This one has been rattling around in my mind for a while now, but the news today finally clinched it. The report out of Iraq stated that an organized group of bad guys hit the Ministry of Education and captured a pile of people and spirited them off to some unknown location. There have been many threats against the university professors in Iraq over the past months. In Afghanistan, the Taliban and other Anti-Govt groups have been blowing up schools [with and without kids in them]…
I believe we are not in a ‘War on Terror’ - we are in a ‘War over the Stupid People’. Whoever gets the most stupid people on their side wins. The bad guys want to keep folks stupid in order to swell the ranks of suicide bombers and militants. We, generally, want to try to improve medical care and education to allow people to make up their own damn minds about how they want to live. We don’t try to tell anybody what God they should worship. We don’t even tell them to install a ‘carbon-copy-of-America’ type of government. We just try to provide an environment where they can figure out how they want their system to look, feel, taste, and smell, and we do this by providing as much security as we are capable of. I’m in a nation right now that has a 33% literacy rate… one out of every three people here CAN READ THEIR OWN LANGUAGE! Most of those are here in Kabul. The out-laying, bass-akwards villages are full to the brim with folks that are incapable of reading their own Koran. They don’t know what the book says [it is written in Arabic by the way, not Dari or Pashto] so they follow any silver-tongued Mullah who says he can read it. They get all fired up when someone tells them that some infidel somewhere may have touched a Koran after shaking hands with some other infidel who may have eaten a pork-chop once. They don’t do this on their own… they are coaxed into frenzy by some instigator.
“Yes, right here - it says Jihad!”
“Ok, guess we gotta Jihad now…”
…and off they go.
Is there any way we can fight this? I think there is, but… [there’s always a ‘but’ isn’t there] we need to provide assistance to create an education system better than American public schools to do it. This is going to be tough because, well, our public school system is not held up as some kind of shining example by any stretch…
The only other alternative is something that the ‘civilized’ world just doesn’t seem prepared to stomach… slaughter every last one of em.
It’s not that it is an ‘all of them’ or ‘all of us’ kind of thing… but at last count it was about a dozen to five in the UK, a few dozen to [?] in Spain, a couple hundred to ten in India, and over 5000 to 19 in America…
How much of this are we, as a world, prepared to tolerate? How much before we help make them smart enough to decide their own future or decide it for them…
As with all of these - comment on them for me. If I’m chewed up, blind, or misguided… how the hell would I know?
