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Another American dies because of our involvement with Muslims
Steven Vincent, apparently a very good freelance writer and reporter who has lived and written extensively in Iraq, was kidnapped and murdered yesterday, his body left on the side of a road with multiple gunshot wounds to the head. Last weekend he had written an article for the The New York Times about how Iraqi police officers are assassinating former Baath party members, and then he was killed himself. Was it worth it for an American to die to reveal the truth about the crimes that one Iraqi faction is doing to another? Does any of this really matter to us? Is any of this really our concern? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: any interaction between us and Muslims can only harm us, mess us up in myriad ways, ranging from profound moral and cultural confusion to mental dhimmitude to violent death. The only sensible stand of Westerners (and other non-Muslims) toward the world of Islam is to have as little contact with it as possible. Our watchwords must be Containment and Isolation, not Engagement and Reform. To avoid misunderstanding, I hasten to add that this does not mean abandoning the ideological campaign to educate people about the realities of Islam, and to support genuine (i.e. ex-Muslim) reformist spokesmen coming from within Islam, such as Hirsi Ali. But the ultimate focus of such efforts must be, not to reform Islam (because most likely that is impossible), but to expose and delegitimize Islam as part of our larger effort to put Islam in a place where it will be powerless to threaten us.
To avoid yet another misunderstanding, I’m not blaming Steven Vincent’s death on America’s involvement in Iraq. I’m saying that his death resulted from his too close involvement in the internal conflicts of mutually murderous Iraqi factions that in a proper view of things would not be his or our concern. In that sense, his death, while not a direct result of the U.S. intervention, is a microcosm of the U.S. intervention, in which we attempt the impossible task of “cleaning up” a tribal Islamic society of its ills and evils, an effort that harms and compromises us and distracts us from our true interests. Email entry |