Al Qaeda: Common Criminals or Lawless Combatants?

Merely misbehaving miscreants and malcontents?

Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Media Service, opened his August 11, 2007 op ed article last week declaring, “Bank robbers rarely use suicide bombers. Forgers don’t declare war on capitalism, democracy and modernity. Kidnappers rarely behead their victims without asking for a ransom. And when they ado ask for ransoms, only rarely do they demand infidels submit to the will of Allah instead of asking for unmarked bills.

“These incandescently obvious observations illuminate, in a small way, the resplendent stupidity of the notion that we should treat members of al Qaeda like run-of-the-mill criminals . . . ” That is what retired General Wesley Clark and Professor Kal Raustiaia called al Qaeda in their New York Times op ed article on August 8. It is representative of the foolish leftist version of the war on terror, that there is not one and Bush’s incursion cannot be won.

The members of al Qaeda are criminals to be sure, but they are more than mere criminals as Clark and Raustiaia and some other leftists claim. Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists everywhere are on a worldwide mission to bring the world to its knees, submitting to Islam’s Allah, who is the false god of this world. President Bush is very wrong in calling Islam “the religion of peace.” However, President Bush has rightly declared al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists to be “unlawful combatants.”

The Islamic jihadists and their foreign and domestic supporters are one of many enemies of the United States. Included in the list of enemies are the American leftists themselves. See my recent article on that subject. Leftists are domestic terrorists, who are subversive, virtual terrorists or combatants who do as much damage pushing their socialist-humanist agenda as does Al Qaeda in its cowardly guerrilla warfare tactics. In a sense they are bound together with Chinese and Russian communists in their vehement hatred of America and on the principles for which she stands and for her eventual destruction as a sovereign free democratic republic.

My final answer to the question posed in the title of this article is that al Qaeda and their ilk are both criminals and lawless combatants, terrorists who like illegal aliens, who are primarily criminals, deserve none of the privileges and rights of American citizenship.

Goldberg concludes his commentary in the above referenced piece, “We obviously need rules for dealing with people we capture, which is precisely what the Bush administration has been trying to establish. but saying that we should treat terrorists like criminals is to argue for doing less than nothing.” I concur wholeheartedly with Mr. Goldberg.