What we don't need is to declare a war on unattended luggage. I'm sick and tired of well-meaning assholes telling us during every alert color change to be "extra vigilant" or to "keep an eye out for unattended luggage". When skyscrapers fall to the ground and British buses blow up into the air, the proper form of retaliation is not to tell people to take a bite out of crime. In fact, let me issue a special "fuck you" to anyone who says anything even mildly stupid just to sound authoritative when you have nothing better to say. (That goes for idiots who wear ties, too.)
I understand that the police have their hands tied (or more specifically, national governments are rolling out the red carpet to terrorists and forcing domestic authorities to deal with the mess), but that doesn't give you the right to spout stupidity about mysterious suitcases every time you're on TV. We get the fucking point already. We'll tell you about the unattended suitcase so you can defuse it and let us get blown up by three bombs instead of four.
And for fuck's sake, stop telling me not to stop living my life, otherwise the terrorists will have won. Tell that to the dead British people.
Here are a few other phrases that piss me off:
- protect the American way of life
- ideology of hate
- bring them to justice
Let's call a spade a spade.
- punish the Islamic terrorist murderers and remove their state support
- Islamism
- kill the motherfuckers
Killing the people who support Islamic terrorism, in as spectacular a way as possible, has two main benefits. On the most obvious and immediate level, it prevents real funding and munitions from getting to terrorists, not to mention removes a few square feet of possible training ground. The second benefit, at least equally as important, is that it forces similar terrorist-supporting nations to scurry like a bunch of scared rats, and clean up their own backyards.
The key word is "spectacular". Unless we want to take our time dicking around doing man-to-man combat Vietnam style, giving terrorists plenty of time to launch another few 9/11s and 7/7s, then we need to scare their supporters shitless now.
The alternative is to do nothing, and to tell the terrorists what would be the truth: that we are more concerned with committing social improprieties than we are with self-preservation.
(Recommended reading: Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists, by Benjamin Netanyahu)
