princealbertofb Wrote:Then, [MENTION=14705]Pix[/MENTION], maybe the answer really is to turn the other cheek? Maybe Jesus had a point?
Of course not. But the far right wants to treat "other tribes" like some hive mind of evil, and that snowballs a cycle into getting worse (Taoism and Buddhism are eloquent about this, too bad those aren't the major religions instead of Christianity and Islam). By all means, go after the guilty (and those who knowingly assist them), just don't treat the innocent as if they were guilty.
Put it like this: what if a wedding of your nation was bombed because ONE person there (out of scores) was SUSPECTED of being a criminal? And then, waiting for ER crews to arrive, like ambulance, they get hit AGAIN, because they MIGHT be bad people? And meanwhile people with last names as yours were being silently taken and turned over to be tortured (not just in American detention facilities, but also other governments)? I bet you'd hate those people with the fury of a thousand suns, and just might even join those fighting back. And, unfortunately, that's what we've been doing, and what the far right thinks SHOULD be done.
But that doesn't mean the alternative is to shrug our shoulders at it. Though I don't have the time to look it up now, the US military has had great success in the past fighting militant enemies of America by working with the demographic the enemies come from, by doing good deeds and building goodwill so that the said demographic turned on the terrorists and helped our military root them out, sometimes executing the said enemies themselves and saving America the trouble. This is what happens when you target the guilty rather than the entire demographic.
Unfortunately, the far right, which includes Muslim terrorists who think and act in similar ways, WANT it to be a war, preferably one that they win, but they'd rather die than learn to get along. But most people aren't like that, they just want to live their lives with as little hassle as possible. So the best thing those terrorists can do is make it so that those moderates get targeted as well, and learn to hate and thus embrace an evil cause. Not good against evil, but evil against evil.
I'm probably not explaining it right, but I'm too tired and pressed for time to polish this. It's too bad that the older, more honorable, methods don't even get considered anymore as that's too complicated and it's just easier to hate and kill everyone to let God figure them out, and as that tactic blows up in our faces, then do it again even harder.