— by Odysseus
The world needs to hit Islam where it hurts it. Islamic terror can only be defeated by targeting its weaknesses.
The recent murder of 10 French satirists (and two police officers) at their place of work by Islamic terrorists shows once again that Islamist terrorists have not abandoned their use of extreme violence to force the rest of the world to submit to the demands of their medieval, intolerant faith.
Legendary Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi wrote in his book “The Book of Five Rings” that one must understand one’s enemy. Only when one understands the enemy will such enemy be quickly and easily defeated. By doing so, one controls the fight. Failing to do so allows the enemy to control the fight. His 16th century axiom is still true today.
As our civilization struggles with Islam-inspired violence around the world, the only hope for victory or even for the reduction in violence lies in ascertaining how pressure can be applied to the perpetrators of Islamic violence. No technique, method or action taken by the defenders of civilization will be effective unless it hits these terrorists where they truly hurt, rather than where we would hurt were we them.
In any defensive conflict, the objective is to cause the attacker to cease his hostile actions. Only three approaches can be utilized to cause the cessation of the attack. The first is surrender. Here, the victim simply acquiesces to the demands of the attacker, whatever such demands may be. A man may choose to surrender his wallet to the robber. A woman may choose to submit to rape. A kingdom may submit to enslavement.
Throughout human history, surrender has rarely been effective for the simple reason that, upon discovery that violence is successful at achieving his objective, the aggressor will continue to use violence to achieve each of his next objectives. The demands will become increasingly more onerous until the victim reaches the point where he can no longer submit and still retain anything of his life’s value. The aggressor’s success will cause him to continue to pursue an expanding agenda for so long as his aggression continues to benefit him.
The second approach to cause the attacker to cease hostilities is to bribe him. Here, the defender does not acquiesce to the specific demands of the attacker, but, rather, offers some other incentive to the attacker to desist. Again, the attacker is rewarded for his aggressive and violent behavior, but not to the degree that he hoped. The bribe must be sufficiently large that the value of the compromise is sufficient to stop the attacks.
Bribery, too, has a poor track record of resulting in a permanent cessation of hostilities. It is because the aggressor still attained something of significant value by means of violence. The aggressor discovered a method of attaining what he values so he will continue to use violence and aggression to obtain other valuables from the victim. Acceptance of bribery will continue until the victim no longer has anything of value to offer the aggressor or until the aggressor finally makes demands that the victim is now willing to fight in order to oppose.
The first two methods are the ones favored by pacifist politicians, like American Presidents Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Their world view is that aggressors can be appeased with a sufficient level of surrender. In all of human history, there is little to no evidence that appeasement achieves anything of value greater than the delay of the conflict, and, more often, great losses by the appeasing victim.
The third and final possible approach to cause the attacker to cease his hostile actions is to counter the aggression with a counter attack. In short, to fight back. Regardless of the desires of the victim or any previous attempts to use one of the two previously-discussed pacifistic approaches, a victim will be eventually be forced to fight back. It is always thus due to the inherent nature of the natural bully, be that bully an individual, a state, or a nation/movement. The violent aggressor will continue to increase his demands until the victim can no longer remain compliant without surrendering something that he deems so valuable that he is willing to risk his own death to protect.
It is, in fighting back, that a defender must know his attacker. He must strike the attacker in vulnerable places where the strikes cause the attacker sufficient pain that the attacker begins to lose enough of what is important to him and experiences a negative return on his investment in violent aggression. The attacker must be shown that, not only does violence not help him, but that it actually leaves him in a worse condition than he started. He must understand that the aggression has a cost and that the cost is too high for him to be worth the gamble that he can obtain something of value from the victim.
The key to any act of defense is the concept of deterrence. The defensive action must not only stop the aggressive attack in progress, but also provide a disincentive to any future attack. In determining how to fight and where to strike the attacker, the defender must understand that his attacker may be like himself in some ways, but is not actually identical to him. The defender must identify what is most precious to the attacker so as to be able to strike at it and achieve the greatest deterrent effect. It does no good to target the attacker in places that the defender falsely surmises are vulnerabilities of the attacker based upon the assumption that the attacker and the defender have the same vulnerabilities.
