Why do I laugh when people say things along the lines of “they would, if they could, kill every single one of us”, about groups for whom it may well be true? Surely this isn’t a sensible reaction to have? Actually, I think it is.
I associate that kind of rhetoric with McCarthyites and communists (and earlier in history, with more or less any establishment group and more or less any immigrant group). While the McCarthyites were literally right that there were Communist saboteurs in the West who were willing to murder in order to destroy our society, they were entirely wrong to believe that a significant proportion of Communist activists were deranged murderous saboteurs – and they ended up doing far more harm to their own country than the fifth columnists could ever have managed.
This sounds remarkably similar to the current situation with militant Islam. Some armed Muslims are proper Al Qaeda-ites who want to kill all Crusaders; infinitely more are Ingush-who-hate-the-Ossetians, Palestinians-who-hate-the-Israelis, Afghans-who-hate-any-foreigner-who-tries-to-invade-their-country, Javans-who-hate-the-Hindus, Kashmiris-who-hate-the-Indians, and a dozen other ethnic conflicts for which Islam is at most a wrapper. Indeed, the Darfur evilness highlights the fact that even sharing the Muslim faith doesn’t stop rival ethnic groups from slaughtering each other.
If our leaders showed an awareness of this, then I’d consider taking their rhetoric on the Great Threat Posed To Us All seriously. But when they come up with quotes like “My friends, there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is only the global war on terrorism” (Tom DeLay, Aug 30 2004), it seems pretty clear that they are conflating the many Muslims willing to fight in inter-tribal conflicts with the very few Muslims willing to blow up the Western world.
There are only two reasons a politican would make such claims: ignorance, or to make us excessively afraid so that we vote for the incumbents.
Worse, the conflation of Islam, Islamists, militants who are Muslim and members of Al Qaeda stirs up mistrust among the public, and drives more people to become proper terrorists (‘well, the west is clearly planning to destroy *us* if we don’t strike first’).
And that’s why I laugh. Perhaps the fact that our rulers are dangerously incompetent or liars (that’s in no way an XOR) who are willing to sacrifice our lives and Muslims’ lives for their own popularity shouldn’t make me *laugh* at their claims, but the only alternative seems to be retreating into more depression than I’d like to experience right now.
(thanks to Jimmy Doyle, who is nothing if not tenacious, for helping me draw out my thoughts)
Allow me to edit and embellish the last comment I posted to your "Freedom? Not around here" post.
Perhaps you could name a high-profile cold war "communist saboteur" global terrorist leader who told his followers they had a duty to kill non-communists, including women and children, wherever and whenever they could. Perhaps you could identify a series of terrorist outrages perpetrated by this "communist saboteur" terrorist network that murdered tens, hundreds and even thousands of innocent people at a time over the course of a few years. Perhaps you could point to the common knowledge that these terrorists were seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and that such weapons were suddenly far more likely to be available to non-state agents due to the recent collapse of a global superpower and the deliberate establishment of a black market by a high-profile nuclear player (A Q Khan). Because if you could do these things — which, of course, you can’t — you would be able to show that the communist saboteurs in question were in serious danger of being capable of a great deal more than "limited murder and mayhem"; and "the (many, at the time) people who said there was a significant threat from Evil Communist Traitors Who Would If They Could Kill Every One Of Us" would not now look "silly" at all. At least, they wouldn’t look anywhere near as silly as those who currently compare al-Qaeda and associates to the threat from cold-war "fifth columnists" as it actually was.
The remarks of people like DeLay are of course absurd and reprehensible, but no more so than the claim that anyone who takes al-Qaeda seriously must agree with DeLay. The threat posed by al-Qaeda and associates is not diminished in the slightest by the simultaneous existence of other terrorist organisations with more limited aims.