destroy those targets.

I'm told that only a small minority of Muslims have any interest at all in the cause of the Islamists. I'm further told that few, indeed, share the goals and the hatred. The problem is, the (allegedly) vast majority of Muslims who neither share the goals or support the methods of the Islamists, do little or nothing to distance themselves from this small minority. They do little or nothing to expel and expose this supposedly small minority. This needs to change, and soon. History is replete with the ashes of the innocent who allowed evil a place to work. Hamburg. Berlin. Shwienfurt. Tokyo. Nagoya. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. That list could go on. Every major city in Germany and Japan lay in ruins. The ashes of the guilty mixed with the innocent.

The young men who unleashed this terrible destruction did not hate, they did not revel in the deaths they caused. Americans and Britons did not dance in the streets nor pass out sweets to children after the firestorms of Hamburg. It was a grim, distasteful and dirty, not to mention dangerous, chore.

Today the clock is ticking. The Islamists are trying hard to find a way to deliver something more powerful than a handful of conventional-explosive bombs. More destructive than wide-body jets. When they do they will unleash a destruction the likes of which haven't been seen since Carthage. We, in the West, will eliminate the Islamists, Islam will be the collateral damage. We won't be able to take the risk of allowing the supposed peaceful majority to survive. I wish the Islamists hiding in America, plotting to kill my children and grandchildren, had the distinctive head shape or peculiar coloration that would allow me to tell them from the majority of peaceful Muslims. They don't. The time is coming when I shall be forced to choose between the safety of my children and the collateral damage of those peaceful Muslims I would have to kill to eliminate the Islamists they allow in their midst.

The Bin Ladens are looking at the wrong examples of history. They look at Somalia instead of Dresden. They look at the USS Cole instead of Nagasaki. They forget what we do when our very lives and way of life is threatened.

The clock is ticking. The choice belongs to that majority of peaceful Muslims. I pray they choose wisely.

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