Posted in Israel News
May 25, 2008 |
Journalist Joseph Farah reports that al-Qaeda has obtained at least 40 nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union, including suitcase nukes which have been smuggled into the US over the Mexican border. How might America react if one of its cities was devastated by these weapons?
Two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the mass evacuation of 112,000 ethnic Japanese (including Japanese American citizens) from the West Coast to the interior of the country.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Roosevelt administration was not animated by racism or war hysteria. Thousands of Japanese Americans were engaged in espionage; Japanese submarines were wreaking havoc on West Coast shipping; and one of these submarines surfaced and bombed an oil depot near Santa Barbara; and, since the Japanese (unlike the Germans) had aircraft carriers, even Walter Lippmann, the renowned liberal journalist, had to admit, “The Pacific Coast.may at any moment be a battle field. Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battle field.” (See Michelle Malkin, In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror, 2004.)
If al-Qaeda made the US a battlefield by nuking one or more American cities, the government would intern hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Since this would not preclude further terrorist attacks, what other steps might the government take to preserve America?
If President Ronald Reagan could order the bombing of Libya after two American soldiers were killed in a terrorist attack in a Berlin discothèque, what would a president do if al-Qaeda slaughtered tens of thousands of Americans in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles?
Recall the Cold War. The US had a second-strike or “counter-value” nuclear strategy vis-à-vis the USSR. If attacked by Soviet ICBMs, the US would have retaliated by utterly destroying Moscow and other Russian cities. (Remember, the Allies napalmed Dresden, killing far more civilians than were incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
In the case of Islam, however, Muslims are not concentrated in a single country. Some 1.3 billion Muslims live in about 50 Islamic states. Suppose only 1% of these Muslims are jihadists. Thirteen million jihadists would constitute quite a threat to America and its global interests. The number may even be much larger. Let’s take a candid look at Islam. Bernard Lewis writes:
Even when Muslims cease believing in Islam, they may retain Islamic habits and attitudes. Thus, among Muslim Marxists, there have been both ulema [doctors of law] and dervishes [popular mystics], defending the creed and proclaiming the (revolutionary) holy war against the (imperialist) infidel. Even when the faith dies, loyalty survives; even when loyalty fades, the old identity, and with it a complex of old attitudes and desires, remains, as the only reality under the superficial, artificial covering of new values and ideologies.
This assessment makes Daniel Pipes’ distinction between Muslim “moderates” and “extremists” strategically irrelevant. That distinction may be academically correct, but it will have no substantial affect on how the US reacts to Muslim nuclear attacks on American cities.
Turn, therefore, to journalist Larry Derfner. Anything but a hawk, Derfner conjures up “images of American cities getting effectively destroyed, with tens of thousands of dead bodies on the sidewalks.“ He then asks: “What would, what should, America‘s retaliation to that be?” He proposes “a reprise of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only in the Islamic world.“ He explains:
You can’t let megamurder go unanswered just because you can’t pinpoint the guilty ones. Al-Qaeda comes from the land of militant Islam, so let’s pick out a city known for its religious hatred in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Pakistan and nuke it. Let’s kill a few hundred thousand people, or even a million or two million, and see if that convinces the terrorists to stop. If it does, then we can go back to the business of living. If it doesn’t, if the megamurders continue, then I would see no choice but to wipe out whole Muslim countries.“
Not a nice scenario, says Derfner, but he concludes: “I’m afraid Kach’s slogan about Arabs kicks in: “‘No Muslims, no terror.‘”
Let me refine Derfner’s scenario. America and Islam are engaged in a demonstrable clash of civilizations. The only rational war strategy is to eradicate Islam. Therefore, in retaliating against megamurder attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists, the US should indeed decimate one or more hate-infested Islamic city or country, as Derfner suggests. But let us be thorough.
The US should not only close down all Arab embassies and consulates and level one mosque after another, but it should also take over Saudi Arabia to control the supply and price of oil, and, in the process, obliterate Mecca and Medina. This is the only way to “refute” Islam and destroy its hold on believers. As Derfner says, “No Muslims, no terror.“