Say Anything to Live

I’ve been struggling all this week to find the right words regarding Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig who were released after being forced to convert to Islam. Many Conservatives are defending it including Captain Ed who writes:

Warren wants kidnapped hostages to die for Christianity and the West rather than jolly along their kidnappers to gain their own freedom. That may be a splendid sentiment, but it results in dead Westerners rather than dead Islamists, and I fail to see how that represents any kind of victory. One of the reasons why Western culture is superior to that of radical Islam — and I say superior deliberately — is that we value individual human life. Dying needlessly and purposelessly for the West doesn’t gain us any converts in this conflict.

In his argument for martyrdom, Warren retells the story of the Italian hostage in Iraq that fought back rather than be beheaded. He leaves out the essential element of Fabrizio Quattrochi’s story, however, which is that Quattrochi knew he was going to die. (He also makes an unsupported allegation that Quattrochi wasn’t Christian.) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s goons had gathered Quattrochi and his fellow victims for their execution. Rather than await the butcher’s knife, the Italian charged his captors, who were forced to shoot him instead.

Brave, yes. Martyr … not exactly. Quattrochi didn’t die to defend the West; he died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Warren complains about the image that Centanni, Wiig, and others who beg for their lives leave on the Muslim world. He says it makes Westerners look like wimps. That, however, is an indictment on their culture, not ours, that they place individual people in situations where they have to beg for their lives. Warren wants to play by Muslim rules, and he wants to do it with other people’s lives. It’s pretty damned easy to criticize hostages who have no idea how to stay alive except to cooperate and hope things work out well — if the critic is heartless enough to do it.

So, it is not an indictment of our culture, because our men are shown to be cowardly but of theirs because they put our men in situations that expose their cowardice. Indeed, if we want to avoid the unnecessary deaths of Westerners, it’d seem the logical thing would be just to have the entire West to convert to radical Islam.

Following Ed’s logic, it’s all an unnecessary game to preserve our way of life. We’d have thousands less soldiers dead in Iraq had we simply all converted en masse after 9/11. If all that matters is saving our skins, then we might as well accept Al Qaeda’s invitation to convert to Islam.

If there is nothing that Westerners or Christians believe is truly worth dying for, then this whole war is a farce. What Captain Ed’s position appears to be is that what is permissible for individuals is not permissible for a nation, which is but a collection of individuals.

This is the point. Captain Ed’s attitude shares a common root with the fickle American public, which now denounces the same war it overwhelmingly supported at the time of the invasion. While, the figure of nearly 3,000 Americans dead in Iraq is disturbing, how many terrorists have died comparatively? I would wager to say that for every American to die in Iraq, at least 20 terrorists have.

The Islamofascist insurgents drop like flies, but they count on one thing, the lack of fortitude and courage by the collective whole of the American people: A Nation of Steve Centannis and Olaf Wiigs.

If you had Islamic invaders coming down savaging American cities and their invasion stretched from coast-to-coast, within one year, 60% of America would be Islamic. They would put on the Hijab, they would say their prayers facing Mecca. They would do what it took to stay alive.

They would save their own skins. Some of these people may be pastors today; they may sit in the pews today. They may even have nationally known Conservative blogs, today. If we are a nation where not only is cowardice not condemned, but it as seen as cruel and heartless to suggest that it is wrong, we are a nation and a culture of men without chests, as David Warren wrote.

We may talk a good game about values, but when it comes right down to it, what matters most is not Democracy, is not truth, or our country, or God, but staying alive.

With such an outlook, I question whether we will survive this war. Thankfully, I’ll probably not live long enough to see this end, but for those who will come after I tremble. Will we come to the day when the descendants of those martyrs in China and Africa meet to plan how they will spread the Gospel to those dark lands of Europe and North America and penetrate the shield of Islamic fundamentalism?

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