I have come up with yet another in a long line of ‘Modest Proposals’ for solving world problems, this time for successful suicide bombers.
When someone is prepared to kill themselves because their religious belief assures them of an eternal party or an eternal peace or large numbers of subservient soon to be non-virgins, there is not a great deal that can be done to sway them from their evil course… or so one would think.
I propose hitting below the belt.
What is important to these folk? What do they want? Why do they do what they do?
They want everyone to be believers of their one true faith.
What else is important to them?
Family.
My modest proposal is a very biblical one. When a terrorist succeeds in not only blowing themselves up but in also killing innocent civilians we should round up their family, nuclear or extended as is appropriate to the culture; men, woman, children and elderly;and give them a very simple choice:
Convert to the religion represented by the majority of the innocents killed… or die.
This strikes at the heart of the belief system of these murdering swine. The message would be that success is a failure worse than their worst nightmare. How many Hamas would want their daughter converting to Judaism and then marrying a doctor? Or even worse… a lawyer!
Thus Sunni wouldst become Shia; Shia wouldst become Sunni; Palestinians would become Jews… and for that matter if any Christian committed a similar heinous act, the same would apply to them.
Fair is fair.
You may run into problems with the Human Rights Act over this one.
And the Geneva Convention!
Benson: …and we can turn beans into peas!
For a moment I thought you were going to round up their family and blow them up in a similar fashion.
Nah. How about bury the head of a suicide bomber in pig fat?
I would be happier with the pig fat idea. High deterrent value (apparently, perhaps Islamists could interpret their way out of going to hell on ‘buried with pig’ grounds) and no collective punishment.
Successful suicide bombers are appalling lumps of excrement, but at least they (among others) are out of the game. It is the unsuccessful ones that worry me: 25 years behind bars merely postpones their ambitions. And they will come out determined to show their strange idea of a supreme being that they really won’t balls it up next time.
My solution would be to close whatever mosque or church they attended, or in better still flatten it, on the basis there may be others attending those places that think suicide bombing is somehow good. Of course, I see the flaw in my argument straightway – York Minster could be demolished though I suspect we may have to wait a while before the CofE preaches hatred the way the Imams do.
The fear for all these people, given their extended families if from the east, would be to have all their relatives sent home for having a SB in the family. The muslims, for all they say they hate us and despise life in the west, would rather stay here than go back to what they had elsewhere. I know, I know… they may be paper-British and claim this is their home. But I am sure we could persuade some small god-forsaken country to take them in return for cash.
Successful or not, suicide bombers forego the right to any laws or rights in the society they want to destroy. Pussy-footing round “cultural sensitivities” tends to lead to a lot of people dead or mutilated, but will we get a government that recognises the underlying problem? No, it’s not foreign policy, not poverty, not cultural values. It’s just good old nasty people with residual hatreds – of which they have a list as long as your arm.
You may not have caused those hatreds to start, but you may have to pay for them.
Collective reprisals? Too Fascist. That is the Islamist game, for what is suicide bombing but an attempt at a collective reprisal?
To me the key is to be robust in fisking Islam and Mohammed.
Aegir: I don’t know that the Geneva Conventions even apply. Which part of which one do you have in mind?
(I don’t know that it strictly counts as “collective punishment”, since the whole group isn’t targeted. It might count as “reprisal”, except I don’t think that “forced conversion” was even contemplated as an issue by the authors of the Conventions.
It plainly violates their spirit, but of course even violating their letter has no actual real-world effect, so who cares?
It’s wrong for moral (and useless for practical) reasons that have nothing to do with the existence or signatory status of the Conventions.)
I do think it’s a daft idea, because it a) wouldn’t work and b) it undercuts the very freedom of belief that’s one of the things we want to defend, which might well be overriding even if it stood any chance of working.
I say a) because it’s not only impossible to enforce in terms of outward impression (going to force them to go to synagogue?) but of course utterly impossible in terms of belief – even if one forces someone to act like an observant Jew (to take the obvious example), you can’t make them actually convert in terms of belief.
And there wouldn’t be any negative effect from the side of radical Islam, because the Mullahs would simply declare (and quite rightly, in all honesty) such forced conversions invalid, promulgating a doctrine such that those martyr’s families could outwardly act as whatever religion they were forced to while inwardly remaining good Muslims.
(Isn’t there already such a doctrine for such cases, in fact? I seem to recall reading of one.)
(The other problem, of course, is that conversion to Judaism is discouraged, and the Rabbis would never in a billion years accept forcible conversions!)
Let’s stick to the high road and limit reprisals to publishing cartoons lampooning Mohammed. I’d like to see papers and web sites festooned with his image whenever a suicide attack is made in his name.
What makes you think they give a flying f*ck about their families?
If anything the solution to islamic extremism is to simply refuse to trade with any nation that allows or condones polygamy or slavery.
Simplier (although not necessarily easier) to implement, respects the rights of all involved.
Of course getting China and India to play along may be a tad difficult.
Well, China anyway.
blaming the family for the actions of the individual is the kind of collectivist crap that would lower western civilistation to that of the bombers themselves. Punishment should be to the guilty not the guilty by association, even if in the case of successful suicide bombers this would be rather difficult.
