What if the West took terrorism to the Muslims' home turf?
Here’s a VERY interesting discussion we had at lunch today here in Boystown, with more than a few people at the table fans of alternate history works by the likes of Harry Turtledove and shows like FOX’s old Sliders series (not, as Oprah believes, about those little hamburgers she has by the dozens at “snack time”, but the show starring Jerry O’Connel as a scientist with a magic remote control that slides him into dimensions where history played out differently).
Our friend Panda met most of us at Nookie’s Tree today, where we all had samplings off their fall menu (chicken pot pie, braised spare ribs, hearty beef stew, pumpkin ravioli, with stuffing and corn bread and sweet poato casserole), except Panda, who had a hamburger like always (and then, like always, covered it in ketchup, ate about 1/4 of it, and then regretted he didn’t get a “fall special” like the rest of us and instead got a hamburger again like always. “It’s those raccoons in my walls,” he said. “They make me so tired with their gnawing and scraping and talking all night that I can’t think straight and didn’t want to read the menu because reading things makes my head hurt”).
Oh, Panda. Perpetually bedeviled by imaginary raccoons, forever ordering hamburgers he never really enjoys because he doesn’t like reading menus.
Randomly, while using a butter knife to scoop more ketchup out of the Heinz bottle, Panda started talking about the movie 2012, the Roland Emmerich disaster flick we’ve mentioned before on this site (which we thought was boring…a remarkable feat, indeed, for a movie about the end of the world). “I read on Perez that they wanted to blow up Medina, Ohio in that movie but then Muslims said they’d kill everyone involved with the movie if they did that, so they blew up Rome instead,” Panda told us, getting most of the story right.
But, it was the Medina in the Middle East the Muslims threatened to kill people over, as it’s written in the Koran, somewhere, that none of the Muslim holy sites will ever be destroyed — and so if a movie showed Mecca, Medina, and the Dome of the Rock, Hagia Sofia, and other famous mosques being obliterated, Muslims apparently would have seizures in the street, unable to process what they were seeing.
They would go more unhinged, apparently, than they do when someone draws a picture of Muhammad (“I bet he looked just like a big butt,” Panda said, “and that’s why they won’t draw him. A big butt for a face, or he looked like that big guy in Goonies who ate the Snickers bars and had the messed up face. I wouldn’t be drawing him either if he looked like that. I’d scare myself.”).
For too long the West has molly-coddled Muslims, with the PC police geared up to come after anyone who speaks the truth about them. Islam is not a religion of peace; it’s not even a religion in our book. It’s just a giant cover for a worldwide terrorist organization bent on global domination, something that makes C.O.B.R.A. from the old G.I. Joe cartoons look tame, religious, and peaceful in its own right.
When Muslims shout Allah Akbar and kill our soldiers, ram planes into our buildings, and set off bombs in the streets or on buses, the MSM rushes to insist how misunderstood Muslims are, how peaceful they really are, and how Islam is just another way of saying “I sure love all mankind”.
Yah, right.
Panda, still trying to get more ketchup out of that bottle, like a sunbear after the last of the honey in a slippery jug, asked what we all thought would have happened if Roland Emmerich had the stones to show Islam’s holy sites being destroyed, as Emmerich gleefully showed the Vatican, the Christ statue in Rio, and Tibetan monestaries being crushed in the apocalypse.
We all agreed Emmerich was right, and that all over the peaceful, misunderstood Muslim world turbaned, black-robed lunatics would have climbed up into minurets to scream for the director’s head, and for the deaths of every single person on the credits roll for the movie (because, Islam, you must remember, is the religion of peace, and this is how peaceful people behave when they don’t like something in pop culture: they call for beheadings and the deaths of hundreds).
Panda pushed the question and wondered what would happen if one day the West got sick of “all this terrorist crap” and Westerners started using terrorist tactics against the Muslim world, to “see how they like it”.
We’re actually surprised Muslims haven’t attacked the Vatican and taken out St. Peter’s by now. It would be a lot easier for them to do than hitting anything in the United States. For anyone who’s ever been to Italy, you must realize how incompetent the Italian government is in general. Garbage strikes can last for years, it seems, and every cop we’ve run across in Italy sure seemed amenable to bribes of all denominations. The Vatican itself is defended by gay swiss men wearing brightly colored clown suits. There are no ninja nuns lurking in the shadows like gargoyles protecting the place. There are no metal detectors to get into the basillica itself. The last time any of us was there, we could still find unlocked wooden doors, unguarded, where we could access storerooms and long corridors in which we could wander as long as we wanted without ever being stopped by anyone.
