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Insurgents, terrorists, criminals

Britain refuses to recognize "war”

By arthur Weinreb

Monday, December 11, 2006

The British government has decided to compensate soldiers who have been injured while serving in afghanistan and Iraq and who choose to remain in the army. While made in answer to complaints that injured soldiers were not adequately provided for and while anything that ensures that those who are injured in the service of their country are properly looked after, the method that is being used is highly questionable and suspect.

Soldiers who have been injured after the formal cessation of hostilities will be treated as victims of crimes rather than an as soldiers who have been injured while on active duty for their country. a compensation system for members of the military that runs parallel to the system that is used to compensate civilian victims of serious domestic offences will be set up. at the present time, soldiers can only receive this type compensation if they are victims of true civilian crimes such as injuries sustained in a bar fight or a robbery. Now they will be deemed to be victims of crime if they are injured by mortar fire, suicide bombers or gunshots.

This is just one more example of the "head in the sand” attitude that much of the West has concerning the war that is going on between civilized society and Islamofascists. This is the same willful blindness or extreme political correctness that refuses to call terrorists "terrorists”, preferring instead to give them cutesy little monikers such as "insurgents”.

The government's decision is a step backward to the pre-9/11 days of Bill Clinton's america when the answer to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was to call the cops and hand down indictments. Even if this type of reaction could have been justified in the mid 90s it is dangerous in today's world to go back to those terrorist-as-criminal days.

Too many people in the West simply don't realize that the world is engaged in a war because they simple do not want to recognize it. Many of those holding powerful positions in the West have never lived through war; they think it's something that is pass. We don't want to have war, ergo there isn't one. Most of these people came of age during the Cold War and when the Soviet Union fell, the threat of war other than minor skirmishes was supposed to be over. although there would be smaller conflicts here and there, mostly there, the major threat that the Cold War brought was over. as Francis Fukuyama wrote, liberal democracies won the day, Communism had been defeated and history had ended. and when Islamic fascism went on the rise, many people simply refuse to see it. They're just criminals; or even worse, misguided.

None of this is helped by the over dependence upon being politically correct. Islamic fascism can be fought but only to the extent that battling it does not defeat the prime directive which is not to make Muslims feel bad. and it's hard to tie acts of terrorism with Islam when those who blow themselves up in a crowded market in the name of allah are placed in the same category as ordinary run-of-the-mill muggers and rapists. It's bad enough when individuals refuse to see the threat to the Western world, but when governments do it by enacting policies that equates war with criminal activity and soldiers as crime victims it does not bode well for the future.

The one thing about being a crime victim is that it is something that anyone in society can become by merely walking down the street. It is demeaning to those young men and women who volunteer to serve in the British army, put themselves in harm's way in afghanistan or Iraq, have limbs blown off by mortar fire and then be treated in the same way they would be if they got an extreme beating in a bar.

One of the justifications for this policy is that those who were injured in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles” were treated as victims of crime. But that was an internal matter and it's unlikely that anyone in Northern Ireland let alone the world was adversely affected or put in danger by what the violence was called.

The British government's proposal is just more evidence of the refusal to see a war for what it really is – war.


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