A counterstrike that causes little or no pain to the attacker is not a counterstrike at all. For example, it does no good for a defender with hair to try to pull the hair of an attacker with a shaven head. It makes no sense for a barefoot defender to stomp on the foot of an attacker who wears heavy boots. The fact that a defender is vulnerable to hair that can be pulled and bare feet that can be stomped upon does not mean that the attacker has the same vulnerabilities.
In international relations, a wealthy defending state may find economic privation to be extremely painful. Thus, that state may mistakenly believe that economic sanctions would be a powerful and intimidating threat. However, economic sanctions are a weak or useless weapon against an attacking state whose leader has no concern for the economic privation suffered by his citizens so long as he suffers no privation himself. Economic sanctions did not deter Iraq’s strongman Saddam Hussein who lived in luxurious palaces while his people suffered. The only counterattack that will work against such an attacker state is action that directly hurts the leadership of the attacker. Only when the leaders themselves are threatened, such as the bombing of Libya’s strongman Muammar Quaddafi’s house during the administration of President Ronald Reagan and the consequent death of Quaddafi’s daughter, the necessary deterrence was achieved.
The key to deterrence is to identify the attacker’s weaknesses and to exploit them. Although aggressors generally do not broadcast their weaknesses, their weaknesses can be discerned from their very choice of attack. If they are willing to commit violence to obtain some desired result, then that result is must be very important to them. The best deterrent against aggression is to ensure that any attack will not result in attacker’s attainment of his objective. If the attacker seeks territory, then, not only should he not gain territory, but, in fact, he should lose territory. If the attacker seeks to silence criticism, his attack should result in his having to suffer even more criticism. In this manner, the defender’s counter-attack causes any attack to be counterproductive from the attacker’s viewpoint. These lessons are easily applied in the global struggle against Islamic terror.
Islamic terrorists have shown that they are willing to sacrifice their own lives, the lives of their children, and their personal freedom to achieve their terrorist ends. This means that their lives and freedoms are of lesser value to them than the objectives they seek to achieve through their attacks. Since they are readily willing to risk and lose them, taking their lives and freedoms has an insufficient deterrent value to prevent further violence. Consequently, current military, espionage, and law enforcement techniques directed at killing and incarcerating the Islamists do not successfully deter terror. Regardless of the value placed by Western society upon individual lives and freedoms, this valuation is an unreliable guide as to providing a disincentive to Islamist terrorists. Western society must target those things that are actually of great value to the Islamist terrorists.
Islamist terrorists use violence to achieve several objectives. In their attacks in France on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, they sought to force the media to stop using satirical images of the prophet Mohammed. They were willing to risk their lives and freedom of movement to achieve this result. Therefore, pursuing the attackers to kill or incarcerate them does little to deter them because they place a lower value on life and freedom of movement. The proper response is to increase the amount, breadth, and spread of satirical images of the prophet Mohammed. While this approach will, no doubt, enrage them, it also deters them by showing them that their violent actions result in more insults to their prophet Mohammed. Thus, their actions will be proven to them to be counterproductive, rather than helpful, to achieving their objective.
Likewise, in those places where they use violence to seek control over territory, every act of violence should result in their actual loss of territory. Again, this will enrage them, and, possibly in the short run, cause an increase in violent attacks. However, if each attack is demonstrated to have a counterproductive effect on their objectives, they will quickly see that, in truth, they are only harming themselves. It is likely that, even within their own ranks, they will begin to turn on one another as they realize that the perpetrators of the violence are actually doing great harm to their cause.
Legal and political mechanisms are already in place that could be used to do this form of “counterattack”. For example, in the Middle East, and specifically in the state of Israel, the objective of the various Islamist terror groups, is to use terror to gain geographic territory. Therefore, the proper response to every terror attack which can actually deter such attacks in the long run is to cost Islamist terrorists to actually lose territory. The administration of President Barack Obama and many European countries have erroneously condemned Israel’s settlements for preventing peace in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead of Israel surrendering its land to buy peace from the Palestinians, thus, providing an incentive to terror attacks, Israel should widely publicize that, in response to every terror attack, it will legally annex, say 10 square miles of land currently in dispute. Legal title to the annexed land could be awarded to the survivors of the victims of such attacks as a form of part compensation for their losses. Thus, each act of violence would cost the terrorists that which they place the most value since they value the land more than any life or liberty. Each attack would be increasingly counterproductive to their aims.
