Don't Shoot, We Surrender

Anti-war liberals have it as an article of faith that the way to resolve our terrorist problem is to address their grievances. But the idea that you can make a violent attacker go away by addressing his grievances has a spotty record at best.

It was theorized that you could make crime go away by addressing social and racism problems. Social and racial problems were addressed and crime only increased. It decreased only when a "Tough on Crime" approach came into vogue again. In a decade New York City went from dangerous to one of the safest cities in America under a Mayor who disdained the social problems answer and instead got tough on crime. And even more shockingly this sea change was accompanied by a general increase in prosperity for everyone.

Even earlier than that it had been theorized that we could make Hitler go away by addressing the grievances of the German people. The grievances were addressed and Hitler got the Ruhr valley and Czechoslovakia, but it turned out that what he wanted was everything he could get. Not an unusual attitude for a conqueror, but one that so many liberals seem to have so much difficulty processing.

At the heart of the liberal fallacy is the wrongheaded belief that violence is an unnatural event produced by grievances or some sort of inadequacy. Where most religions understood that violence is inherent in man, we continue to be burdened by the domestic and foreign policy "insights" of people who think that violence is an aberration rather than the norm. And on that basis, they naturally assume that our peaceloving attackers will give up the fight once we give them what they want. After all, they couldn't possibly really want to kill us, could they?

That's the question few liberals want to ask and even fewer would seriously care to answer. But it is the fundamental question of our time. After all if you're going to shout, "Don't Shoot, We Surrender", you had better have some confidence that the fellow on the other end will lower his rifle when you walk out of that trench with your arms held high, instead of pulling the trigger.

Yet the experiences of everyone from the Carter Administration to the Israeli Peace movement suggest that when dealing with Islam, you should expect the pulled trigger. After all we aren't dealing with pained secular humanists who regret having to fight. We're dealing with people who like fighting and like killing. They aren't interested in a McDonalds franchise, except when they move to Detroit, and even then the money will still be going right back home to Lebanon, Yemen or Gaza.

Life isn't very fair to people who like to believe in the best of other people. You could almost sympathize with anti-war liberals if that alone was their fatal flaw, but instead they seem willing and even eager to believe the worst of America or whatever their home country happens to be. It's when the villainy of the enemy is told that you find them growing incredulous.

Tell them that American soldiers stopped a bus full of women and children, cut off their ears and buried them in a pit and without hesitation they'll demand war crimes trials and denounce the Bush Administration and the brutalizing culture of the military. Give them five minutes and they'll have both a documentary and fictional movie in the works.

But tell them that Muslim terrorists did the same thing and they'll demand evidence. And when they get it, they'll deny, nitpick and finally juggle excuses for the terrorists that will all turn out to blame the whole thing on us. "Oh but they were provoked", "Who are we to judge?", "This is only happening because our foreign policy in the Middle East is provoking blowback", "And when American bombers kill tens of thousands of people from high in the air, is that any better?"

You probably know the drill better than I do.

The very same people who believe the best of our enemies, believe the worst of us. Truly, we have met the enemy and the enemy is ourselves, or rather the enemy lives in San Francisco, bikes to work, works at Google, owns an iPhone and contributes to MoveOn.org. And he knows that if we just addressed the enemy's grievances, everything would be swell. Just don't tell him about the grievances of his fellow Americans. That's something he really doesn't want to hear.