The Depths Of Savagery

An attack has been launched on a Paris-based satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. The attack has resulted in the death of 12 people, a mix of staffer members and police officers. The attackers, two men wearing black balaclavas and armed with AK-47s, rushed into the office and opened fire, while shouting Islamic slogans. The magazine had a long history of making fun of everyone; but what motivated this attack? The magazine has made fun of Mohammed. Recently, it had focused on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. Of course, they also made fun of French politicians, Christians, Catholics...basically, everyone.

Of course, most of the magazine's targets are not blood thirsty savages. Which is what the Islamists are. They are barbarians armed with assault rifles and a savage creed mired in the depths of the Dark Ages. There is no hope for coexistence, no common ground to be had with the Islamists. Not because we, the civilized people of the world, cannot live with them. It is because they have no interest in living with us. At best (as ISIS has shown) we are potential slaves. At worst, they want to exterminate us.

People like Howard dean have no understanding of this. Howard Dean is representative of the mindset of to many people in the West. He had this to say on today's Morning Joe

WILLIE GEIST: 11 people dead, at least ten injured and five more seriously.

MKA BRZEZINSKI: We're looking at journalists being among the dead, too.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Howard?

HOWARD DEAN: You know, this is a chronic problem. I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They're about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else's life, that's not what the Koran says. Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it's a cult.

BRZEZINSKI: Interesting, yeah.

DEAN: And I think you got to deal with these people. The interesting thing here, is we talked about guns the last time in regarding the United States, regarding how guns get in the hands of the kind of people that kill the two police officers here two weeks ago. France has tremendous gun control laws, and yet these people are able to get Kalashnikovs. So, this is really complicated stuff, and I think you have to treat these people as basically mass murderers. But I do not think we should accord them any particular religious respect, because I don't think, whatever they're claiming their motivation is, is clearly a twisted, cultish mind.

His failure to acknowledge the religious root of this attack and his failure to understand that a significant number of Muslims support attacks like this is troubling. Not because I care what Howard Dean thinks; he's an idiot. Instead, it is because what he thinks reflects what many people with power think. As long as people with power fail to correctly identify the root cause of the problem - ideological Islam - then we will continue to suffer from atrocities like this attack. Update: French authorities have announced they are looking for three terrorists, not two as originally reported.

Sources: BBC, Newsbusters