Muslims remind us a lot of a dog named Zodie who we’re friends with. Zodie, when left alone, will rip up newspapers, pee on the carpet, destroy a pillow or two, and cause controlled chaos in the apartment whenever she’s upset about something or wants to lash out at the bad humans who’ve been ignoring her. But, she doesn’t ever do anything TOO TERRIBLE, as if she knows if she did she’d take a last ride to the pound. She’ll sit there, with her big eyes, staring up at the Thanksgiving turkey, smacking her lips and thinking about going for that ultimate score, but she won’t do it. She somehow knows the punishment for that would be much, much worse than what she’d get after ripping up the latest Vogue.
If Muslims hit the Vatican, or took out another major Christian symbol, we bet the payback for that would be the destruction of Mecca or Medina. At least we hope it would, because the West can’t keep standing by idly while Muslims attack and attack and attack.
If it’s really true that Muslims believe none of their religious sites can be destroyed, and someday, or in some alternate universe, either a military strike or a reverse-terrorist attack takes out the Dome of the Rock or one of their major mosques, then the faith in Islam could very well be shaken in many people. It seems like that would have the effect of pulling back the curtain on the Wizard, rendering all those crazed imams and ayatollahs powerless as people realized most of what’s in the Koran is utter garbage.
There would probably be WWIII, but it would be a war between a civilized West with modern weapons versus people who want it to be the Middle Ages. Terrorist attacks and the economic games the Saudis play are one thing, but a direct confrontation between the West and Islam would not go well for Islam at all.
And it would be wonderful, in the aftermath of that, if Islam was then treated worldwide like Nazism was in Germany. No more mosques, no more Korans, no more coddling of terrorists.
We tend to believe Muslims realize all of this too.
But we wonder what would have happened if they had taken out the White House and the US Capitol on 9/11 back in 2001, instead of hitting the Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Maybe it wouldn’t take a religious, Christian target to launch a full scale reprisal against Islam…maybe if they had hit American political institutions with vested emotional importance to all Americans, Islam would have been struck back hard too.
The same could be true if they hit Parliament or Buckingham Palace, or if they took out the Eifel Tower or Arc D’Triumphe. There are a lot of buildings in the world that seem like they would have already been targeted by Muslims, but have been left alone…perhaps knowing that if they hit these targets, the consequences for them would be too great for them to bear.
It’s Zodie the Dog versus Thanksgiving Dinner some more. She knows what she can get away with, and what she can’t.
It would be very interesting if Turtledove or someone like Tom Clancy ever wrote a book in which the West hit back at Islam by taking out its holiest sites in retaliation for some abominable attack on Western culture and history.
What do you think would happen?
Maybe we’ll collect enough ideas and write some fiction ourselves in that vein.
What think you?
© 2009, HillBuzz. All rights reserved.
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I haven’t (and won’t) see 2012 (least ways whilst its in Theatres…I don’t have the cash to spare to take myself and one of my teens). But as we are special affects ‘junkies’ here (and who doesn’t like a good end of world, with a lameass President in the WH scenario?) I am ‘officially’ boycotting 2012 for the lack of stones in NOT putting something Islamic up for cyber destruction. Not cool that the Vatican rolls, Christ tumbles, Tibetan monks scurry…and our peaceful friends don’t get even the fringe of a prayer rug disturbed.
Don’t ever, ever lose sight of the fact that Flight 93 (which went down like 20 minutes from my house) was intended for DC (the WH? Capitol?) and was taken down by passenger rebellion (or G-d help us all) the US AF (though locally, again close by, no real talk or ‘I saw the fighter jets’ so I really, really believe in the ‘let’s roll story). A field in Shanksville PA was not an intended target (and they had already flown over Cleveland and Pittsburgh airspace–uber civilian targets there–and were flying visually following the PA Turnpike).
What would have a second DC hit have caused retaliation wise, thankfully, we will never know.
