GWOT Taking Shape

The Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is credited with starting the first world war. It remains unclear as to what historians will mark as the beginning of our latest world war - late 1940's geopolitics or early 1970's terrorism, but what is certain is that this conflict is taking shape. Naturally it is politically incorrect to say so, but the facts remain and compound.

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Selami Aydin's words will comfort many Dutch people if opinion polls are to be believed.

"I'm thinking of going back to Turkey. Seriously," the 39-year-old Muslim said just a few hundred meters (yards) from the apartment police stormed last Wednesday after a 14-hour siege with suspected Islamic militants. "We're all frightened."

The Netherlands' image as the land of tolerance has been shattered in the two weeks since outspoken filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered and a Muslim suspect arrested in the crime.

Since Van Gogh's death on Nov. 2 there have been at least 20 arson attacks on mosques and churches in tit for tat violence.

Opinion polls show the majority of Dutch people are uncomfortable with or feel threatened by the presence of foreigners, while support is surging for Geert Wilders, seen as heir to murdered anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn.

But unlike previous world wars, this is not a war of empire based primarily upon geography; its basic premise is first and foremost ideological with geographic expansionism simply a by-product. That ideologic foundation makes it very difficult to track or give it form.

STANWOOD, Wash. — A teenager accused of planning to supply a Somalian terrorist group with night vision goggles and bulletproof vests foreshadowed the charges in his high school yearbook with a note that mentions Somalia in his "plans for world supremacy."

Mark Robert Walker (search), 19, was arrested Nov. 6 in El Paso, Texas, and on Friday was charged with attempting or conspiring to contribute goods or services to a global terrorist organization. A more serious charge filed earlier was dropped.

Months earlier, Walker caused a stir when he left a cryptic note next to his senior portrait in the 2004 yearbook, writing that his "plans for world supremacy are in order. They entail taking over Somalia (search) and working outward, but I should not divulge the exact details of my cunning strategy."

The entry also referred to Walker's "future heroic death" and offered a "death poem" with imagery of a grenade exploding and the phrase "all shall pass this world."

Bill at the fouth rail has up a guest post on the ideological development of combatants within our own borders.

It is important to look at the similarities in upbringing that allowed these two California kids to go from experimenting with Islam, to traveling overseas to study, to eventually fighting for Al Qaeda or the Taliban. It is interesting to note the similarities in the family and environment of these two young men. Their families encouraged them to find spiritual enlightenment through any form of study they chose. They were typical California liberals who championed environmental causes.

It remains to be seen how this war will continue to take shape. But what is certain is that our enemy is steeped in an ideology every bit as evil as any the world has ever known.

FALLUJAH, Iraq  — U.S. Marines (search) on Sunday found the mutilated body of what they believe was a Western woman during a sweep of a street in central Fallujah.

The body was lying in the street covered with a blood-soaked cloth. Marines fear the body may have been boobytrapped and called in dogs to sniff for explosives.

Two Western women are known to have been kidnapped in Iraq.

Margaret Hassan (search), 59, director of CARE international in Iraq, was abducted Oct. 19. Teresa Borcz Khalifa, 54, a Polish-born longtime resident of Iraq, was seized last month.

Given the true nature of the enemy we face, our current greatest threat is from within. Not so much from the occasional misinformed individual who joins the other side, but from the naivete of leftist judicial thinking that holds that when fighting for one's very life, it is somehow important to uphold such unrelated issues as the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions when dealing with any and all opposition, here or abroad.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 8 - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.

For me the issue breaks down into some very practical terms. There is an unprincipled,  ruthless and utterly comitted enemy within and about our nation that seeks to not only do great damage to us but also seeks our absolute demise. To who do I turn for protection? A be-robed thinker fiddling with great notions while Rome could indeed burn, or the noble blood, sweat and tears of brave warriors willing to sacrifice everything of their own so that the nation and people that produced them might endure?

There is no contest in my mind as I believe that the grand freedoms for which our nation stands can and will only endure if, first and foremost, we ensure our own national perpetuation. To leftists and former peace-niks I turn your attention to an old bit of music many of you may have once found rather comforting.

To everything
(Turn, turn, turn)
There is a season
(Turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose
Under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

There is indeed a "time to kill" and what better time is there than when the paradigm of the conflict is, quite clearly, "kill or be killed first." We erred in a decade of judgement and set the groundwork for 9/11. We simply can't afford to err for another ten years or so at this critical juncture in our nation's great history.

Comments

[Crazy Chester]

At current rates of immigration in Holland, about 30,000 a year, in fifteen years the majority of males in Holland under the age of eighteen will be Muslim. New arrivals or children of new arrivals.

Dutch tolerance for behaviors considered social pathologies elsewhere coincides with the decline in Christian church attendance, down in thirty years from over 80% to just above 6%. Church attendance is one thing, the abandonement of the culture which accompanies it is another.

It might be too late for Holland. Most of Europe along with Holland exhibits the internal contradictions of tolerant liberal democracies which even tolerate cultures INTOLERANT of tolerant liberal democracies.

This is not going to end well.

[newscaper]

I'm posting this because most references to this in the MSM deliberately leave out the gruesome details.

SEVERELY mutilated body of a western woman found
from AFP via Yahoo! - http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041114/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_us

The body of a blonde-haired woman with her legs and arms cut off and throat slit was found lying on the street in Fallujah, a notorious enclave for hostage-takers, marines said.
"It is definitely a Caucasian woman with long blonde hair," said a military official, who cut open a cover that had been over the corpse.
The gruesome discovery was made as the marines moved through the south of Fallujah, hunting out the remaining die-hard rebels after a week of fierce fighting to regain control of the city.
"It is a female... missing all four appendages, with a slashed throat and disembowled, she has been dead for a while but only in this location for a day or two," said Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the Navy Corps, who had inspected the body.
An AFP photographer embedded with the marines said the woman was wearing a blue dress and her face was completely disfigured.
---------------------------------------- --------
The similar AP article conveniently whitewashes the gruesome details.
Two blonde foreign women known to be missing are both AID!!!!! workers, one of whom is the CARE lady.
God knows what they did to her while she was still alive but with no arms & legs, but unfortunately we can imagine how they used her. Animals.

[chrys]

We need to end this "leave it alone - it will go away attitude" really quickly. Hopefully readership of this type of article will create a mind of logic in a "surface" "I'm Sorry" group of people in our world.

We need to be more aggressive - not less.

Terrorism is a destructive force threatening the ENTIRE world. The "whine" Iraq's not OBL is sad - OBL is but a small part of this sick group of "children" playing "king on the mountain" wanting to be the next cruel leader.

The United States just happens to be the "strong" target - a "take down" of Western people or on U.S. soil - adds huge numbers to the point total for the total points required to become the next dictator.

[Ron Deaton]

Thank you as always Dan, well written. The steel tipped arrow of the now mainstream blogoshere is the main hope I hold for this country. The old stream media has propagandized their viewpoint for so long to so many that "brainwashed" is an apt analogy. The left is so blinded by their own tolerance that when the enemy is within they are a clueless mass of protoplasm. Puffing your pipe and thinking kumbaya thoughts as you intellectually condescend to the masses works in the alternate universe of the collegiate world, but here in reality central, y'all just don't get it. Never will. It is beyond your pathetic, egocentric, brainwashed minds.

I feel an instalanche coming.