Eradicating totalitarianism; or I love it when Huffington Post makes a point for me

Bookworm:

Huffington Post leans Left.  It is not a media outlet that believes that the only way to destroy the jihadist mindset is to wipe it out from top to bottom.  Instead, HuffPo’s editorial policy makes clear that, in keeping with most major media outlets, it’s very certain that, somewhere out there, there’s a peaceful resolution to our problems with jihadist Islam — and one, moreover, that does not involve HuffPo writers getting shot or beheaded.  The HuffPo collective believes this despite daily news reports demosntrating that the jihadis have world domination as their goal, and that they intend to achieve it through the purifying force of hundreds of millions of deaths.

Even Qatari-owned Al Jazeera is slightly further along the path of jihadist discovery than is the American media.  It is Al Jazeera, after all, that took the time to interview Jurgen Todenhofer, a German journalist who managed to embed with ISIL and return alive. Todenhofer, as is true for so many European (and American) Leftists, seems to have gone in assuming that the bad press about ISIS, much of which ISIS promulgates itself, just couldn’t be true. Imagine his surprise to discover that ISIS is even worse than we imagined:

As far as our meetings with the ISIL fighters were concerned, the discussions were very hard. I have read the Quran many times in German translation, and I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam. I didn’t see any mercy in their behaviour. Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.

These were very difficult discussions, especially when they were talking about the number of people who they are willing to kill. They were talking about hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that.

Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, Todenhofer falls back into the usual rhetorical tropes of the Left: Make nice with Islam, stop bombing the bad guys, let them fight it out against each other.  Qatar, which is trying to be aggressively modern while maintaining a medieval economy (complete with serfs), all the while paying off jihadists in the hope that, like the crocodile, the jihadists will eat them last, tries to tip toe that same delicate line — it warns how dangerous jihadis are (and the jihadis are a lot closer to Qatar than to the US), all the while squirming away from doing anything that might turn the jihadis’ gimlet eyes on Qatar itself.

I don’t believe in any of that “peaceful solution” talk. I believe that, when people have imbibed with their mother’s milk a toxic ideology dedicated to murdering and enslaving all but a select few, they don’t just walk away from it or wear themselves out in a few months or years. Instead, if unchecked, they spread a wide swath of death and destruction. Look at how the Soviets managed to kill endlessly for seventy years while the Chinese communists kept the bodies piling up for forty years. Between the two of them, guesstimates as to the violent and vile deaths they cause run between 70,000,000 and 100,000,000 children, women, and men.

The reason that the German Nazi and Japanese Bushido culture didn’t achieve the decades’-long “success” that the Soviets and ChiCom did (although not for want of trying) is because the Allies — inspired by Churchill and powered by America — destroyed them. We didn’t do targeted strikes. We didn’t engage in endless rounds of peace talks. We didn’t diddle away time with partially enforced sanctions. We didn’t back down when they threatened us.

Instead, we ripped them out, root and branch, threw them away, and policed the next three generations to make very, very sure that they had fully abandoned their predecessors’ evil ways and embarked on a different path, one more conducive to freedom and peace.

Which gets me back to HuffPo. As I said, the HuffPo collective would never be caught dead admitting that the only way to preserve and promote universal freedom is to kill those whose ultimate goal is to wipe out liberty. And yet, apparently without irony, HuffPo has just published a post promoting a show of post-WWII photographs, and in that post, they make a stellar argument in favor of turning every gun in the Western world onto the jihadists as soon as possible:

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