Would any writer have the cojones to write a story like that? Probably yes…but who would publish it? Would retailers who carry it be subject to Fatwa too? I think they are playing the West really, really well…yet…look at the discussion (read backlash) at the media coverage of Ft. Hood and of the KSM trial-to-be. Heck…some people will even take note of how Islam is treated in totally fictional movies. Hmmm…
I’m currently working on a story like that. Actually, it’s a series of novels. The first volume is still in rough draft form.
I’ve titled the series “III” (simply the Roman Numerals, evoking the Third World War). Briefly, the meta-arch of the series is an alternate history where 9/11 is postponed, bin Laden forms an operational alliance with Iran, and the attacks occurring in September 2004 are much, much more widespread and devastating, resulting in a chain of events that spiral out of control into a Third World War.
There are additional hijacked planes on the East Coast, the Capital Building is destroyed along with a big portion of Congress, terrorists systematically setting super-wildfires on the West Coast, large groups of Hamas/Hezbolla/Hispanic terrorists infiltrating up from Mexico to wreck havoc in Midwestern cities, and a terrible horror inflicted on New York City that I won’t reveal until I start posting portions of the story.
This will eventually result in Mecca being reduced to rubble by kinetic strikes (the perfectly clean alternative to nuclear weapons), and the Islamic world being reduced by a couple hundred million in population.
I welcome any ensuing fatwas, personally.
In the months after 9/11, there was a dustup over Cheney saying that the nuclear option was not “off the table” in the case of Afghanistan. This is the real nuclear option, with small but actual nuclear bombs that melt mountains and burn the air, not the fake crap Harry Reid talks about in the Senate.
There is basically a pact among powers that if nukes are used, it’s all over. The terrorists don’t abide by this, but they are incapable of getting even those Russian suitcase nukes.
We can effectively limit ourselves into defeat by not blowing up heavily fortified mosques and reading Miranda rights to terrorists. We could have had a lot less casualties (on both sides) if we took an educated guess as to a 100 mile radius of bin Laden’s location and nuked it into a glass parking lot. Then we call the Taliban and ask for their unconditional surrender on our terms in two hours. When they refuse, we nuke their military transports as they flee Kabul.
Talk about an alternate history.
Don’t be too dismissive of the Swiss Guard. Along with the ceremonial garb and weapons (which they train with, they have Sigs, H&Ks, and other modern stuff. AND – shooting it a national sport for them, they grow up shooting. Cities and Cantons have regular matches, and seeing kids toting guns in the streets is not uncommon.
A nice (apocraphal) story tells of a German general talking with his Swiss counterpart.
“How many men do you have under arms?”
“I can put a million armed Swiss, all crack shots, into acton in an hour.”
“What if I invade with 5 million?”
“Then all my soldiers would fire 5 times and go home for a beer.”
As for Islam – we should have held the treat of doing to Medina or Mecca what Rome did to Carthage if OBL wasn’t handed over to us, along with all his staff. And then make good on it.
suffice to say, there’s a reason the Swiss have been allowed to stay neutral in every war in recent memory, and it ain’t the banks alone.
Yep – they threaten to cut off the supply of chocolate.
I have a different take. What would happen if a meteriorite hurled itself at Medina and pounded it into the sand, creating a big hole? How would they react? They can’t say that it was something the west had orchestrated. But you can count on one thing – they will go berserk, and could end up taking each out of existence.
Great post and comments. And as for the book on the scenario you describe, I think Dan Brown should be the one to write it (and to suffer the corresponding Fatwa).
This is getting to be a bit too much. Has anyone heard about Best Buy? Apparently, they ran ads but didn’t mention Thanksgiving, but instead wished Happy Eid Al-Adna (Festival of Sacrifice) to the Muslims. They don’t say Merry Christmas anymore, and say they don’t because they want to honor all peoples but now we are supposed to recognize a festival of sacrifice. I was in India on business one year during this “festival”. It just leaves you speechless. It was bad enough that we went from Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays. Now this.
A friend called me about this today and was livid because she and her husband just spent quite a bit of money for a new TV and computer stuff for the kids. I just told her to take it back and tell them why.
They have lost my business for good.
I had a similar reaction and posted on my blog.
http://daysofchange.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/day-383/
In an alternate reality, Islam, like most other major religions would have gone through a reformation about 300 or so years ago. Then it would have fractured into different groups and sects with their own ‘take’ on the Quran, far more liberal and diverse than Sunni’s and Shiites…..there would have been multiple versions and interpretations of the the Quran, and various degrees of ‘Muslim’ denominations would exist from extremely liberal and modern to the super fundy.
