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When I was 9 years old I remember coming home from school and seeing on the T.V. a plane
fly into the twin towers, and then another.
One tower fell, and then another.
President George W. Bush addressed the nation,
“Good evening, today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under
attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks.”
And then over the years journalists and politicians labeled Osama Bin Laden “evil” and identified
him as part of a larger “Axis of Evil”.
“My friends, we are facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century — radical
islamic extremism, and we are going to defeat this evil.”
But I think we need to be careful with who and with what we call “evil” because to
call someone evil is to insinuate that they are somehow possessed by a demon or that they
wish to kill the “good guys”. Calling someone “evil" is a way to dehumanize them
and it’s the stuff of superhero movies, not real life.
Because in real life, the villain, in this case Osama Bin Laden, didn’t see himself
as the villain. He saw the United States as the villain and himself as the good guy, nor
did the hijackers see the thousands of innocent people in those towers as innocent.
In order for somebody to kill themselves for a greater cause they must obviously feel certain
that they are in the right, and in their case, that God was on their side.
Many of these terrorists were wealthy, well-educated, and principled men.
If they wanted they could have easily taken an elevator to the “Windows of the World”
restaurant to enjoy a nice glass of champagne while looking out over city, but it was this
superficial existence that they shunned.
They caste off their wealth and privilege because they felt there was greater glory
in serving Allah.
They looked at the life of Mohammed, and saw how he robbed, enslaved, and murdered non-believers.
This is a historical fact that moderate muslims excuse by saying, “Mohammed was a product
of his times and he did these things out of self-defense”, but to radical muslims who
see The Last True Prophet as the ultimate example of what it means to be human they
feel if these things were good enough for him then they’re good enough for them.
Al-Qaeda hated the United States and everything about the West not because of our government’s
foreign policy, although they didn’t like that either, but because the West refused
to bow to their God. And as long as we refused to do so then they would have wanted to kill
us no matter what we did. There is no negotiation.
People who are ignorant on this topic will say, “Well if the U.S. didn’t have a presence
in the middle east then they would never have attacked us”, but the opposite is true.
The more the U.S. retreats from the Middle East the more these extremists are embolden.
This reality provides me no comfort in acknowledging. I’d love for the U.S. to be able to hide
behind it’s borders. Life would be much simpler if we could simply say, “That’s
there problem!”
George Washington spoke in favor of an isolationist foreign policy during his time because it
took 3 months to cross the Atlantic. Today it takes the average person 8 hours. And if
my main man Elon Musk succeeds it could take as little as 2 hours to circumnavigate the
globe. Breakfast in New York. Lunch in Hong Kong. Dinner in Paris.
And as innovation continues to drive down the cost of travel it will also drive down
the cost of Weapons of Mass Destruction thereby making them even more powerful and accessible.
All it would take to kill millions of people is a well-placed bomb, chemical gas, or genetically-engineered
disease.
Therefore as daunting of a task as it may be: we cannot allow terrorist networks to
exist anywhere on Earth!
But the way to win the War on Terror isn’t by killing all the “bad guys.” Again this
isn’t a superhero movie where you kill the Big Boss and peace is restored to Gotham.
Over the last decade it should be clear that as soon as we destroy one terrorist network
a new one pops up to fill the void.
A far more accurate metaphor is to say… Jihadism is a virus.
We can quarantine, imprison, and kill everyone who is infected with the virus, thereby slowing
its spread, but ultimately to cure the virus we must understand the deep underlying reasons
that cause people to get it in the first place.
In the case of violent Islamism I believe the cure is… a smartphone.
If we put a smartphone in the hands of every person who lives in these “terrorist hotbeds”
then we’ll have control over their eyes and ears. We can then… Suppress extremist
content by creating fake videos to distort their message and continuing to create fake
terrorist networks to lure those susceptible to radicalization. N.B.C. could even do a
T.V. show called, “To Catch a Terrorist”. *I’m sort of kidding. Promote moderate content
that's critical of Jihadism and offers a more balanced view of the west.
Distract. For the most part these smartphone users will be allowed to use their smartphone
however they please. They’ll download games, watch movies, and mindlessly scroll through
their Instagram feed thereby replacing one flawed way of thinking, “the way to paradise
is by blowing myself up”, with another flawed way of thinking, “the way to paradise is
by traveling”, but whereas in the former case thousands of people die, in the latter
case they just get drunk and pass out on a beach. Overtime as they become more and more
dependent upon these devices we'll have more and more control over their minds. The West
already provides food, healthcare, housing, and education to so many muslims living in
extreme poverty, but now with these devices we’ll be able to make sure that they see
all the good we are doing, which is important, because the War on Terror may have begun on
the airways, but it will end on the airwaves.