Posted by
Doctor Poddy on Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:49:40 PM
When
"insurgents" kidnap simple working men supporting their families by buidling roads, that is terrorism.
When
a political group trying to destroy a government uses bombs that is
aimed to kill innocent civilians and not government targets, that is
terrorism, whether the bomb be in Algeria, Morocco, Thailand,
Indonesia, Iran or the Philippines.
When gangs murder their
enemies so they can gain control of cities and neighborhoods,
intimidating and killing innocent bystanders and those who oppose them,
that is crime, not terrorism. There has been gang violence in
Los Angeles,
Mexico or
Rio.
Claiming
that there should be no "war on terror" and treating terror as mere
crime ignores the central differences between the two killings.
Fist
of all, gangs don't want to impose a utopian society on the rest of us,
they only want to make money. They get money from kidnapping, murder,
and extortion, but are essentially self sufficient.
Often
unemployed youth, seeing no opportunity, see gangs as a logical way to
make money and have fun (pushing around people and running around with
guns is fun, let's face it.)
Unless they go too far, locals see
them as annoying but "their own" and tend to protect them. Indeed, one
of the problems with the Philippine police trying to eradicate the NPA
is that after 60 years, they are more like the mafia, seen as a way for
poor people to revenge on those who exploit them, and if a few
innocents get killed, well that's the cost of keeping those in charge
from going too far.
But the main difference is that terrorist have outside help.
In
Iraq, the "insurgents" are helped by the governments of Syria and Iran,
while the Saudi government looks the other way when their charities
fund mosques that preach Jihad and launder money for Alqaeda. These
terrorist groups may get part of their money from murder, extortion
kidnapping and drugs, but without the help of rogue governments they
would soon fade away because their local "support" is from fear.
Unlike
gang violence, which can live nicely with government and locals as long
as they don't go too far, terrorists want to take over a country, and
then run the country according to their utopian ideology. the result is
more terror, because the extreme views allow murder as a way to an end.
The
twentieth century had murderous terrorists take over many countries in
the name of many utopian ideas: Fascism, Nazism, and especially
communism. And the reason some people call present day terrorism
"Islamofascism" is that these groups have more in common with Soviet
funded terror groups than with Islam. And, like the communist groups,
they work on many levels, not just terror, but thru Saudi funded
mosques that preach extremism, and through elites who push their agenda
at the level of government. The dirty little secret is that these
groups could not exist without funding, either official or via
"charities", from other governments. Without Soviet backing, the local
NPA has degenerated into a Mafia type gang, and these groups also would
be more of a murderous gang without the careful guidance and funding of
their actions.
So when a car bomb by a group with only a few
thousand adherents can make the Democrats decide "the war is lost",
while not even mentioning sadness for the innocent civilians killed
trying to shop for food, one wonders where is their priorities. Let the
murders win? Are you nuts?
When you say such things, you are
essentially telling the worst type of murderers that it is okay to
murder in the future to gain power, and telling rogue states that
preach murder as a way to extend their utopian ideology that terror
works, encouraging them to fund even more terror to extend their aims.