{"id":2507,"date":"2002-06-08T15:49:26","date_gmt":"2002-06-08T15:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2002-06-08T15:49:26","modified_gmt":"2002-06-08T15:49:26","slug":"the-answers-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2507","title":{"rendered":"THE ANSWERS BEGIN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is my first pass at a reply to the letter below (I’d give the author credit, but while I’ve emailed him and asked, I haven’t received a reply. What’s the blogger etiquette on that, anyway?). I think the questions posed are close enough to the “basic questions” to start a good discussion.
\nFirst Question:
\nMy question to you is whether your A position is strong enough that you will continue to fight for a peaceful Middle East, even if SOME Arabs continue to “follow the path they are on.” Or is B is cop-out that will allow you to say “I told you so, but it’s not my fault” after your fear in A is realized? Are you opposing genocide or making excuses for it?<\/i>
\nWell, I hope I was clear – I’m opposed to it. But being opposed to it doesn’t imply that I am in all circumstances<\/u> opposed. I’ll quote another of my posts:<\/p>\n

Bluntly, at the moment I am under threat, I don\u0092t care why they do it. My response is not very different from my response to my friends who said that \u0093America had it coming\u0094 on 9\/11. \u0093Maybe. So what?\u0094<\/u><\/b> People who attack me or mine need to be stopped. If the only way I have to effectively stop them is to kill them, so be it.<\/u><\/b> Once I am out of danger, I am happy to consider what it will take to improve education and job opportunities in the central cities, or to talk thoughtfully about helping the Palestinians figure out how to become a nation and a state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want to reach peaceful, mutually respectful terms with the Arab world (and I single them out because I do believe that the core Islamists – I’ve been using the word Islamicists, and been corrected – are culturally Arab). But, simply, they have to stop threatening to kill Americans for me to have that discussion. They don’t all<\/u> have to stop…we have a nutball fringe here in the U.S.A….but the core organs of government and culture have to back away from their frenzied rhetoric of hate, violence, and threat.
\nI do believe that there are a set of actions that the Islamist world could take that would lead me to decide that simply killing them all, or enough of them so they stopped existing as an effective culture, would be an acceptable response. I think that for me to come to that position, the actions they would have to take would be so horrific as to be unimaginable \u0096 I don\u0092t believe they have the physical capability to do the things that would make \u0093nuke \u0091em all\u0094 even my reluctant position \u0096 but I\u0092m probably pretty far along the continuum. Take a thousand people, a thousand average Americans, and I\u0092ll bet that ten of them are pretty close to that position already. I\u0092d probably be the 850th or so to take that position.
\nAnd I\u0092ll reply with a question to you: Can you imagine any circumstances, any form of threat or attack by the Islamists on the US or the West that would lead you<\/u> to support nuking them all? If they developed aerosolized Ebola? If they had twenty suitcase nukes and started using them?
\nWhat would you do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is my first pass at a reply to the letter below (I’d give the author credit, but while I’ve emailed him and asked, I haven’t received a reply. What’s the blogger etiquette on that, anyway?). I think the questions posed are close enough to the “basic questions” to start a good discussion. First Question: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}