There is nothing much you can do to them other than a comprehensive defilement of their remains. For unsuccessful suicide bombers however a whole world of nasty things opens up which might provide sufficient deterrent effect. Forced community service as a gay prostitute for example.
I don’t think that forced conversions will work, however if we do not start waging war like General Sherman (“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it;…”) and give these people their Chief Joseph moment (“I will fight no more forever”) then it is inevitable that they will get their megadeath event and when enough Americans are dead and maimed we will, in our best
Johnny Rico voice (Starship Troopers, 1997), cry out “Kill them! Kill them all!” and then we will unleash the grandsons of LeMay and the world will tremble. And no one will be able to stop us because “We have got the B-52 and they have not”.
Former SAC brat who’s most awe inspiring sight was a B-52 wing performing an emergency war sortie.
The claim that there’s something “collectivist” (read: begone devils!) about this proposal goes to the root of the modern Western dilemma. Islamists are not individualists and don’t much care about individual responsibility for any particular crime, real or imagined.
This gives them a noticeable advantage over those more libertarians, vide that they can play on concern for one’s family in a way that libs cannot. It also means they are willing to die for the sake of their collective group. Yet we are prevented by our morality from striking at these collective groups (see individual resp.), leaving us with nothing that can threaten our enemy. Giving collectivists a military advantage is no way to spread freedom.
Would targetting their family be immoral? I’d suggest that all morality is reciprocal, and if someone is coming at with a gun he is in no position to say “how dare you try to tie me down, what of my right to liberty!” The same applies to groups of individuals acting in concert, for example gangs of robbers. Why this shouldn’t apply to other collective groups which act together and threaten us, I cannot understand.
I am not quite sure I understand the polygamy bit… are you saying we should not trade with Utah?
So long as it is consensual, I have no problems with it or any other creative form of family. In fact, Robert Heinlein came up with a few interesting ones for the lunar families in some of his novels.
As to my real point… a poster above points out that war is cruel. It is. War is cruel, hateful, immoral, unethical, horrendous, inhuman, brutish, ugly and every other term the most hard core lefty could come up with in their wildest moments. Sometimes the alternative is even worse, which is where I part company from them.
My point may be shown in an extreme way, but it is still valid. You cannot stop suicide bombers unless you can get into their psychology and find something that they value more than the life which they obviously do not. Most of our techniques of war assume out front that life is valuable and when used against these scum those techniques are doomed to failure.
You must find something else. Something they care about. Then you must make certain they know that sacrificing their life will cause a loss to them. Whether it is letting them know their remains will be treated in such a way as to deny them heaven, or their families will die, or their families will become devout Catholics, or their entire village will be flattened to bouncing rubble and body parts by B-52’s… I don’t much care.
Whatever we can imagine doing to them hardly matters. They are already willing to do it to us. They behead, torture, fly airplanes into civilian buildings, blow up infants, machine gun doctors and nurses and patients on hospital beds… there is NOTHING, NOTHING that is beyond these people.
We have to get ugly with them.
Sounds to me like a hearty endorsement of the barbarian value-system of religious- and clan- based collective violence to me. You don’t change people by reinforcing their beliefs.
Ugly indeed, and calculated to breed ugliness.
In the case of suicide bombings, other acts of terrorism, and other serious crimes that are distinctly un-British in character, such as honour killings of family members and female genital mutilation of daughters, the fact of the crime, should lead to an inquiry into the loyalties of the offender’s family members. (The particular crimes that triggered the provision would have to be specified in the Act of Parliament.)
For each adult family member the question should be considered whether they are loyal to this country and its way of life. (For minors, their fate would follow that of their parents.) In deciding this their religion (including their particular denomination, sect or variety of it), culture, conduct, associations and mode of life should all be taken in to consideration.
If the answer, on a balance of probabilities, is “No”, then that person should be stripped of their British citizenship or, if not a citizen, leave to remain in Britain, and be deported from the country.
This would give parents, siblings and children every incentive to dissuade a family member from getting involved with the wrong crowd or committing the wicked deed and to report suspicions to the authorities. It would also give incentives to immigrants to assimilate rather than self-ghettoise.
Naturally, to bring this policy in to law would require us to repeal the Human Rights Act and withdraw from certain naive international conventions, such as those concerning statelessness.
The above is, of course, only the briefest sketch and doesn’t deal with who would investigate, how the initial decision would be taken, what appeals would follow, whether the appeals would be suspensive, whether it would be possible to actually physically remove some people from the UK, etc..
However, it does show that individualised incentives and sanctions , that fit with ordinary notions of loyalty and justice, are possible.
Egad. C’mon, man! Is that all you’ve got? What an inane thing to blog.
I think many muslims need to develop a healthy tolerance for *criticism* of Islam *and* their pedophile prophet. The medicine for thinking what you happen to believe is beyond criticism *is* irrefutable criticism.
C’mon, Dale! Did ya have a little writer’s block (or something) today? Surely *you* can do better? ;^)
I thought this was “a blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective”. And now blog posts are proposing collective punishment.
Now, while somebody’s immediate family may bear some responsibility for an individual’s psychological development, that’s a whole world of difference from rounding them up, and giving them the choice of forced conversion to another religion or death.
When you’ve got somebody who is recently married with a little baby, and yet still chooses to blow themselves up, it suggests they are valuing something else over the welfare of their family.
