"I have rights!" Ramzi Mohammed wailed from
inside.
He hated the West and plotted to kill us; and when caught, demanded we treat him under our laws. Terrorists like this man wants to terrorize a society that they assume will protect them. And amazingly enough, many in our society do want to treat him as worthy of all our society's protections designed to keep a too-powerful state from oppressing an honest man.
I find it maddeningly stupid that some of us think we should allow our enemies to kill us while we have to slap the cuffs on them, read them their rights, and pay for a lawyer to seek a loophole to get them out on the streets again.
This doesn't venerate our principles or prove we are better than them--it threatens our principles by making it too hard to defeat our enemies. The basic problem is that as long as we seek a law enforcement solution we have little choice but to operate within our laws. We must do this because we are better than our enemies. But also because a government used to fighting enemies contrary to our laws will ultimately treat citizens in the same manner. So if we see the fight as a law enforcement job, we risk our freedoms by trying to fit those who fight way outside its boundaries as if they are mere common criminals seeking to be parasites off of our society and not mass murderers trying to destroy our society.
Playing defense against these enemies under our criminal rules is a mistake. The weapons these thugs might use expand in their lethality every year, and we can't risk them getting the worst weapons. The key is to accept that enemies who do not accept our principles and try to destroy our society must not enjoy the protections that our principles offer our own people. The key is to see this as a war where we must destroy our enemy, not convince twelve angry men to send them to prison. This is a war, and we must target the thugs abroad and at home with wartime rules.
Part of the problem, of course, is that these individual nutballs are supported by nations that would love to help individuals kill lots of us. Absent this state support that allows thugs to kill on a mass scale, perhaps we could treat them as we treat common criminals.
Amazingly enough, we extend similar attitudes to the governments that support terrorists. If you believe that thinking about enjoying our society's rights is restricted to individual terrorists, look upon how Iran under the rule of the murderous mullahs expects to be treated:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust is a matter for academic discussion and the West should be more tolerant of his views, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.
They have rights, you see. Who are we to get upset at a little talk of eliminating Jews? I mean, shouldn't we calmly debate which countries should be wiped from the map? It is an academic question, right? We should grant the mullahs the toleration that we claim is essential and that we're always prattling on about, right? We discuss warrantless search warrants and they discuss how and when Jews and other assorted infidels should die and in what order. What's the difference? Where's our tolerance?
The amazing thing is that many in the West are just as ready to grant nutball regimes the tolerance we'd extend to Canada in a debate over lumber just as readily as they demand we extend our legal protections to individual terrorists who try to kill us.
We must treat this struggle as a war and defeat our enemies without making our job impossible by treating terrorists as presumed innocent and treating terrorist regimes as just another member of the diverse community of nations. Ultimately, only by destroying the state supporters of this terrorism can we make the problem one that our law enforcement personnel and courts can address.
Iran does not deserve the benefit of our rules designed to respect rational governments. Iran's mullahs aren't even playing the same game let alone using the same rules.
Are we so stupid as a society that we don't even think our way of life is worthy of defending? Will we love our principles to death? Our death?
