You go to war with the zombies you've got

You know what occurred to me recently? The image of Muslims propagated by the war blogs is pretty much exactly like that of zombies in bad sci-fi movies.

They’re forever comparing the threat of Islamism to that of Nazis, but aside from some fairly gaping chasms between the fantasy and the reality (foremost of which is that Islamic terrorists do not have their own army, government, or even unifying ethos), there’s even a basic difference in the cultural portrayal. While the public certainly engaged in plenty of racial stereotyping and cartoonish othering of our national enemies in the Second World War, the people up top – war planners, journalists, politicians, generals and commentators – seemed to possess a general sense of realism. They believe that the Germans and Japanese were capable of being civilized, that their battle tactics and strategies were the product of thought and planning and could be understood, that their motivations were recognizable and human, that given the proper circumstances their threat could be contained and their leaders could be neutralized.

With the devil-worshippers of the great deserts to the east, though, it is a different matter. Despite the efforts of modern propagandists to paint them as the second coming of the last really good villains the America At War series had, their portrayal is much more like that of robots or vampires than any Evil Empire you can name:

- They have no motivation but destruction. Their only aim is to kill and destroy, for no reason than that they are evil.

- Even though our liberals and intellectuals are always are trying to appease them, they cannot be appeased. If we negotiate with them it will be seen only as weakness and will spur them to more violence.

- Like the Terminator, they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bargained with, and they will never stop killing until every westerner lies dead. You can no more appeal to their reason than you can that of a tornado.

- The inhumanity of their motivation extends to their techniques and behaviors. They do not love their children or their fellows, because the only thing they can love is death. They behead with knives and destroy with bombs, which should be seen not as evidence of their lack of access to modern weapons and tactics, but rather of their savagery. Satan does not use a pitchfork because he does not own a gun.

- As zombies and vampires are united in their thirst for blood and flesh, Muslims are united in their lust for death. There are no innocents among them, for whatever their good intentions, they must obey the lustmord of their faith. It is good to demand from them constant affirmations of their loyalty to our value system – absence of these merely shows how evil they truly are – but such affirmations should never be taken as evidence of true goodness, of which they are not capable.

This realization hit me when I was thumbing through Hugh Hewitt’s blog this weekend and I encountered two posts about the hijacking of a Turkish airliner. The first was presented as yet another example of the vile behavior of the so-called Religion of Peace, yet another horror inflicted on innocents by the bloodthirsty Mahometan, yet another proof that none of them can be trusted. It turned out, unfortunately, that the hijacker was in fact a Christian; the second blog post made a correction, shame-faced in its terseness, stating that the man was not a Muslim, but a “crazy Christian”. Odd, that: a Christian who would do such a thing must be crazy, because the default condition of the Christian mind is peace, sanity, and reason. You never hear these people say that an atrocity has been committed by a “crazy Muslim”, however; the default condition of the Islamic mind is that of violence, lunacy, and murder. Indeed, stating that violent behavior by a Muslim is the result of insanity is the sort of thing a weak, cowardly, politically correct liberal – the kind of person who cannot recognize them all for the monsters they really are – would say.

That’s when it occurred to me that most of the things that right-wingers, from the shitheels at Little Green Footballs all the way up to the President, say about Muslims makes a lot more sense if you imagine that they are actually talking about zombies. I think that’s who they’d rather be fighting, anyway.