The Way of the Warrior

The French public is lining up to join army, army reserves, police or whatever other state organ with a militaristic orientation that will take them on. A rabbi previously an American Jewish Press award winner is now publishing a book called 'The Israel Warrior's Handbook'. It seems everyone's keen to be a soldier. Jihadists must be chuckling over their tea (they don't do champagne) watching us gear up for the war of religion they've been trying hard to convince us exists.

Daesh and its ilk are reminiscent of the landsknechts and other wandering Mediaeval European hedge knights who descended on unprotected villages to slaughter and pillage and hole up. Our Sunni bandit 'knights' of today have the same outlook but better weapons. They take over territory that they have no capacity for managing effectively over time. Rapine, slavery and butchery is the order of the day.

 

The authorities in a region affected by mounted troupes of medieval villains would eventually get round to slaughtering or expelling the cancer that they represented, but the dislocation caused by never-ending local conflicts, especially during the Hundred Years War and the later Thirty Years War, ensured that new groups of bandit horsemen emerged on a regular basis. This we see today in the Arab and other dysfunctional Muslim lands where new Al-Qaedas and Boko Harems are popping up year after year.

One doesn't 'declare war' on such criminal trash so dignifying them as the 'enemy'; one eliminates them in a massive police action using all the technology at one's command. One doesn't tolerate terms like 'Islamic State' since the likes of Daesh lack the attributes of a civil state. Just as no-one in the Middle Ages expected a robber baron and his followers to develop a social conscience, we can have no expectation that murdering Sunni jihadist units will ever join the community of nations.

I have real doubts that the answer is larger armies, bigger domestic police forces, or new 'warrior' groups packed with vengeful citizens who believe like Hollande that we are 'at war' with fundamentalist Islam. Better is a coordinated international 'police' action using already highly-trained special forces working under a UN mandate to capture or exterminate these psychopaths who are a danger to all nations. A cancer is cut out or killed so that it cannot spread to other parts of the 'body of nations'.