Comment on "How to End Terrorism" essay

Submitted by Bryan Taplits (United States), Dec 5, 2006 at 12:17

In my opinion, a vital, and what has proved to be an essential, provenance of The War on Terror is ignored in Dr. Pipes' article.

Radical Islamists used Israel as a rehearsal to propagate their violent ends. This occurred in the 70's & 80's when Fatah (Arafat's organization) use terror as a means to further its aims.

Seeing that terror worked (one only has to look at the Oslo Accords; Arafat and Begin shaking hands; and Carter and Clinton beaming-both expecting a new era to be ushered in), IslamoFascism began to make its inroads into Western Democracies. Both the US and Western Europe, by ignoring and "negotiating" with the arbiters and leaders of violent Islam (while overlooking the moderates) aided in what has become to be called The War On Terror.

The significant difference between Fatah and Al Quada (or Hamas) is that radical Islamists use the strictures of the Islamic religion to justify their violent means: Thus associating religion with violence was seen as the way to go. Llike communism before it, the West's toleration of any dissent (under communism, middle class dissent; religious dissent today) that is both violent and homicidal was now used by IslamoFascists to strangle Western Democracies and capsize their freedoms.

The West did not know how to deal with this ideological-outlawry!

In effect, we are now reaping what we have sowed-and unfortunately many Western soldiers and civilians are going to have to pay for our pusillanimity-and our foolish inability to recognize that there is such a thing-under the rule of law-as legitimate and illiegitimate dissent.

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