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Terrorists are Scumbags
One of the things that wrankles the Left and the MSM is naming evil. They howled when Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” They moaned when President Bush used the word “evil” over and over in referring to 9/11. To call something evil is to begin a discussion of whether such a thing actually exists in our morally relativistic, modern world.
But refusing to use strong language or using nuanced terms to describe what is afoot in the War on Terror is to hand the terrorists yet another victory.
Carlin Romano, a literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer and philosophy teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, makes the case that we need to use even stronger terms when describing the terrorists. He suggests “scum” (H/T The Corner).
After the terrorist near misses in London and Glasgow, British officials did the expected. They raised their nation’s threat-assessment level. They weighed the balance between civil liberties and new, tougher security measures. They pondered the latest fold in the elaborate tapestry before them, the possibility of a privileged jihadist cell tucked into the country’s National Health Service.
Finally, they produced the usual morally namby-pamby, logistics-heavy rhetoric about getting to the bottom of each case. They sounded deadly serious about investigating the attempts, deadly uninterested in morally judging what happened.
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You might think shrewd politicians would notice something wrong with this picture. After all, the last major national politician to insult those who violate civilized norms in expressing political anger — former French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who denounced Muslim rioters in France as “scum” for their car burnings and mayhem — won election as president of France despite predictions that he’d committed political suicide.
Yet the vast majority of statesmen believe in purely operational talk after terrorist acts . . . . Why does such a better way not include a call for sterner moral judgment, forcefully expressed?
Should Ayman al-Zawahri, deputy head of Al Qaeda, be the only “leader” quoted making moral judgments — that Arab regimes are “corrupt” — in a week of terrorist incidents? Why do media parrot this moral irresponsibility . . . ?
The first rationale amounts to political correctness, however odd that may ring in regard to terrorism . . . But if the admirable part of political correctness is that one shouldn’t utter unsupportable, reactionary ethnic, gender, or other generalizations, that principle is misapplied in the case of terrorists, who are picked out for condemnation by their acts alone. Aren’t “bastards,” “scum,” and so on precisely the right terms for people who seek to maim and kill presumably innocent others to make a political point?
[We should do this if for no other reason than to educate] the world’s Muslim youth. Instead of hearing moral praise and encouragement for terrorism from jihadists, which then gets mixed in their minds with the nonjudgmental, tactical talk of Western officials and media, they’d have to absorb a steady stream of insults of terrorists’ intelligence, morality, decency, and reasoning. Young Muslims would have to get used to hearing jihadist heroes described as savages, scum, and uncivilized losers, along with the reasons why. It would intellectually force them, far more than they are forced today, to choose between two visions of the world.
The terrorists are baking children and gunning down schoolgirls. Calling them scum is too polite.
In essence, The Surge is a grand scum removal operation. Here’s a new bumper sticker that even Al Gore should embrace: “Make the world a cleaner place: Support the Surge.”