Handcuffed by our Western values?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The American Declaration of Independence, quoted above, separates all Americans from the terrorists.

But the right to a safe and happy life is something universal and international: no man should live in fear of terrorists.

Man, in fact all mankind, has an expectation, a right, to life. We believe this is an “unalienable right”, in fact a sacred right not granted by man but by a higher power, our Creator and incapable of repudiation. The right to life cannot be taken by another man.

The terrorists don’t believe we in the West, or any man, apparently, has an expectation to life. The terrorists have shown they can commit, intend to commit and are committed to intentional, indiscriminate killing of innocent strangers.

What greater disparity could there be in the beliefs between the terrorists and ourselves?

Americans see themselves as men with rights “endowed by their Creator”.

Terrorists see America as “the Great Satan”.

There is a gap, in fact an abyss, in values and moral mindset between America and the terrorists.

What makes this so devious, so desperately troubling, is this. A part of the terrorist movement has, will have or wants to have nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The actions of the terrorists to date tell us that they are released from our inhibitions to kill indiscrimately by using nuclear weapons and other WMD.

And the terrorists are being encouraged, fuelled and even driven toward the use of WMD by the likes of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, various imams, mosques, madras’s, political activists and others. In fact, throughout Pakistan and other Moslem nations, terror has superseded a religion.

This means, for the terrorists, all treaties, all normal forms of the so-called “laws of war”, and all the normal underpinnings of negotiation are off the table.

We need to think very carefully about what this means for the United States and the Western World and where we go from here.

The terrorists are: using liquid explosives carried aboard in hand luggage in their planning to destroy hundreds of passengers in airliners - this since 1995, and it continues; using aircraft as weapons (9-11) and bombing trains and buses (Britain’s 7-7 and Madrid); and using Katyusha rockets to bombard Haifa and other targets in Israel. These unguided rockets are intentionally and indiscriminately killing innocent civilians. About 4,000 of these have been used to date, with 250 fired into Israel on Sunday within 24 hours of a UN “cease fire”.

To put this in a nutshell, Israel, used a conventional military force bound by restrictions on the indiscriminate killing of civilians, to find and kill people lobbing unguided rockets into their civilian population with no restrictions on their use of indiscriminate killing: a kind of asymmetric warfare of the most heinous sort.

The UN and the media view the opposing forces through one single prism of values: both are brother nations of the world. In fact, there seems to be a media bias towards Hezbollah (not a nation at all). And Kofi Annan wasted no time in saying Israel “intentionally” killed UN observers during the conflict.

The terrorists, media and the UN tend to handcuff the West within its own values even more, while the other side feels empowered. Reuters news service participated in the chicanery last week by publishing doctored photos detrimental to Israel.

And the screaming rhetoric of Aljazeera reminds us that the other side doesn’t play by the same rules as the west - freedom of the press without checks and balances.

In a story in the Los Angeles Times by Ashraf Khalil on August 1, Khalil detailed how the Israelis are also phoning innocent civilians on the civilians’ mobile phones to warn them of impending danger due to military action. Israel also used a radio station to warn civilians in Lebanon of impending danger: in Arabic. Israel dropped leaflets to warn civilians.

Israel moved humanitarian care and caution in war to a new level.

No nation, in the history of man, ever went to such great lengths in war to warn innocent civilians. And this in the face of an enemy, Hezbollah, who elected to hide behind those very civilians.

On August 10, former Israeli Prime Minister Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is working on nuclear weapons and “eventually after crying wolf, you face the wolf, and this wolf has nuclear teeth, and it will bite, of that I’m sure”.

This is the same President Ahmadinejad that appeared on 60 Minutes on August 13, claiming that the UN was only serving US needs; who said last autumn that the Jewish state had to be wiped off the face of the earth; and who is defying the United Nations while he does nuclear research that most experts believe is intended to make a nuclear bomb. This is the same President Ahmadinejad that is arming Hezbollah and developing his own long range ballistic missiles.

A few days ago, Mr Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “During the Cold War, both sides possessed weapons of mass destruction, but neither side used them, deterred by what was known as MAD, mutual assured destruction. Similar constraints have no doubt prevented their use in the confrontation between India and Pakistan.”

The question now is this: are terrorists deterred by their own potential destruction, when they already act as suicide bombers? Stated clearer, once one is released from the belief in life, as stated in our Declaration of Independence, how may he be effectively confronted and countered?

What binds the terrorists we face today together is the religion of the intentional, indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians. No true religion can underwrite this thinking.

There is a great religion sitting quietly on the sidelines here: the religion of Islam. If this is a God-centered religion, people who follow the teachings of this great faith need to distance themselves now and forever from the terrorists who are people who underwrite indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians.

What binds us, the Western democracies, together, first and foremost, is the belief that all people have a right to life. As so eloquently stated in the US Declaration of Independence, all mankind are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

From the terrorist perspective, terror-war is the waging of war against democracies and life. It is meant to cause death, suffering and anguish among masses of civilian populations in pursuit of political gain.

Given the chasm in values between mass killers and people firmly adhering to the right to life (and a lot of other rights), it seems the PATRIOT Act, NSA eavesdropping and restrictions on liquids aboard aircraft are minor indeed.

This conundrum of belief between terrorism and America, in fact, the West, must consequently alter the way we view and wage this war on terror in the future.

Before Iran has a nuclear weapon, we might rethink our values and moral restrictions. Or ask ourselves, how many lives would we be ready to lose?