Suicide bombers are much more interested in personal glory and ideology than in their family commitments.
I am sure that if such a law were passed, they would think, “that is the decision of the state, and it should not hold any influence over my moral integrity. My family will be better off dying as martyrs as well”.
Dale,
Forced conversion is meaningless. Think about the Andalucian Jews who practised in secret after they were forcibly converted to Catholicism.
TimC has at least a partial solution in his “robust fisking” – Oh Er Missus!
I do think their friends, family and their mosque* ought to be thoroughly investigated mind (and hauled over the coals). But that’s to join the dots to others who might be planning similar. Think how many UK plots had a connection with old Hookie. That’s not the same as reprisals.
In a very real sense successful suicide bombers though are just gone: either drinking sherbet with inexperienced sexual partners – “No darling, not like that… like this… for all eternity”, being roasted in hell or in bits in the forensic lab. Which of those three actually pertains is something I leave to the individual.
The best answer I can come up with is to aggressively market our culture to them but that first means being proud of the West, proud of our achievements, determined to achieve more and absolutely not giving in to culturally relativistic hand-wringing.
Until we all see the Mehdi Army as a bunch of idiots “playing Nazis” (ditto Hez & Ham), that most Islamic cultural norms are barbaric and that the Palestinians “bigging-it up” aren’t upset over a genuine grievance, they’re just a bunch of pathetic fucks wearing “cool” masks and having a rage-a-thon and turning the skies above Gaza into a bullet festival with AK-47s then we’re getting nowhere.
I can’t describe how I felt when W made his “Religion of Peace” speech. Imagine if Churchill had in 1940 talked about “The vast majority of decent, law-abiding Nazis”.
Until we believe that we’re right and they’re wrong we can’t proselytise our culture and we can’t win.
Though I guess we have another problem. The mindset of young heterosexual lads who really don’t want free mixing of the sexes or to watch girls in bikinis on the beach is very difficult to comprehend. I have had conversations with muslims who didn’t regard nudes in the National Gallery as art** and who thought music, all music, was essentially a waste of time and therefore haram. It’s like talking to Martians. And that was on the “moderate”, now defunct***, Islamica Community Forums based in Chicago (I think).
I dunno. We’ve got a rough road ahead against people who, the more I know about them, the less they make any sense.
*And who are we kidding about the belief system which is a problem.
**They were only into Arabic calligraphy and mosque tilings.
***Their business-model collapsed due to bandwidth costs as far as I could see.
There seems to be some confusion. I am not talking about those who can be dealt with under normal laws; I am talking about tactics of all out warfare.
Law is what happens in societies that are basically stable. War is not a state of stability and tactics are judged by whether they help group A defeat group B. As an A, I seriously want to ensure those nasty B’s are not just defeated but broken… because if not they will just regroup and try again later.
Now one can make the argument, as some here seem to be doing, that we can play nice and simply absorb the punishment until they get bored and go away. One could say that a 9/11 size disaster with the loss of 3000 lives is something the US could easily absorb year and in year out. After awhile it would hardly be news any more. We’d simply factor it into our economy and our actuarial statistics and keep going.
It really comes down to whether that is acceptable to you or not.
This commentariat is understandably made up of libertarians/individualists. Most of its members show a belief that avowed collectivists should be treated the same as individualists should.
These commenters demonstrate a fundamental non-comprehension of collectivism. They are defending tactics that compare to attempting pacification of a hornet’s nest by only addressing the hornets actually proven to have stung people.
When dealing with an attack by a collective body, the acts and beliefs of individual members of that collective do not matter. What matters is the consequences their actions have for the collective body. If their actions benefit the goals of the collective body, then our actions must be addressed to the collective body, not to the member of that collective that is taking the particular action we are responded to.
Our only moral consideration when applying collective responses to hostile collectives is whether an individual is a supporter of, or a prisoner of, that hostile collective. And in this moral decision, the same values apply that apply to any other POW. You do not reward the taking of hostages by making concessions. Full stop. End of sentence. You defend POWs of all kinds by making the consequences of mistreating them to great to risk.
We must respond to the expected beneficiaries of all terrorist acts regardless of the status of the bombers themselves.
War is between groups. Even if you decide that 9/11-type incidents (or, at least, a large number of them) are not “acceptable,” then you still face the problem of what constitutes the “other side” in this “war.”
I agree that in war it’s OK to kill civilians if you must – if that’s what you have to do to break the other side down. But I’m not sure I like the cavalier way you’re defining what constitutes the other group here.
This isn’t the same as nuking Hiroshima in WWII. In that case, all Japanese people were members of the Japanese nation – with which we were at war. They all had some stake in Japan’s victory – and even though I guess there were one or two out of the hundreds of thousands killed in the blasts that actually wanted the Allies to win, as Japanese citizens they belonged to a clearly-delineated group that made up the “other side.”
That’s just not the case in this war.
What it comes down to, I suppose, is whether you are willing to lump ALL Muslims in as “the bad guys.”
I am not. I believe in “moderate” and even “casual” Muslims, and it is not at all clear to me that members of the families of suicide bombers are on the same team as the bombers themselves. In short, I just don’t think that Muslims as a whole are anything like “Japan.” It’s not clear that they all share in the cause or that they all – “military” (read: suicide bomber) and “civilian” (read: relatives of same) have some stake in their side “winning.”
