They Live!

Many years ago I was in a discussion group where pacifism was bandied about with great abandon. It turned out that the chief pacifist and I didn’t live too far away; so we met for coffee at his campus and got to know each other a bit. His position ended up similar to Samuel’s, namely that he would fight if someone were attacking his wife or if someone were attacking his country, but that was it. He frequently employed the pacifist mantra, “there’s got to be a better way.”

As to having coffee with an Islamist, for the uninitiated, that wouldn’t be possible, at least not with an Islamist in good standing. Go back in history a thousand years and ask a medieval Christian to sit down with a devil worshiper for ale. That is what it would be like in the mind of an Islamist to sit down with me. They are encouraged to kill infidels and I would certainly be an infidel in his eyes. I’m sure they haven’t all killed infidels, but if you were ever in a Christian Church where the pastor, or some visiting evangelist, implied that you weren’t a real Christian unless you were witnessing every day, you have some idea of what the Islamist evangelists are telling the faithful: You’re not a real Muslim unless you’re killing infidels – and don’t forget the infidels in your own country. Many leaders of Islamic countries are puppets of the Great Satan. They need to be killed as well. The only encouragement I find in this comparison is that most Christians do not go out witnessing every day.

Someone unfamiliar with the teachings of Islamism, Heinlein, or both might think me excessive, but after having studied Islamism for awhile, the comparison seems apt.

I get the Sci Fi channel and Jason’s words “just listen to yourself,” are the hackneyed device used in countless films. Only the hero or heroine know the aliens are out there doing their worst, but the idea of them, aliens who aren’t from around here is so, well, alien, that no one who hasn’t seen them will believe it. So the hero or heroine is ridiculed, perhaps even locked up until much to everyone’s horror which is often accompanied by an inordinate amount of mayhem, the aliens become manifest to everyone. Given the cynical nature of most Americans, we may very well have to have the mayhem before very many of us believe that they really do exist. Much better the mayhem, I hear Americans saying, than having to read a large number of boring books by Islamists and political scientists about Islamism.

Oh well. Suit yourself.

Lawrence Helm