The Wages of Appeasement

The headlines are still awash in blood after a terrorist murdered fifty people and wounded over fifty others in a night club attack Sunday morning. Michael Hurd has already commented at length on some of the all-too-predictable reaction this will draw from the establishment media. Indeed, the following paragraph from his post very nearly puts it all into a nutshell:

When a drunk driver kills an innocent pedestrian, we don't call it a "car-related" tragedy. We call it a drunk driving tragedy. Yet with gun-related violence, we fixate on the weapon and completely ignore all other factors (particularly when the shooter is Muslim).

I completely agree with Hurd that such commentators, "are not the kind of people from whom we should seek guidance on how to combat crime" -- or wage a war. Given that the usual reactions to such atrocities are calls for the government to more effectively trample the individual rights of ordinary Americans, the following paragraph quite aptly explains why terrorism enjoys any success at all:

Terrorists are pushing Americans to give up on individual rights and freedom, to throw away a precious legacy so few in human history have ever enjoyed. If we bow our heads and give in, then that's on us -- not the terrorists. [bold added]

When we accept calls to, say, have our possessions pawed through by government officials at airports, to avoid speaking plainly about an unreformed  religion that incites murder, or to deny individuals the right to defend themselves, we are accomplishing what savages like the Orlando gunman would never be able to accomplish without our help. Most of America's entire reaction to Islamist savagery so far can be summed up in one phrase, sanction of the victim, which Leonard Peikoff once defined quite succinctly:

The "sanction of the victim" is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the "sin" of creating values.

Keep reading at the above link for a fuller explanation.

To see a picture of the cockroach who committed this atrocity is to see the smallness of our Islamist enemies and the degree of help they are getting even without government appeasement: Just for starters, he assumed a "tough-guy" pose, borrowed from our culture (however debased it has become); snapped the image using a computer no "caliphate" full of obedient drones could ever produce; and then used a weapon superior to any he'd ever otherwise own to ... to do what? To get attention for a confession of envy and impotence. This he did at the expense of over a hundred merrymaking souls who had never harmed him. And for his efforts, this non-entity attracted the attention of millions he claims to despise for the purpose of getting them to do what he knows he can't accomplish.

-- CAV