It should also be noted that the concept of monetary compensation for wrongful loss of life or limb is currently practiced by all systems of justice. It is far more civilized than a literal application of the Bible’s “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” and taking a life or lives in retribution for lives wrongfully taken. Apologists for Islamic terrorists would be forced into the indefensible position of claiming that the legal remedy of awarding money or title to real estate was somehow worse than the initial offense of killing people. That position would not even accurately reflect their own Sharia law. When the peers of the Islamic terrorists see that violence increasingly undermines their objectives of land gain, it is likely that an internal conflict would develop, whereby the non-violent Muslims would prevail over their violent brethren.
This is not to suggest that the above suggested disincentives take the place of ordinary defensive or law enforcement measures. Armed self-defense, the placement of peace officers and security guards, and incarceration of offenders are necessary defensive measures to incapacitate and limit the damage caused by Islamist terrorists. However, killing and incarcerating terrorists does nothing to actually deter terror attacks, undermine terrorist movements, or reduce the frequency of terror attacks.
To deter terror, western civilization may be forced to resort to lessons learned at an earlier era that was free of political correctness and multiculturalism. More than a century ago, American military forces in the Philippines encountered the Moro Muslim insurgency which engaged in suicide attacks against American soldiers. As recounted in the 1938 book “Jungle Patrol”, American Colonel Alexander Rogers of the 6th Cavalry proceeded to inaugurate a practice of burying dead Muslim insurgents in mass grave together with the carcasses of slaughtered pigs. Other officers further refined this practice to include the decapitation after death of the heads of Muslim insurgents and sewing them inside the carcasses of pigs. This practice was met with success when the Muslim insurgents withdrew from the geographical areas which Colonel Rogers or his fellow officers controlled. Colonel John “Blackjack” Pershing had also threatened the mullahs that pig blood would be splattered on them and their families and that any of them killed would be buried in pig skins. The Moro insurgency was then successfully suppressed.
It is known that the Muslim religion abhors pigs and there is belief that contact with pigs will prevent the entry of Islamist terrorists into heaven. The West could capitalize on these religious vulnerabilities to deter terrorists who care little about their earthly existence. Execution and burial of captured terrorists in a common grave together with pigs, all televised and posted on YouTube could be used as an effective deterrent. Imprisoned Islamic terrorists could be force-fed pork products rather than the ritually-slaughtered halal meat prescribed to Muslims by Sharia law. If, according to the Muslim Qur’an, the saliva of dogs is considered unclean, captured Islamic terrorists should be licked regularly by dogs.
To date, the West has lacked an effective model by which it can truly deter Islamist terror. Thus, the West has been forced into utilizing techniques that merely harden the defenses of Islamic terrorists, but do not actually win the battle by convincing them that they have little to gain and a great deal more to lose by continuing their aggression. Kinetic confrontation, law enforcement, incarceration, and even targeted assassination are really merely stopgap measures in this conflict. They may impede their methods and hamper their efforts, but they do nothing to undermine their will to continue the conflict. The foregoing proposal, to seek out and to exploit their true vulnerabilities, opens the door to success at actually changing their behavior and deterring their choice of violence to achieve their religious goal of converting the world to Islam. Only then will they choose civilized methods of conflict resolution.
Engaging in these techniques may be unseemly and barbaric to the multicultural western mind, but there is no better alternative to the endless cycle of violence, kidnapping, imprisonment, death, and destruction inherent in fighting with an enemy which has demonstrated time and again that they are his preferred means of imposing his end of worldwide Sharia law. It is absurd that westerners should abhor non-violent techniques that exploit an enemy’s cultural or psychological weakness. When facing an enemy that kills women and children, amputates limbs, decapitates prisoners on video, and goes on rape and murder sprees across territory, it boggles the mind that our western political and cultural leadership can draw a moral equivalence between nonviolent movies, cartoons, seizure of property, and cultural insensitivity, on one hand, with rape, amputations, permanent disfiguring torture, and murder, on the other hand. How can they be so willfully blind? Just on whose side are our leaders when they so easily ignore the obvious difference?
