Know your enemy!

As is his prerogative, David Kear has offered a response, of sorts, to my comments:

I said:
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"i) The IRA is an example of domestic terrorism based on issues of nationalism and colonialism, not international terrorism. The IRA isn’t blowing up soft targets around the world."

"ii)”Foreign” and “international” are not synonymous. In any case, the issue is not some technical definition of what constitutes an international terrorist organization, but the actual threat level which it poses to the free world."
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He said:
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(Answer to the first two) You are not arguing with me. You are arguing with Colon Powell. http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2001/10/fr100501.html.
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How is this any sort of answer?

i) So what if I were arguing with Colin Powel? Actually, Powell was just reaffirming something generated by the State Dept. under the auspices of Madeleine Albright.

How does this address the facts of the case? How does this “answer” constitute a realistic risk assessment? It doesn’t.

Kear acts as if the way to deal with suicide bombers is to look up a definition of terrorist in the dictionary.

This is not an argument from authority, but a factual question of the threat-level posed by certain terrorist organizations.

BTW, I happen to agree with Newt Gingrich on the need to reform the culture of Foggy Bottom. It suffers from an acute case of clientitus.

ii) Since Kear is evidently opposed to Administration policy on the Iraq war, why is he citing a document from the State Dept., anyway? Clearly he doesn’t defer to the mere authority of the Administration to settle either the de facto or de jure merits of the case.

iii) Even on its own grounds, the document does not treat “foreign” and “international” as synonymous. All it does is to designate certain offshore terrorist organizations as “foreign.”

By definition, they are foreign in relation to the continental US. That doesn’t make them “international” in the sense of blowing up innocent civilians all over the world. These are not interchangeable realities.

Why doesn’t Kear drop the semantic games and get serious about the mortal peril we’re in?

I said:
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"iii) Why could a war on Islam not be considered a just war? Islam is the aggressor. Our response would be a defensive war or counteroffensive."
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He said:
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Simple, Islam is not the aggressor. Islam is no more the aggressor than the Lutheran church in WW2.
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Well, this is simple, all right. Simple to a fault.

i) Kear doesn’t spell out what he means. I guess the assumption is that the Lutheran church in WW2 was an unwilling accomplice to the Third Reich. Actually, there were some bona fide Nazi theologians like Kittel. Conversely, there were also some Lutheran theologians like Bonhoeffer and Kasemann who resisted the Third Reich.

ii) In general, though, to the extent the Lutheran church collaborated with the Nazi regime, it did so under compulsion.

But that’s just where the analogy breaks down. Jihadist clerics and Muslim terrorists are not acting under coercion. Suicide bombers are volunteers, not draftees.

iii) Or, to press his own comparison, what about Mosques which serve as armories? What about Mosques which function as buckers from which militants fire upon US troops? And all this with the blessing of the Mullahs and Imams.

If Lutheran churches had been turned into armories and bunkers, they would have been legitimate targets.

I said:
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"iv) Just-war theory is a product of medieval moral theology. Why does David Kear embrace this part of medieval moral theology, but not the part about the Crusades?"
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He said:
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Here is a good site to learn some modern ideas of the Just War Concept. http://www.credenda.org/issues/9-2magistralis.php. My opinion is that the Crusades did not meet the criteria in most cases either.
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i) Kear is either missing the point or ducking the point. The initial question is why he regards just-war theory as authoritative? Does each and every one of just-war criteria enjoy Scriptural support?

Speaking for myself, I take my point of departure with the Biblical laws of warfare (e.g., Deut 20).

ii) Actually, if you bother to read Urban II or Anna Comnena, you’ll see that Medieval Muslims were the aggressors, as defined by just-war criteria.

I said:
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"v) Is it merely guilt-by-association that leads us to link jihadism with Islam? This is not a Christian characterization of Islam. Rather, that’s part of Islam’s self-definition."
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He said:
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This is like saying that blowing up abortion clinics is a self description of Christianity. I am a Christian. I am pro-life. I have even gone to jail to protect the unborn. But, I do not blow up clinics. Fairly simple concept.
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Fairly simple fallacy, you mean. Presumable, Kear doesn’t believe in firebombing abortion clinics because he thinks that this activity is contrary to Scripture or Christian ethics or whatever.

So, for the argument from analogy to hold, terrorism committed in the name of Allah would have to be contrary to the Koran or Islamic theology.

But Kear is simply turning a blind eye, both to the theology of jihad as well as the history of jihad.

In Islam, the rule of faith is more like Catholicism or Orthodoxy than Protestantism. It isn’t a Koran-only faith. Tradition is also authoritative in Islam. That figures in the self-definition of Islam.

I'd add that the comparison with abortion clinics is fatally flawed in another couple of respects:

i) These are isolated events. There is no trend or pattern here.

ii) These incidents come in for the nearly unanimous condemnation of Evangelical clergy. By contrast, the way in which most Muslim clerics respond to Islamo-terrorism is to: (a) incite further violence; (b) reply with deafening silence; (c) condemn the death of the innocent, but redefine "innocent" to exclude Christians and Jews and Americans and Westerners and collaborators with the Great Satan.

I said:
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"It is not a case of guilt-by-association to judge behavior by its stated belief-system. Would Kear make these same generous allowances for the Nazis?"
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He said:
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No, but I do make the same allowances for the Lutheran church that hung swastikas from their alters. Under your logic we should have declared war on the Lutheran Church. Or better yet since you can't differentiate between Lutherans and Christianity we should have declared war on Christianity.
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This is intellectually obtuse. Did the Lutheran church have a theological tradition of holy war? Did the Lutheran church have a history of waging holy war?

Under my logic, the Koran is analogous to Mein Kampf.