But the overall point is that I don’t agree with what you’ve said here:
No – that’s not what it comes down to. That kind of thing can be equally “unacceptable” to people who simply disagree with you on what constitutes the “other side” as a whole. That’s the trouble with the “War on Terror.” It just isn’t a war in the sense we’re used to – precisely BECAUSE it isn’t totally clear where the “other side” ends and fades into “our” side.
Sorry, but I am finding this entire thread rather repulsive, and contrary to the value set I normally expect to find here.
TimC, Nick M, your ideas are right and proper; defeat them on principle. Otherwise who cares who wins if we are no better than them?
…and the Iman you rode in on.
Target the imans. They shouldn’t mind, given the virgins and all. Not much different than targeting a criminal boss.
I would make the point that the convert or die choice is almost always met by convert rather than die and thus would in most cases be a rather less bloody answer to the suicide bombers than what they themselves do to the families and children of others. I do not actually think very many would die at all.
As to children, you’d just put them up for adoption in say a Sunni or a Shia or a Jewish family and they’d just not remember.
Now that would be something almost to horrible for a terrorist to contemplate.
As to being purists… well, in deep time all that matters is who survives and what ideas they carry. Liberty will only survive if those who carry that idea are willing to make sure their way of life remains undefeated no matter what.
Liberty is an anomaly. It has rarely existed at all and certainly not to the extent it does in this spoiled era and on these spoiled Western and Westernized shores. If it can’t get down and dirty with those with an uglier meme set who are quite ready to simply kill everyone on the planet who disagrees with them, then they will win.
I do not expect that outcome. The most they can accomplish is to ensure a larger number of innocents of their own culture get dragged into hell with them when (and if) the situation finally becomes totally intolerable to the rest of the world. Like say, if Iran gets a nuke and it goes off in London or New York…
An interesting and provocative post. And the responses provoked are interesting also.
I’m afraid a proposal such as this will look moderate, even mild, at some future date, after a few more of these endless plots succeed.
Esp. interesting are those who are apparently willing to accept a future modelled on the “Amenyar-Vendicar” equilibrium indefinitely, rather than do anything ishy that might be too offensive to their sensibilities.
At this point, that seems to be the prevailing opinion in the west. I wonder how long it will survive the volcanic events that loom on the horizon?
I might add that many seem to have missed that the largest number of those who would be affected would not actually change religion per se… the largest numbers of these murdering swine are killing members of their own religion but of a different sect… so the largest numbers would be in places like Iraq where Sunni or Shia suicide bombers would find their families sent to the ‘other’ tribe.
Finally. Someone begins to understand.
Yes, war, of itself, is an atrocity. There’s only one worse thing: Losing. Humanitarianism, as has been said of other things, is not a suicide pact. “They” intend to win by any means necessary. “Us” had better learn to respond in kind.
We can of course make great effort to minimize loss of innocent lives – but only to the point that it does not interfere with with winning. Responsibility for the death of innocents in the line of fire lies with, and only with, the Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Zawahiri type of assholes who started the fight.
As for the SBs – We should make a great public spectacle of them. Gather their body parts (real or faked as required), mix with equal volumes of pig fat, urine and feces. Burn all in a great vat and dance round the fire. Mix the resulting ash with cement, drop the solidified results in a deep hole with more pig filth, and place a pig monument on top. Broadcast worldwide and post on a special website. Above all, be consistent and never let a single speck of SB escape this treatment. The point, of course, is to demonstrate the hopelessness of getting to heaven by being a SB.
As for SB Families: Investigate. If prior knowledge is found, confiscate their property, and deport them to Yemen or some other charming place. If they’ve been naturalized, revoke their citizenship. All with due process, of course.
Co-Conspirators: Family, friends, associates, whatever. Investigate. Charge with whatever crime is appropriate, including treason for citizens. Lock the guilty up forever, and/or bring back public hangings. Again, be consistent.
Nations: Make it clear. Carry through, ALWAYS. If a nuclear weapon crosses your border to be used against a Western country or ally, whether it actually detonates or not, you’re toast. We shall destroy your capacity to make more weapons, annihilate your military, and exterminate your leadership. To the last man.
Immigrants: Simple. Welcome. Just remember – it’s our country. Live in peace with us, or fuck off.
We can learn to be hard-asses like this, or, we can continue to be compassionate. And lose.
Pig fat, obviously.
Although the Ummah is a collective, to persecute the collective with violence is not our way, but their way. We should always expose these acts as acts of collective punishment by a fascist mindset.
Symbolism is important. It might be that the UK has to demand no hijab in any public funded organisation or place like Turkey does. Sounds petty, but hijab is a clear unequivocal symbol of moonbat irrationality in Islam to cover the hair. It is a symbol of separateness and oppression and let nobody bluff you into thinking it is “personal” – it is an “I am pious, you are not” statement, with the follow on that “all uncovered women are whores” excuse for their men to be barbaric.
Cartoons are good. Ridicule is good. Fisking is good. The use of the term “innocents” in their mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded faux condemnations should be thoroughly exposed at each and every turn. There should be no opportunity for the lie that Mohammed was somehow a perfect human or that he had any real justification for his acts. Expose him as the delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic carpet-muncher that he was.
