This post is my response to John’s piece on Commentary South Africa, ‘Al Qaeda Junior‘. In his piece, he expresses strong outrage at video footage showing children being trained for guerrilla warfare.
Nah. John’s got the wrong end of the stick on this one.
The reason the ‘war on terror’ is unwinnable by the ‘west’ is thanks to reactive analyses like his.
What’s happening is a paradigm shift of the most extreme kind. The September 11 Twin Towers demolition represents a change in the world order.
The message was quite simple: ‘You are no longer safe. Anywhere.’
The recent use of mentally challenged women to detonate suicide bombs is nothing short of a stroke of genius. Because it adds another layer of pain to the message: ‘You are no longer safe. From anyone.’
The ‘discovery’, ‘release’, and/or ‘shooting’ of a video showing a training camp in which children are being taught to be suicide bombers/guerrilla ‘soldiers’, whatever, is possibly one of the key masterstrokes of the propaganda war being fought by the Muslim extremists. (It appears the video was shot by western forces. Which makes it an even bigger mastercoup by the extremists. They couldn’t have gotten better publicity if they’d simply leaked it.)
John’s reaction plays completely into their hands. He’s responding exactly the way their propaganda experts planned.
They wanted outrage. Whinings about human rights, the rights of children. Cries of anguish.
They wanted all westerners to think, ‘How low will these bastards go? NOTHING is sacred to them!!!’
And yeah… they’ve definitely got us thinking that. (Soon they’ll be training sweet little dogs to be suicide bombers. Mark my words. And THEN we’ll see anguish!)
And all they’ve got to do to make this world unbearable for westerners is to publicize just ONE suicide bombing by a child.
Cos that’ll lock it into our minds forever.
And the message will be: ‘You are not safe from anyone, anywhere, ever again.’
Sadly, this war is inexplicable to us westerners.
I don’t know about you, but I cannot fathom what ‘they’ want from ‘us’.
In most wars, someone wants something from someone else. There’s a goal. Once the goal is met, the war is over.
In this ‘war’, nobody has said what the goal is. Nobody has explicitly stated: ‘This war will be over when x, y, and z have been achieved.’
Which is why it’s a paradigm shift and a change in the world order. Cos as westerners, we don’t have access to the correct way of thinking about this.
In addition, I’m not sure how many people are actually saying, ‘What do you guys actually want?’ Maybe if we ask, they’ll tell us. And then we’ll know how to end the war.
So… uh… I’ll ask. Guys… what do you want? How do we make this all stop? Please respond in the comments section. Thanks.
The illustration started out as a sketch in ink in my Moleskine notebook. Then I pulled it into Photoshop via my HP scanner and coloured it to within an inch of its life. All on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc, of course. No pork was consumed during the making of this image.