Most of all, due to the reformation, the embracing of more modern thinking would have taken place, and implemented would have been one of the MAJOR tenants found in most religions NOT found in Islam. That being the respect and value of individuals, and a degree of tolerance for other beliefs.
This is why Islam is a lesser and less ‘respectful’ religion in the pantheon. Not all religions are equal….some self police, some try to live and adapt to the modern world. Most of all, some really do make the world a better place.
Not so with Islam.
And why I get furious when people say “Christians did it”, yeah, like 200 years ago max. Islam condones violence and intolerance is when of it’s basic planks….behaviors that while ‘might’ be exhibited by other religions, is never condoned by the writings or religious leaders.
So, in an alternate reality, the few jihadists would be openly and vehemently denounced by the majority of their reformed and more modern religious kin and more internal housekeeping would take place. Instead, we’re met with crickets everytime an act of violence takes place. Until there is a reformation and internal punishments, I have no respect for it.
Goddess and her big hookah bless you boys. At least someone who’s not a right winger is willing to call it for what it is. I am sick and TIRED of all the PC crap. It’s just like the beginning scenes of Holocaust, with the Jewish matriarch in denial until she gets sent to Warsaw. Think what positive stuff we could accomplish if we didn’t have to spend so much of our resources just treading water.
I’ve started thinking that a new Crusade may be rolling around in people’s heads and Panda may just have hit on something. Not sayin’ I espouse it, but it’s inevitable that with this much irrational hatred being thrown at us by muslims, retaliation (and I don’t mean war as we conduct it) may well come out of this. I don’t think the world of islam (small letters are intentional) has any idea of the rage they have created. Consequences, little turbaned desert folk, consequences.
The same happened with the film version of Angels & Demons. In the novel, the villain was the Muslim “Hassassin,” going around and killing the Cardinals and attempting to blow up the Vatican with the CERN anti-matter.
In the film? Whitewashed into a generic, non-Muslim mercenary-for-hire.
I lost interest in the film (even though I dug the book) and still haven’t seen it yet just because of that.
I’d give Islam a pass on attacking DC, as long as congress is in session.
That will probably be the only way we can actually get rid of all the incumbent politicians.
It will be sad to lose all the history, but we can build a monument on the spot and relocate the capitol out of the swamp.
30+ years ago, I grabbed a Reader’s Digest Condensed selection, out of desperation for SOMETHING to read – one of the stories’ premise was an passenger airplane is hijacked {don’t recall if it originated in Europe/Greece/the Middle East} and flown into the Dome of the Rock, by PLO types, to FORCE all Muslims to attack Israel {of course, all “public” pronouncements about it blame Israel for the plane’s crashing, & destroying a ‘Muslim holy site’} – of course, I can NOT find the book {NO CLUE as to the title}. If you could locate it, it might make a good launch-point for you ………………
Semper Fi’
DM
I LOVED SLIDERS. I wish that show had stayed on the air and they didn’t kill the professor!!
The actor who played Professor Arturo wanted to leave, so it was unavoidable on the show’s part. I read some of the behind-the-scenes dirt on how Scifi didn’t know how to handle an unexpected hit show and dropped the ball with Jerry O’Connell.
You would think that the Vatican would be a prime target for the Muslims. The answer is very simple and not many people realize. There is a collusion between Islam and Catholicism to attack their common enemy (Jews and Christians) and bring about the Antichrist. The Catholic Church and Islam share much in common, and according to a former Jesuit cardinal named Augustine Bea, the Vatican created Islam to persecute the true believers, or heretics of the Catholic faith. The Islamic conquest was ordered by Rome for several purposes, including getting rid of all Jews and Christians (true believers), protect the Augustinian Monks and Roman Catholics, and conquer Jerusalem for Rome. This is why no Catholic shrines nor Rome was attacked during this time, only the Jews and Christians were killed. The devil uses deception to further his agenda, this is why the Nazi’s and Muslims worked together to destroy their common enemy. And the same thing goes with the US government using Muslims to create a fake threat called the war on terror. And since the Muslims are against infidels and America, the government blew up buildings in New York City and blamed it on the Muslim extremists. And the movie will keep playing until people wake up to the truth and leave the theater.