Tim C,
I agree with you. We have to show strength culturally on the home-front otherwise we don’t have a hope in hell of wining abroad.
Here’s my solution for the UK:
1. Tackle the welfare state to give moochers no reason to turn-up with a hordes of kiddies (or just scrap it)
2. Repeal all the Human Rights legislation so that we can deport the rable-rousers to wherever and they don’t have the “might face torture card” to play. Oh and it would stop things like that slag from Luton taking a matter of school uniform to the sodding High Court!
3. Overhaul immigration and asylum so the system is much quicker and simpler. Quite a lot of these chancers can be turned around in the time it takes for the next flight to leave for Islamabad. Make immigration easy from “nice” countries and much harder from “nasty” ones.
4. Make speaking English a requirement for immigrants. Aid this by legislating that all national and local government literature is printed only in English**. Crack down on the method by which Ahmed gets in and drags the whole clan across. Consider all international arranged marriages as forced marriages.
5. Imams. The overwhelming majority are foreign and a great many don’t speak English. The English test should help sort that and also we can remove the law which makes residency for “ministers of religion” very, very much easier than for any other profession. Deport the current non-English speakers – they don’t meet residency requirements afterall.
6. Oh and did I say, “Only let immigrants in who’ve secured a job here, have the wherewithal to start a business or a demonstrably easily employable skills (except Doctors!)”
7. Adopt the proposed(?) Swedish plan on FGM and make it abundantly clear that perps will suffer, badly. Similar for whatever other cultural barbarities they are into such as Burkhas, forced marriages and honour killings. Can’t ban headscarves – we’d have to arrest the Queen. If they can’t accept that women are equal and are not property they should be placed on the next Tehran Express.
8. Adopt a French-line on secularism in state schools. If someone wants to know about religion I think it’s safe to say that the local shamen, priest or rabbi will be delighted to explain. From my experience the average RE teacher isn’t qualified to explain a goddamned thing.
9. Generally draw the line on creeping Dhimmitude. If they object to a pub opposite the mosque then fuck ’em. If they want women only swimming-times at municipal pools, fuck ’em. Because if you give into that they’ll want women-only seats on buses next, and then what. Let ’em seethe and rage about cartoons* and British novelists all they like. It only shows ’em up for the raving loons they are.
10. Tell our chums the Saudis that if they want to build “Islamic Cultural Centres” here they can fuck off. Remind King Abdullah that without Western backing the real Islamic nut-jobs would have him hanging by his ghoulies from a lamp-post. We really ought to have his dick in the blender with a thumb poised over on.
11. Don’t engage with the likes of the MCB. Don’t fund Islamic community centres, outreach schemes or God knows what else. Religions should be self-funding anyway and there should be no Islamic pork barrel.
12, Call a spade a spade. Crimes committed by muslims because they’re muslims should be reported as such. The media pussy-foot around this way too much.
The Liberty Pixie might blow her top but so what?
The immigrants would actually respect us. How much respect do you think they can have for us when they think we’re a real soft touch.
Anyhoo. That’s your small onion. I had some thoughts on the Dubya’s Crusade but that’ll have to wait.
*I think the cartoon intifada did more to wake a lot of Europeans up to the fact that these aren’t just a put upon minority with nice tiles and interesting food. Oh and don’t bung aid to the Palis or at least not until they behave which I guess mean just don’t bung aid to the Palis. Especially seeing as they wrecked the EU mission out there. It’s like buying new toys for a kid who keeps breaking them.
**I dunno about Welsh etc. I always thought that the money could be better spent on cultural stuff than ensuring folk get bi-lingual council tax bills.
Pig Fat
Problem is, Islam has huge a capacity for end justifies the means thinking when it comes to Jihad.
Some bugger will issue a fatwa saying that it’s OK to attend Hog Roasts if you’re killing infidels…
Or we could just unleash our secret weapon…
The Giant Badger of Basra.
Allah preserve them from such infidel horrors!
If you want to get really draconian but in a relatively gentle way rather than starting by killing people you could you could consider dealing with the problem of Islamist fifth columnists and suicide bombers by making the practice of Islam illegal and banish anyone who insisted on adhering to it, except for accredited diplomats agreed to and authorised by the state.
The banishment should be at public expense. Any property the banished were unable to take should be purchased at public expense at the going rate for houses and vehicles, insurance rates for all else. Once banished no return – ever.
Another solution might be to thoroughly vet all Imams. A full psychological testing work up. Only state licensed Imams would be allowed to practice and only in English. Ditto for any ancillary staff, the equivalent of vergers, secretaries etc. Licences could be revoked. No Unlicensed Imams, or venues. Make the nut-job aggressive stuff like the wearing of burkhas illegal. Ensure that any preaching of violence, even a hint of it got a 10 year sentence or permanent banishment.
Any of these would probably need a number of laws, agreements, treaties and conventions and political organisations to be withdrawn from to implement them. Whatever necessary.
A bit feeble I know and slightly st the edge of the topic, but how about removing the tax fee status of all religions?
Also maybe intitute a charities police who would verify and track all charity money.
I never thought I would take a more liberal line than you Dale, but it seems (if you are serious) that the day has come.
Death threats to the family of a suicide bomber are wrong – period.
I can remember defending soldiers who shot at people who came towards them (people who turned out not to be terrorists) when you expressed disgust. But that is shooting someone one believes is out to kill oneself or others.
