Last week I wrote a bit about my thoughts on people fighting for a specific cause. Even if that cause is irrational, they believe enough in it due to some transformation or indoctrination that has caused them to believe what they believe so strongly that they desire to kill those who disagree. I would like to believe that most people would consider me a rational thinker though I haven’t conducted any polls to substantiate my claims, but I certainly don’t understand how someone can take something like the Koran or Bible or other supposedly inspirational text and manipulate it into a driving force that drives them to kill and maim those that don’t quite see eye to eye with them. It still baffles me, so it is something that I will still try to figure out.

At some point in history some knucklehead was reading the Koran and drew the conclusion that his God wanted him to kill everyone that thought differently. I’ve read the Koran and I must have missed the part about killing everyone because I took it as a book with a very similar message to the Bible. None the less, this is the world we presently live in. One of the more popular arguments for people who oppose any sort of armed conflict, specifically the recent conflicts that the USA has been involved in is, “why don’t we act civil and solve our differences diplomatically so nobody has to die.” That’s a great idea, but the fatal flaw of this plan is that you can not negotiate with irrational people. It is impossible to have constructive dialogue with people who are so mad or so brainwashed that they are more than willing to kill themselves just so that they can kill one or two Americans in the process. That is a level of thinking that isn’t capable of dealing with rational people.

I recently read a story on a news website about a woman living in Yemen who was trying to find a way to move herself and her three children out of the country and somewhere that is more suitable to a peaceful and fruitful existence. In her case, she was a divorced woman with three children. Her three brothers had all become Al-Quada fighters, and all three of her brothers were killed while fighting their good fight in Iraq in recent years. Her ex-husband had just left Yemen to go to Afghanistan to join the fight there and was in the process of trying to recruit his eight year old son to come and join him. He sent the kid pictures of swimming pools and other kids playing in playgrounds to try to entice him to leave home and join him in fighting for the terrorists, at eight years old. This is where the problem begins. When I was deployed we caught young kids who were working for the bad guys, mostly as lookouts and informants who would follow us around and then give that information to the bad guys with guns.

One of the nicer memories I have about being in Iraq was dealing with kids. They were just kids. They were curious, strange, and fun to interact with. They were also usually very dirty and smelled like garbage, but that wasn’t really their fault. But the kids would follow us around and shout out phrases of broken English that they knew until we would laugh and throw them some candy or some other treat. It was great to see that in such a violent and unstable place that at least the kids were normal. It’s a terrible tragedy to think that some twisted person could be preying on them to turn them into killers. To even begin to think about solving this problem of extremism, the first step would be to find and eliminate the recruiters of children.