About the Terrorists, from Someone Who Knows
The Muslims want to kill us. Maye it’s all of them, or maybe just a tiny minority. Or maybe it’s just a tiny minority, but they make sure that the silent majority stays silent. Maybe the murder of non-Muslims is a perversion of an otherwise peaceful religion, or maybe world conquest is built right into the Koran. I don’t know. It’s all too big and complicated for any non-expert to really understand.
But here’s a speech by a woman who thinks that she understands, and her credentials are excellent :
I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted “Allah Akbar!” My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word “infidel.”
I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends–killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon.
Her prose crackles with passion that the most bellicose of conservative American bloggers and commentators can’t duplicate. Here’s the climax:
Even after 9/11 there are those who say that we must “engage” our terrorist enemies, that we must “address their grievances”. Their grievance is our freedom of religion. Their grievance is our freedom of speech. Their grievance is our democratic process where the rule of law comes from the voices of many not that of just one prophet.
Note that she isn’t affirming every doomsday scenario involving the terrorists. She’s right—and she knows that she’s right—because she’s talking about what she really knows, which is how the terrorists perceive us and our actions. Her point is simple: They will keep on trying to kill us until we defeat them. Attempts at tolerance or conciliation only encourage them. Eventually, America and perhaps Europe will stand up and fight. Her question, and mine, is: How many more deaths until that happens?