First off, I will tell you I had strong disagreements with things in this post, that aside, however, I think that Joe Carter @ Evangelical Outpost had an important contribution to the discussion.
I think it is worth the reading time, and worth thinking about.
Peaktalk had this post,LIKELY AND LETHAL SCENARIOS, which is really very grounded in the thinking.
Excerpts:
“Dutch writer Leon de Winter – who occasionally appears in the NYT – gave an interview to the daily newspaper De Telegraaf a week ago…. He made a number of statements that are so applicable to the war against jihadis in almost every country that I decided to translate a number of them”
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” adopting a “Guantanamo Bay†scenario for captured terrorists or suspects:
It’s not possible to reject that categorically. We have created a society based on laws in which our freedoms are anchored. The downside is that terrorists take advantage of these laws to organize themselves.”
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” But we should also count on the Muslim community to co-operate and De Winter knows how:
Muslims first have to acknowledge that it is their problem. ”
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“he is irked by the passivity of the Dutch citizenry and the lethal outcome of that particular attitude:
I am afraid that most people are not able to conceive of the magnitude of such a blow. It is too vague, too abstract. I do have the ability to imagine such a blow. As a writer I can create an imaginary world. In addition, I did grow up with the knowledge that the world can change all of a sudden. My childhood was characterized by evil: my parent’s war (De Winter is Jewish). They too could not imagine the war that was coming. On the other hand, there were a lot of people that did warn about what was coming but they were either not believed or were ridiculed.
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Three very important points are contained in this… the three that always seem to come up in the discussion:
1) There is a problem big enough that we will have to look at some highly distasteful ways of dealing with it.
2) The fact that most of this problem is incipient within Islam and the Muslim community and they must face their part in dealing with it.
3) The strong temptation that we all have in denial of the problem.