Terrorism

Terrorism must be fought like a disease

By Ian Robinson

It's not often that I have my ghast completely flabbered by a newspaper story.

But there it was in the Calgary Sun, an Associated Press story that began: "Britain began reaching out to Muslim communities yesterday, launching an effort to confront the resentment and anger that helped breed the suicide bombers who attacked London's transit system."

Pretend for a moment that it isn't 2005.

Pretend that it is, say, 1941. An invasion of Great Britain by Nazi Germany has narrowly been averted by the bravery of mere boys in RAF blue who took off in Hurricanes and Spitfires to fight the Luftwaffe to a flaming standstill at 20,000 ft.

Parts of London are in ruins from German bombs raining from the night sky.

Europe is under the Nazi heel, and the concentration camp crematoria are being built to eradicate Gypsies, Jews and opponents of Hitler's regime.

Now imagine the horror and outrage that would have followed a news story published in 1941 that began: "Britain began reaching out to Nazi communities yesterday, launching an effort to confront the resentment and anger that helped breed the German war machine that conquered half the world and turned much of London into unattractive heaps of smoking rubble."

We would have thought such a thing insane.

Today, we do not.

And we should.

There's nothing to understand about terrorism other than the fact of its existence.

The bombers who attacked London's transit system are not drawn from the legions of the impoverished.

They were Britons, born and raised, most of them.

Even being on the dole in Britain is better than being middle-class in Pakistan or most of Africa.

These were not people living hand to mouth, oppressed beneath a vicious system that exploits them.

They lived, in fact, in one of the most politically correct societies on the planet, a country in which teachers propose that the word "fail" be purged from the vocabulary because it makes failures feel bad to be identified as such.

Terrorists are not generally bred by communities of the disenfranchised.

Russia's Lenin? Middle-class.

Germany's Bader-Meinhoff gang? University students.

The American Weather Underground? Ditto.

The 9/11 morons who flew passenger planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon? University students and graduates.

Osama bin Laden? Multi-millionaire.

Terrorism is a potentially fatal, disease infecting the body politic.

And, like any other disease, we must understand it.

But, like syphilis, where terrorism comes from is not the issue.

You can't negotiate with syphilis. (If you could, the disco era may never have ended.)

You can't convince a spirochete not to infect you with the purpose of doing you harm.

No. You recognize the symptoms and hope to God that a seriously applied regimen of antibiotics will take care of it and -- if you've got any brains at all -- you protect yourself against future infections.

Western society has long chosen to devalue its institutions and values to the point of ceasing to demand that immigrants jettison what is not compatible with those institutions and values.

In Ontario, it has been recommended that Muslim law be sanctioned for the resolution of some disputes, including divorce -- something which has aroused the ire of the largest group representing Muslim women, which is something that even gives pause to the most devotedly stupid of the politically correct.

When mutiny struck the French army during the First World War, the French government randomly executed men from the mutinous regiments.

"Pour les encouragement des autres," was the explanation -- for the en-couragement of the others.

Catching them and killing them is the only answer, and in such numbers that it will, indeed, encourage the others to think twice about acting on their twisted belief system.

The answer to terrorism isn't a warm and fuzzy outreach program.

Give A Terrorist A Hug Day just won't work.