What you propose is cold blooded murder. For that is what it would be if they said “no” to your forced conversion plan.
It is also stupid. As pointed out above the family members could simply say “we said these words out of fear, it was not a real conversion” as soon as your gun was not against their heads.
What you propose is not war. It is no part of what a soldier should be doing.
“You would not write like this if you had family members killed by terrorists”.
Well I did have family members (close relatives of my father who were in Holland in 1940) who were gassed by the Nazis Dale.
And near where I used to live as a child there was a German family. The mother of this German family told me that they knew what was happening to the Jews during the war (they even made jokes about smoke) – I did not believe this family should be killed out of revenge then, and I do not now.
Nor do I believe that they should be forced to pretend to be Jews (or be murdered).
The whole idea is daft.
Actually Dale – the polygyny is very important. What do all young men, around the world, want? And always have wanted? Sex – the biological imperative. To be able to get a chance to mate, however, a young male must have status. And violence is one way to earn status – whether one is talking about gangbangers out in California or the Middle East or much of Africa. In societies where the high-status males have several wives, there are lots of males who have lost the only game that matters – success in the gene pool. Sub-saharan Africa has polygyny, and therefor lots of violence (someone call Bono and Geldof!). The Middle East has polygyny, and lots of violence, and suicide bombers – because the Koran promises 72 virgins – and they believe it. And the high-status males get rid of their genetic competitors when they send them off to kill others.
We haven’t evolved anywhere near as much as we think we have.
The principle of holding family members responsible for the behavior of any one of their relatives is fundamentally Stalinist, and once you accept that you might just as well accept the rest of the package.
This thread seems to be winding down and has thrown up some good boundary pushing discussion, so it is time to point out the head line in my original article:
“I have come up with yet another in a long line of ‘Modest Proposals’ for solving world problems, this time for successful suicide bombers.”
And to ask the question… how many people recognize the literary reference? 😉
Yup and I should’ve called you on it.
Declaring war is itself an act based on collective responsibility.
I aim for individualism and libertarianism as an ideal, but the world isn’t.
I appreciate the concerns of many people here about collectivist punishments and not being liberal, and I too would normally be appalled at such ideas. But we have (or are) entering a very frightening phase and it is not of our making.
A good number of years ago these people (Muslims, Islamist, whoever) declared war on us – pre 9/11. They have the attitude of perpetual victims and have skillfully penetrated our effete, wooly minded media, so much so that stopping a Jewish person talking about hatreds against Israel on a campus is more important than criticising people who actually kill innocents while screaming they will do it again.
These self-proclaimed enemies of ours have used our porous borders, lax authorities and “commonwealth ties” to slip into this country and plot to change our way of life. Such is their mindset that they brook no criticism or discussion of what they want or believe: there is certainly no “As in Rome do as the Romans do.” There is no middle ground between their ways and ours. They do not even have a critical faculty about their own religion. My wife believes the Muslims are as we were 500 years ago, with overbearing religions arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin. Maybe, but my contention is these people have access to weapons undreamed of centuries ago and we have no evidence there is even a remotely healthy discourse among their scholars to suggest a renewal of thought. Black is black in their book and if a little grey can be made black too then that’s even better. Even where the Koran says that women must cover their bosoms, it is interpreted as cover everything, and not to do so risks all kinds of pain and disgrace.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but if someone says they are at war with us and will kill us or convert us by terrorism and fear (and dear God, even the “moderates” among them talk about the peaceful Islamification of Britain as if it was something we all really want and will have to surrender to anyway) then we have to fight back.
Are there decent neighbourly Muslims? Of course. Are there reasonable, easy-going Muslims who will live and let live? No, none at all. This is not my estimation, it is theirs. Their path is clear and we are in the way.
Bizarrely they revel in the freedoms we have if only to promulgate their hatreds. How they love the internet, the new technology they use but could never invent or even improve. Lazy? Hmm, maybe not. Want to integrate with our society? Not at all. We have clear laws on not calling for the death of people publicly, so at every demonstration they flout this with placards calling for our death. When Iran’s ridiculous little PM declared a programme of nuclear power for peaceful purposes, the Iranian parliament greeted the announcement with cries of “Death to America. Death to Israel.” Way to go, guys.
Of course they say “convert to Islam and all will be well.” Great, but which branch? Haven’t they noticed that the vast majority of Muslims who die violently are murdered by other Muslims of a slightly different persuasion? Apparently it isn’t their fault. It is ours and we must pay.
A world of Islam… perhaps the best bet for a third world war as rival factions duke it out with bigger bombs over the length of the burqa.
Now the point of all this ramble is to say we have no one to talk to, no one to reach an understanding with over this. There is no understanding to be had: we are wrong and must suffer. Period.
We might try in a fair society (a mostly fair society anyway) to find some way of accommodating this difference, of being reasonable. The law and courts, international agreements, social initiatives, allowances for men with multiple wives who married abroad and brought them all here, right down to multicultural centres (like the one near where I live, occupied solely by Muslims and when a Chinese person enquired whether they had a nursery place for their little girl he was sent packing as the Muslims don’t like the Chinese over much) where all is light and understanding. But if they do not want our watered down apologies, seeing us as weak and valueless, we are in trouble. Big trouble.
