deterrence

Submitted by leonard magruder (United States), Sep 24, 2003 at 20:22

VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM -
the student auxiliary at the University of Kansas

Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology, Suffolk College, N.Y.

A PERSONAL NOTE

Every day I check what academics are saying about the war on terrorism on the proper websites, but always seem to end up getting reality from people like David Horowitz and Cal Thomas. Compared to them academics have gone into a coma and taken their students with them. But it is also the truth that writers like these two are still scorned on campus, and to some degree our group is also. Something about "conservative', which of course is code for a differing opinion. Even though what we write receives support from people all over the world, academics either remain silent , or write "Take me off your list." Although not always that politely. One wrote recently. "Don't send me that crap , you sick f---." Students usually stay with us. They can handle intellectual challenge.

Today Cal Thomas wrote something that really struck a chord with me as I have repeatedly noted with alarm and puzzlement the bizarre non-response of the free world to the declaration of the Muslim world, through its terrorists, that they intend to either convert or kill us all.

Thomas in an article today titled "World Lacks Resolve in Terrorism War" wrote:
"There is a greater enemy than terrorism facing the United States and the West. that enemy is lack of resolve, which has little to do with money and weapons and everything to do with motivation and focus."
In one place in his article he has a terrorist musing to himself : "These people are so self-destructively open , so afraid to offend those who would just as soon see them and their children dead and their entire cultures destroyed."
"While we argue about the place of God in U.S. society," said Thomas, "our enemies are not so conflicted. They believe their god wants us dead. No amount of munitions, money and Marines is going to stay these fanatics from their ordained rounds. "Newsweek" magazine reports that Osama bin Laden is planning an attack that will dwarf 9/11, and this time he plans to strike panic into the populace using biological weapons. Who knows if the report is true ? Who doubts that it could be ?
Unlike every other war in which the United States has been engaged , this one will have no end - not as long as there are "Mohammeds" willing to kill and to die in large numbers and to take as many of us with them as they can."

In our latest release yesterday we argued once again that stopping terrorists one-by-one is useless, that what is needed is a strategy of deterrence that threatens the entire world of Islam. (The Horror of Islam and the Need for Deterrence NOW) Place every soldier we have, plus every warship, in Iraq and surrounding waters and let the terrorists guess as to what we will do in retaliation if they attack. Syria ? Iran ? Saudi Arabia (Mecca) ? This they would understand. As to what else we could do, here is another recent release from us that suggests how the West could be using its creativity and media resoures to expose to the world just how dangerously insane the Muslim world has become.

Press Release: Student vet organization calls on Hollywood celebrities to drop senseless rhetoric, use their creativity.

In "The Declaration of War" by Osama bin Laden, together with the leaders of the World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders (Christians), Feb. 23, 1998, bin Laden wrote,

"We, with God's help, call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money...divide their nation, tear them to shreds, destroy their economy, burn their companies, ruin their welfare, sink their ships, and kill them on land , sea, and air...May Allah torture them by your hands."

What does Al Qaeda want to do? They want to kill us. They want to kill every man , woman, and child in the United States. All three hundred million.
Recently a group of celebrities took out an ad in "The New York Times" calling on the people of the U.S. to "Resist the war and repression loosed on the world by the Bush administration".This included such Hollywood celebrities as Oliver Stone, Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, Ed Asner, and Susan Saradon. The ad suggests that we face no danger from terrorists, that the real danger stems from our own "imperialism."
Why don't these people do what they do best. Use their creativity and imagination - not to spout senseless rhetoric - but to do something to help in this crisis. For example,
produce and flood the world with short TV messages, using hundreds of children to shame the terrorists saying:

1) "Osama, why do you want to kill all the little American children ?"

2) "We believe in God too, but he never asked us to kill anyone."

3)" We don't think killing us will get you to heaven."

4)" We don't want your religion, we have our own."

5)" Why do you want to kill our mommys and daddys ?

The great British historian Arnold Toynbee in "The Study of History" showed that nations only survive challenges through a creative response. The leaders of this nation in academia and the arts are utterly failing the nation, doing nothing but recycling a few leftist slogans from the 60's. Slogans that betrayed Southeast Asia to tyranny and genocide. Their response to the current challange is even more pitiful.
This war on terrorism calls for only two responses. A world-wide wall of lethal force if the Muslim world crosses that line in the sand, and a massive worldwide philosophical and theological attack night and day using press, radio and TV to expose and discredit the corrupt theology behind this Muslim threat. All the elements of Islam, as any scholar knows, are extremely vulnerable to, cannot stand up to, intellectual or rational criticism. The infinitely superior philosophical and theological arsenals of the West could make a laughing stock of Islam overnight if they were publicly employed. And why aren't they being employed ? Because the world has been frightened into whimpering cowardice by one simple but also awesome fact. One man with a nuclear device can destroy the greatest city. That is what is new. And we need a plan to deter it NOW, even if it means the end of the entire Muslim world.There can be no compromise, and no misunderstanding on this point. The free world must tell the Muslim world, like yesterday, we will sacrifice no city on the altar of the bizarre god of the Koran. Jonah can pout all he wants. "And the Lord God said to him, "Should I not spare Ninevah, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also much cattle?" ( Jonah 4:11)
The whole civilized world must stand up and call these people what they are - murderers. And if they continue to insist that God told them to do it, then their Allah is a murderer also, a reincarnation of Baal Hammon, that ancient idol horror from whose hands children were dropped into the sacrificial fire.

Although it would be helpful if academia would lend its talents to fighting the crisis of the hour, the coma there is simply too deep. To be certain, the buildings are well maintained, the lawns are well watered, the football team plays for cheering throngs of fans, the faculty and the staff are well paid, and the students attend classes and receive diplomas. The institution can keep going for a while on autopilot. But the heart of the university's mission- the quest for universal truth - has long since decayed into dust- leaving it useless before the coming storm.

Did we think it only rhetoric when Yeats asked ; "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" In the university we face the outcome of decades of intellectual frivolity, impotence before a nuclear device hidden in Harvard Square, even as Noam Chomsky up at MIT rambles on incoherently about American "imperialism."

Leonard Magruder
President
Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform
(Magruder44@aol.com)
this article may be reproduced in any manner.

Distribution:
National media
Vietnam vets in Congress
Columnists and journalists
major university newspapers
Leading veteran organizations
K.U. faculty and student org.

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