Charlie Hebdo

There are several things to think about concerning the recent bombings at Charlie Hebdo’s offices  in  Paris. It is important to make neither too much nor too little of it. It was not an act of war. It was a criminal act committed by a small number of people. The conflict with Muslim terrorists is not a world war and not an existential threat as many conservatives assert.  (I wonder if even they really mean it,  because they generally seem content with the way the administration of George W. Bush handled the problem. A real world war and existential threat would call for giving the enemy not the mild and measured war of Bush and Colin Powell, but at least a taste of Franklin Roosevelt’s war, which is something they are not advocating.)

However this crime does  illustrate again that many Muslims are fanatical savages who have no place in a civilized order, and that much of Islam remains a religion of violence and intolerance and a danger to the rest of the world. It also illustrates the hypocrisy and fatuousness of Obama and those in his administration who are talking about responding by having a conference on “extremists” , finding themselves unable even to identify their enemy by name, apparently feeling too insecure and politically correct to call a spade a spade or even a diminutive digging utensil.   

The correct operational response to these and other Muslim terrorists is to hunt them and their material backers down and kill them, ruthlessly and remorselessly.  Those of us not in the armed forces should support those who will have to do the tough, dangerous work of eliminating these people.  The correct symbolic response is to both advocate free speech and practice free speech by doing something offensive to the Muslim fanatics’ sensibilities. People should drag out and tell and post their grossest and most tasteless rag head jokes. Theatres should present revivals of Voltaire’s Mahomet.  The cartoons from Charlie Hebdo should be in every Sunday paper. Cable networks and broadcasters should run marathons of old movies about fighting and killing dangerous Muslim fanatics – the more politically incorrect, stereotyping,  and supportive of colonialism the better. CAIR and other front groups should be lampooned and insulted unmercifully. Campus speech codes protecting Islam from insults should be violated as brutally and sophomorically as possible. Enough is enough. A point should be made. People should have good, rude, offensive fun making it.