So this then is the dilemma, folks. The hard question that no amount of careful liberalism will solve. Question: How are we going to do deal with it all?
Rephrase: what will work to end the problem?
Back to the start. They are at war with us on their terms. In war, sorry to say, it is gloves off. No quarter asked, none given. Of course a brutal solution will make mistakes. Of course it will sweep up innocents and guilty alike. But the option facing us is simple: do we want to be Muslim? Should my grandson have to learn the Koran? Should my daughter have to hope her arranged marriage isn’t to someone with learning difficulties – and I know this happens. I may well want to be Muslim (I once read vast amount of stuff about the Sufis) but it is a personal choice and not something imposed, complete with tribal preferences, on me.
Next question: if we can’t make up our minds about this, how many deaths from bombings, how many northern towns under Sharia law will it take before we do?
Be creative, be clever and we will see if the suicide vests and car bombs will be defused. But if we get this wrong we have a high price to pay.
I have a brother who is a fundalmentalist Christian. He does not actually advocate murder but he has some pretty unpleasant views and were the world operating in the way he would like many people he dislikes would be seriously inconvenienced.
My brother was not like this when we grew up together and seems now to be a completely different person from the boy and young man I grew up with.
Should I be held responsible for his views? Should his children? I detest and loathe quite a lot of the things he believes and have made it quite clear to him.
What have his views to do with me? As his brother do I have a responsibility to the wider community to try and change his views?
The libertarian ideal is to ensure every INDIVIDUAL freedom and every INDIVIDUAL responsibility for transgression against another individual. How can any true believer in liberty advocate group reprisals?
I am sure Dale was being deliberately provocative in order to stimulate debate but I cannot agree with anyone who suggests that group reprisals make any kind of sense.
Treating the remains of a murdering islamist scumbag by burying them with pig products appeals far more. At least one is then attacking the individual concerned and hopefully making an example that nutters of a similar disposition may find to be a bit of a deterrant.
Discouraging certain emigrants by getting rid of the welfare incentives also appeals. We should then only atttract the truly enterprising emigrant.
Also I believe that our society is far too squeamish about the kind of punishments it is prepared to mete out to people proven to have attempted mass murder.
Public beatings, humiliation and punishments along the lines of being in the stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables (or pig parts) and many years of hard labour performed publicly while wearing pig skin coats seem to me appropriate for individuals who choose murder and maiming as a way of trying to coerce people through terrorism.
6th column,
Police arrest and prosecution is the individualist response. War is the collectivist response.
Your proposal forces us to either decriminalize conspiracy to commit mass murder, or to occupy and police the countries where these people are indoctrinated, trained, financed and armed. We are trying your plan right now in Iraq and Afghanistan but we will have to extend it into Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Syria etc. etc. to prosecute all the conspirators. And there are likely to be so many of them that they overwhelm our courts, to say nothing of our police forces.
Of course, we could always just keep dealing with the weapons delivery devices better known as suicide bombers and let those other country conspirators continue to operate. I’m sure they will stop sending suicide bombers at us once they find out we are dipping what remains in pig fat. (eye roll)
Or we can conduct an act of war. Collective action against collective targets that harbor and support terrorism. Destruction of general infrastructure and of known facilities and people connected to acts of aggression followed by our immediately leaving the air space and land space of that country. Repeat as needed.
As for your brother, if he threatens or commits violence, turn him in. If he conspires to attack other nations from his home nation, turn him in. We live in countries that (still for a while at least) prosecute individuals for violating the rights of others. But these individualist responses require an environment that recognizes individuals. It is people with opinions like yours that have us in Iraq trying to impose a system of society that recognizes individuals so that we or they can prosecute them. Treating people as individuals only works when they already are individualists. Otherwise, it requires converting everyone around them first so that they will turn them in.
As a citizen of your brothers country, you better make sure that either you or your government prevent him from attacking another country. Because that other country is entitled to see that your brother’s (and your) nation arrests and punishes every participant that supported him. If it can not/will not do it, then it is an act of war and may be responded to accordingly.
The reference was from Johnathan Swift’s “eat the babies” suggestion.
Yes I know – that is what I mean by “if you are serious”.
But “so what”.
Either your meant your suggestion, or you did not – and if you did not there was no point in suggesting it.
I would have said the same thing to Dean Swift.
“If you want to suggest that I am the cause of this Irish famine [an 18th century one – not the famous one of the 1840’s] then explain your case, do not talk about how I might as well eat the babies because I have starved the parents”.
My Mother’s family (the Catholic Irish Powers) would have had no more time for such eat-the-babies-accept-I-not-really-mean-eat-the-babies stuff than my father’s family would have (Harry Marks did not think much of complex Jewish humour – make your case or keep silent was his line).
Dale,
You had me nodding right up until the “marry a lawyer” thing.
Good grief, man: have you no pity?
Midwesterner I understand your point about war and the fact that this is a sometimes necessary collective response.
However to answer the suggestion that Dale made, that is, to specifically target the relatives of suicide nutters, I think my point still stands. I was assuming Dale was talking about our domestic UK nutters rather than the situation in Iraq. While I feel that the members of the islamic communities in the UK are not nearly vocal enough in their condemnation of terrorism I doubt that that the majority of them support murder. Of course if there is evidence of incitement and aiding and abetting of a criminal act by anyone we already have laws and procedures for dealing with them.
