The Golden Fool

There's the Golden Rule -- and there's the Golden Fool.

We all know what the former is.

The latter just occurred to me the other day (though I've thought about it in other terms for a long time now):

"...more Muslims are turning to Jesus Christ as he is offered in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (NOT as he is portrayed in the Qur'an) than at any time in history."

So wrote a Jihad Watch reader, recently, located appropriately in a comments thread to a Jihad Watch essay dedicated glowingly to giving Eric Allen Bell, someone so soft on Islam he's positively marshmallowy, a platform from which to show the anti-Jihad community his supposedly staunchly anti-Islamic bonafides.

And I responded:

That's an interesting statement. If it's accurate, it seems rather odd, because for at least three centuries, the West maintained an intensely intrusive presence throughout the Muslim world (with one exception, the center of Arabia) and had far more control over the people and institutions than they allow themselves to have now, since now the West is ashamed of its Colonial past. And during that long Colonial era, missionizing was also widespread and intense. So you would think that millions of Muslims would have already converted by the end of the 19th century. But this isn't the case.

In fact, Muslims mostly resisted conversion, hunkered down stewing in their hatred of the intrusive, humiliatingly dominant Infidel on their lands controlling their economies and politics, and often even their societies, and waited for the day they could revive again. Which is exactly what they have been able to do throughout the 20th century.

And with our colossal mistakes of

1) dismantling Colonialism (administratively, psychologically and culturally)

and

2) admitting millions and millions of Muslims into the West (an unprecedented disaster that had never been done before), Muslims have only become more able to wreak their terroristic jihad, not less.

I don't see Christian missionizing as a solution to the problem of Muslims. I see it as an unrelated virtue which we should allow to continue as long as it does not hamper our #1 priority: protecting our societies from the dangerous Muslims (whose numbers are legion and which -- I have to repeat for the umpteenth time -- we have no way of of distinguishing from the harmless Muslims even if they do exist, somewhere out there.

That reader later responded to me thusly:

"I am neither a Mennonite nor a Quaker, and think that Augustine was on to something with his just war theory. I would certainly fight for the defense of my country and civilization if I had to. I just question if now is the time to commit armed forces to cleaning up the entire world between Mauretania and Mindanao; or even if this is necessary. We free people in the West still have options, and Islam has its weaknesses even in the lands where it is dominant."

To which I responded:

Sometimes defense can wait until provocation; sometimes it has to be pre-emptive and proactive.

Hitler's years of ramping up in the 30s is a good example of the latter, whose appropriate response as urged by Churchill went unheeded by people who felt that the former was the way to handle it. And millions of lives, terrible destruction of land and property, and terrible dislocations were the result of that disastrous miscalculation.

Which type of defense is appropriate now in our time as the 21st century limps along with its feet flat and asleep?

Conclusion:

When dealing with ruthless and psychotic fanatics whose culture and conscience is not only devoid of the Golden Rule, they positively despise it, we cannot afford to follow the rules of the Golden Fool -- who would have us apply the Golden Rule even to enemies who would exploit our use of it in order to try to subjugate and kill us.

As an example of what I am talking about here, I here recount a recent exchange I had with another Jihad Watch reader, similar to (though decidedly more naive than) the one cited above:

"...you are saying that Christians striving to "love their God with their whole mind, heart and spirit" and to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is "morally neutral" ...

To which I responded:

No. It's good when the "others" you are "doing unto" aren't psychotically murderous fanatics trying to kill you, your family, and your fellow citizens. It becomes, however, idiotic and reckless and morally irresponsible when the "others" are, in fact, psychotically murderous fanatics trying to kill you, your family, and your fellow citizens.

"So if everyone in the world applied those admonitions in their lives, the world would not be a much better place?"

To which I responded:

Of course if everyone in the world applied those admonitions, the world would be a better place. But everyone won't. So you're sounding like an airheaded Miss Universe telling America why she believes in World Peace. And what's more important, a sufficient number of Muslims around the world won't apply those admonitions, and their unwillingness to do so will express itself (and already has expressed itself thousands of times around the fucking world in case you haven't noticed from your cave) in actions that -- again -- reflect a psychotically mass-murderous fanaticism hell-bent on trying to subjugate and kill us, our families, and our fellow citizens.