The "Root Causes of Terrorism"? How About "Hate"?

John Brennan is Obama’s deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security. He’s also a fool. You might remember Brennan as the guy who couldn’t tell us why Islamic terrorists want to kill us, even though bin Laden wrote a letter spelling it out clearly. Well now Brennan has opened his mouth again. Apparently, John thinks terrorists are victims, and he thinks holy war is justified.

One of the most perverted ideas liberals ever came up with was the idea that criminals aren’t responsible for their actions. Indeed, nothing highlights liberal stupidity more than this idea that criminals are “victims” of “root causes,” i.e. that criminals don’t murder, steal, rape or torture of their own free will, but they do it because they are victims of poverty or discrimination or cycles of violence. . . anything other than personal responsibility. Of course, liberals are major hypocrites, so this doesn’t apply to white collar criminals or “hate crime” criminals or anyone else they don’t like, but it does apply to just about every other run-of-the-mill murderer, thief, rapist or child molester.

This theory is of course crap. There simply is no nicer way to say it. It fails to account for the fact that humans have free will and can make up their own minds how they want to act. And it completely misunderstands human nature in that it doesn’t recognize that people do act for many reasons, and many of those reasons are indeed down right evil. It also denigrates those who have risen above a bad start in life, and encourages others never to try. And it endangers everyone else just so that liberals can feel smug.

Over the years, liberals have occasionally tried to expand this thinking into foreign relations. That’s why liberals excuse the mass murders in places like China and Africa as being the result of events that happened 200 years ago, and why they excuse corruption and dictatorship as “cultural.”

Well, now John Brennan is applying that same stupidity to terrorism. Yep. According to Brennan “violent extremists” are victims of “political, economic and social forces.”

This would be laughable if it wasn’t so asinine. There is no political, economic or social force that causes someone to go out and kill innocent people. Billionaire playboys like Osama bin Laden and the children-of-privilege terrorists of Al Qaeda are not driven by political, economic or social forces. They drive themselves. And what motivates them is hate. Hate that wells up from personality defects, and which is re-enforced by a hate-filled “religion” that teaches its adherents to see the world as divided between believers and infidels.

And that’s not the worst problem with Brennan’s thinking. Brennan claims that:

“Jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate about murdering innocent men, women and children.”

Ok, let’s take a look at this sucker. First, “jihad” is a word that can, in one sense, mean “a purification,” as Brennan claims. But its broader meaning is to wage a holy war against the infidels. What Brennan is doing by taking an ultra narrow interpretation of this word is the equivalent of interpreting the word “purge” as used by Stalin to mean “to clean out,” and ignoring what was done to those dissidents who were purged. Thus, either Brennan does not understand that he’s endorsing holy war, and he should be fired because he’s stupid and not qualified, or he is actively endorsing holy war, in which event he should be fired as a collaborator.

Secondly, Brennan is repeating a canard that Muslim-apologists keep repeating ceaselessly: “Islam does not condone . . . blah blah . . . against innocent men, women and children.” And this is true, to a degree. But what Brennan and the other apologists fail to mention is that only believers are considered “innocents,” and that the rules of Islam do not apply to infidels. To discuss Islam without addressing this distinction that it draws is dishonest at best.

To put this into perspective, the best Western equivalent that comes to mind is the distinction between humans and animals. Let’s put it this way, Brennan is saying the equivalent of “cattle have nothing to fear because American law forbids murder.” That's an absolutely true statement of American law, but it misses the crucial distinction that animals are not protected by laws that protect humans. The same is true with Islam, where the rules don't apply to dealings with infidels.

Finally, even if Brennan were somehow right in his interpretation of Islam, what does it matter when 1.4 billion Muslims follow a different interpretation of Islam than the one he espouses? Unless those 1.4 billion suddenly decide that Brennan is some new prophet, then it doesn’t matter what spin Brennan puts on their religion. We need to deal with their religion as it really is, not as arrogant John Brennan thinks it should be. Indeed, Brennan is spitting out nothing more than the modern version of the racist "noble savage" idea that liberals fell in love with in the Victorian era.

Brennan is not a man who should ever be put in the position of trying to understand or stop an enemy of this country. It is obviously beyond his ability. And that makes him at best a fool, and not-at-best a collaborator. It’s time for him to resign. Or better yet, send him to Pakistan and let him do an internship as a hostage of the religion of peace, so that he can get some first hand knowledge on this issue.