The root and branch method is a bit old testament and we cannot declare war on citizens of our own country simply because they adhere to religion that has not evolved one jot from its 7th century beginnings. (I may be wrong about the century but you get my point).
6th column,
I agree pretty much with your reply. But here is a question for you. How do we deal with an organization that functions much as the mafia, using extreme threats of violence to prevent witnesses from speaking.
And I do disagree with you interpretation that the problem with Islam is that its supporters “are not nearly vocal enough in their condemnation of terrorism I doubt that that the majority of them support murder.”
I believe a substantial proportion, probably a majority, support the stated goals of the terrorists, namely, Dar al-Islam. These Muslims believe terrorism is a tactical error, but not a moral one. Since this is the way the religion is written, to believe otherwise would be to reject important parts of the Islamic canon. Listen to virtually any moderate Muslim ‘condemning’ terrorism. It makes Bill Clinton’s parsing of “is” look straight forward.
Perhaps you may adjust your interpretations of their silence by looking more closely at how main-stream Muslims view the world. They see the entire world as a scale from Dar-es-Islam to Dar-al-Harb. Some modern Muslims see various transitional stages between those two, but everything is somewhere on that scale.
What I suspect we agree on is the general guide that our domestic policy is appropriately one of enforcing the law against terrorist conspirators, not waging war domestically. And our foreign policy is appropriately one of waging war on terrorist states, not taking over countries and re-writing their laws (and of necessity staying behind to enforce them). War is not a matter of law enforcement, it is about altering a nation’s collective behavior.
Fascinating! Just while I am typing this I am watching the talking heads on Sunday morning TV. An anti war senator Jim Webb just decided the ‘push’ is failing because the people who are coming forward to join it and are defeating Al Queda are not the Iraqi military, they are civilian locals. As he called it “red neck justice.” This is the first optimistic sounding thing I’ve heard for a while and it came from somebody trying to declare defeat. Astonishing.
My contempt for Jim Webb meter just broke from overload.
Midwesterner. I am not sure that I have a sufficiently well thought out answer to your question but I will try to work my way towards one.
I have been a reader of this blog almost since its inception and all through the Verity period so I am aware, to some extent, of islamic beliefs and ideals. Having been a regular visitor to the UAE and Bahrein and occasionally Saudi and the Lebanon in the 70’s probably helps a little too.
The only way progress is made against organisations based on terror and threat is for people of courage and integrity to take a stand against them. This means the people being threatened and those that wish to provide support for them against their aggressors.
Easy to say but I do not know how I would fare were my family being threatened. I do, however, believe that true freedom has sometimes to be bought with blood and sacrifice.
The biggest threat to our way of life and freedom – already eroded greatly in my view – is the tremendous ignorance of most people. I do not just mean the peasants who grow up under islamic regimes, but also the great unwashed, ill-educated mass of westerners who seem sometimes to aspire to nothing more than a reality TV show where superficial, self-obsessed no nothings form their opinions.
Difficult to expect most people to understand abstractions like freedom when they cannot even turn the TV off when there is nothing worth watching.
Sorry. Not sure if that was an answer.
I’m sorry but the whole pig fat trope really has to be discarded if this discussion is to be considered the intellectual exercise that Dale intended it to be. It’s as spurious as an idea can be, IMHO.
The fact that a SB has elected to scatter himself across infidel territory demonstrates nothing but a total lack of concern for how his remains will be treated. I fail understand the idea that a fanatical Muslim in planning to eliminate himself, others, and the possibility of a traditional Islamic burial would reconsider a bombing if pig fat or any other magical item might be buried with his remains.
The 9/11 hijackers didn’t seem to be too concerned with adhering to the prohibition against alcohol and lascivious entertainment.
That said, I do think Nick M.’s list is the best rejoinder to Dale’s rubric. The actions Nick mentions are far less immoral, more feasible and have the greatest chance of success.
Ah, Verity. Like a light house to sailors, you always knew where she stood, you just didn’t want to get too close.
I’m not so sure if that was an answer so much as a good look at the question. But if I had an answer, I would provide it.
I think fundamentals for us to look at with questions of this sort are whether the host society (for the reasons you mention, including ignorance) is willing to enforce a system of individual accountability. If it is, then the things you describe will be happening. Violent people will be turned in and testified against. If either the system of justice, or the will of the private citizens fail, then it slips into the realm of collectivized responses and/or vigilanteism.
All of our dealings with other nations and peoples must be collectivized. Even when the UK and the US deal with each other, it is not our own laws that we should seek the other to enforce, but rather their own laws.
Domestically, we have the choice of holding individuals accountable, or altering society to reduce the opportunities for an individual to do harm. We encountered this mind-set on another thread in a throw away remark about highway bypasses in Wales. Somebody seriously suggested that the problem was not the individual criminally reckless drivers, but society’s failure to provide them with an alternative they like.
But internationally, we must hold entire nations collectively accountable for the actions launched from their territory. The only alternative is to take over these nations, re-write (or order re-written) their laws, and then enforce (or compel the enforcement of) those laws. We are attempting this in Iraq and lately, in Afghanistan. It is unwinnable approached this way. We must treat them collectively for any hope of success. (Which I believe may finally be happening.)