Twenty years later I am still confused as what to call the people that the world calls Islamist terrorists. The Taliban certainly represent this kind of group. But who are they really?
Have we accepted them as religous fundamentalists first when in fact their first allegiance, for whatever reason, is power and control through violence. Does any religion’s strength rely on the point of a gun?
I know scholars and others say we have to understand people before we can intelligently deal with them. I think understanding the terrorists’ world of tribalism and interrelated languages and a thousand variations of Islam is beyond us. And pointless.
I don’t care why you just stoned a woman to death. You deserve to die. Are we clear?
The Taliban and their ilk and the Saudis oppressing women and the Chinese putting Uighurs into concentration camps are the same kind of people at the root level. It’s violence first and then a smokescreen of religious or political reasons afterward.
These are all totalitarian regimes plain and simple. Big and small. It’s bad behavior, criminal behavior, not the equal respect between people that most of civilization has been working toward for thousands of years.
Let’s not reach religion. Too complicated and inflammatory toward Muslims that are good people. Let’s deal instead with what they are actually doing. Forget the spin they are weaving.
Don’t blow up our buildings for some weird vision of the world that you have. I don’t care. We’ll track you down and kill you. Fair enough?
Beat a woman or a kid or put someone into a camp and we are not going to respect you and we will deal with you accordingly. No matter what kind of crippled 15th century nonsense you come up with.
These terrorists and Saudis and the Chinese are all just power-mad thugs who control things and people through force. No amount of Arabic study or research into the meaning of the Quran have helped. Nor will it ever. Groups like the Taliban are more rag-tag gangs with guns than anything else.
What we are actually dealing with are a bunch of miscreants and brutes who enjoy killing someone by dragging their body behind a beat up Toyota. That’s all I have to know. Whatever you consider religion, I don’t care. Die!