Angry in the Great White North

A problem for Mulsims in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack is how to condemn it. You'd think it would be easy, but for many Muslims, it isn't. Their condemnations are filled with conditionals and qualifiers and attempts to draw dubious moral equivalences:

In the Arabic daily Al Hayat, columnist Maher Othman speaks for many Arabs when he says the killing of innocent civilians is a crime "whether it is perpetrated by members that are armed with explosives and fanatic extremist beliefs, or committed by countries with armies, strong and modern air and navy weapons along with governments that care less for foreign civilians' safety, especially if they belong to countries with huge oil reserves."

Right, the terrorism of a suicide bomber in a London subway is the same as the the casualties of war. Normally, I dismiss those sorts of comments as vile and self-serving, an attempt to assuage the guilt and shame of being a Muslim.

But maybe there is something to this:

Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor of the Arabic-language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, says the linkage is inescapable.

"We are not justifying [the attack]; rather, we are interpreting and analyzing it," he wrote in a column translated by MEMRI. "War is war, and terror is one of its means, whether it is by means of missiles and bombers, or by means of planting bombs in a train or a public bus carrying innocent passengers on their way to work."

So the terrorists are really soldiers, by this logic.

Works for me.

A soldier who is not wearing his nation's uniform and is passing himself as a civilian while engaged in a miltary operation is not protected by any of the Geneva Conventions. Upon capture, he is subject to summary execution, or can be held without access to the Red Cross or representatives of his home government. This is both legal, and supported by historical precedent:

In June 1942, German submarines landed two small groups of saboteurs on the U.S. coastline, one near Amagansett, Long Island, and the other near Jacksonville, Florida. Operation Pastorius had begun, its objective to destroy industrial and communications facilities throughout the United States. The teams carried explosives, detonators, equipment for invisible writing and money -- lots of money. Within two months, the operation had collapsed, both groups had been apprehended and six of the original eight saboteurs had already been executed after a hasty trial by military tribunal.

So please, carry on with drawing a moral equivalence between a US infantryman wearing full American battle gear and insignia in Iraq hunting for terrorists while Iraq's democratic institutions take hold, and a bomber in a T-shirt and jeans eagerly awaiting his heavenly reward of virgins. It'll give us all a reason to tell Amnesty International to go take a hike.

Related Update: A ruling from the US Court of Appeals puts the end to the nonsense that Gitmo terrorist detainees are somehow equivalent to soldiers deserving protections from the Geneva Conventions, leaving them in the hands of the US military:

It looks like some common sense has returned to the Geneva Convention debate. The lack of a uniform, the absence of al-Qaeda acceptance of the Convention, and the clear international character of the conflict all point to not only a lack of standing for POW status, but good reason to deny it. The entire point of these Geneva provisions is to protect civilian populations by giving a clear distinction between them and the combatants. Obviously, wearing a uniform puts combatants at higher risk, but nations agreed to do that in order to keep civilians from getting unnecessarily harmed. AQ intends on inflicting as much harm on civilians as possible while hiding among them for unfair advantage -- which disqualifies them from the GC's protections. We must not allow them to acquire those protections if we want to discourage others from violating these tenets of conflict.

See also here and here.