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Unforeseeable or Preventable?

11.17.06 @ 12:01AM

BROTHERLY HATE
Re: Patrick O'Hannigan's On Forecasting Fratricide in Iraq:

Fratricide in Iraq wasn't inevitable. Shia and Sunni work together when it suits them and kill each other when it suits them. In Iraq, Sunni and Shia worked together after our invasion. Al Qaeda decided to ignite a civil war by attacking Shia civilians. The Shia waited patiently for about a year for the U.S. to stop the Sunni massacres of Shia, but instead of killing the Sunni murderers, Bremer negotiated with them behind the scenes, trying to woo them into the government while calling them nasty names in the press. Finally, the Shia had had enough and decided to retaliate. Paul Bremer deserves all of the credit for the mess and mass murder in Iraq today.
-- Roger D. McKinney
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

If O'Hannigan can point to his having published an article prior to the Iraq invasion that predicted deliberate Muslim fratricide, I'll take his criticisms of the Administration more seriously. As it is, they simply seem to form another example of 20-20 hindsight.

He questions "...whether people in the president's inner circle learned lessons from...the etymology of the word 'assassin'"? OK, it comes from hashish -- but what point is that supposed to make?

Dubya can be effectively criticized for being too "nice' to Islam; for failing to hit Syria and Iran; for not firing General Zinni on January 21, 2001; and probably for many other things. I don't see how he can be criticized for failing to use the Palantir to foresee Muslims killing Muslims in order to embarrass the USofA.

In fact, on re-reading O'Hannigan's effort, the whole article fails to hang together, and looks like a patch job of multiple rants pasted up for AmSpec.
-- Richard Donley
New Lyme, Ohio

Patrick O'Hannigan replies:
I would like to assure Mr. Richard Donley that the essay was not "a patch job of multiple rants." I'm pleased to say that no less an authority that Robert Spencer thinks well of it (here).

Moreover, Donley's reference to assassin as being derived from "hashish" is correct, but incomplete. Hashish was the drug of choice associated with a secret Islamic order of killers that originated in the 11th century. If Mr. Donley thinks I inserted an oblique anti-drug message into an anti-Muslim pastiche, then he missed not just one point, but two-- and for that I am sorry.

Mr. Patrick O'Hannigan nails the problem in our national "forecasting" about the inter-civilizational war radical Mohammedans have once again launched against us. The forecasters have cast their own religious preferences into their interpretive template. When one commences one's reasoning upon faulty premises, rest assured that faulty conclusions result. "Garbage in, garbage out."

The social elites who dominate our government bureaus all share the secularist false 'religion' (first widely exported by Revolutionary France and cursing the world ever since). The "progressivist" secular, humanist "religion" produces: "positive" thinking, naturalism, materialism, scientism, and usually also socialism; and it further assumes that all human change necessarily produces advancement. Secular elites also assure themselves that they in their human rationality stand personally superior to any and every advocate of any supernatural religion. They claim most particular superiority over those who confess that the LORD is God, and Jesus Christ as Lord. The secularist (correctly) views Christianity as even more dangerous to secular religiosity than the manifestly murderous Mohammedans.

For all his pretensions to "multiculturalism" and "global thinking" the elite secularist suffers just as much provincialism, blindness and self-pride as those he looks down upon as benighted lesser beings. Following his irrational faith in human "progress" the secularist ignores contrary lessons offered in abundance by competing religions and by objective human history. He sees the past as always per se worse than today, and tomorrow as necessarily more "advanced" than today. Under his blinkered religious thinking the secularist presupposes that all persons in the world must think and react just as he would, and all for the betterment of man. Small wonder that our best and brightest did not "forecast" Mohammedans murdering Mohammedans on vast scales.

Of greater concern to me is the worthy Dennis Prager's apparent sharing secularism's foolish presumptions. For an orthodox Jew to find Mohammedan bloodthirstiness "unforeseeable" -- Ow. Both reason and revelation provide irrefutable evidence of Mohammed's fixation on lust, blood and death. Reason directs us to the long historical record of Mohammedan crimes and hatred. Their mistreatment of Jews alone would certainly prove the lie to protestations that Mohammed preached a "religion of peace." Let alone all of us other "dhimmis" (root concept: dimunition). Just as secularist Marxian sects engaged in vicious intramural violence while each deeming themselves superior to all non-Marxists, so also have, and do, Mohammedan sectarians.

As for Divine revelation: Mohammedans claim that "Mohammed is the prophet" of a self-conceived god they call Allah. They further claim their descent from Ishmael, firstborn son of Abraham. But Almighty God told Abraham, about this son: "He will be a wild man, his hand will be against every man". God ordained that Ishmael, "son of the bondwoman", be "cast out" of the family of Abraham, declared to be no son of Abraham's -- dis-adopted, as it were. God ordained "through Isaac shall your seed [descendants] be called" unto God for salvation from sin. For through Isaac came Israel, and Judah, and David, and all of God's true prophets, and ultimately our final Prophet, Priest and King, the Lord Jesus Christ. Denying Christ is Lord and God, Mohammed most certainly is a false prophet. He abysmally fails the test of one-hundred-percent accuracy fixed by God in the Torah. Mohammed advocates actions which violate the Ten Commandments revealed two thousand years before he ever came to be. And, the god who Mohammed claims to represent is most certainly less than our Almighty God and LORD. The unholy Koran's "god" is but a pale, partial description of the One True God Who revealed Himself in ancient times and in diverse manners -- Law, Prophets, and Writings -- and finally some six hundred years before Mohammed by His Son. Mohammed stole his material from Judaism and Christianity. Mohammed's god is not their Immanuel. Mohammedanism lacks a doctrine of grace -- thus knows no means of reconciliation of man to God or of man to man; the only "peace" Mohammedans know is the "peace" of the grave. Mohammedism lacks a doctrine of Trinity -- thus knows no means of reconciling the one with the many in amicable unity; Mohammedanism is inescapably Monist, forcing all to submit to one, "might makes right," the law of the jungle. Mohammedanism lacks a doctrine of atonement -- thus knows no means of obtaining pardon for sin and assurance of God's favor; all is "works righteousness," the way of Cain who envied and killed his elect brother. Just as for Cain, Mohammed's true "god" was himself. Mohammed's adherents do likewise.

I do hope that Mr. Prager contemplates God's revelation of Himself. God's Word reveals the true, pagan pattern of Mohammedan self-consuming bloodlust. I also recommend that our "forecasters" consider Mohammedan behaviors in light of our Creator's revelation of what fallen men of any stripe will do. Thus says the LORD: "All who hate Me love death."
-- David James Hanson
Fayette, Iowa

"'Widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims' were 'completely unforeseeable.'"

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