Tom Hanks knee jerking......

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I realize that if you read this blog you might get the idea that I'm majorly right wing. But that's only because people have decided that in order to be "Liberal" you have to believe that any first or second world country is bad and every third world "nation" is good. This is why "Liberal" people have decided that the two countries they most like to criticize are the US and Israel.

So when I heard what Tom Hanks said a few days ago, I was incensed (though not surprised):

"Back in World War II," he said, "we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?"

In actuality, he's sort of right. But he's also very wrong.

I think his mistake stems from his thinking of how we treated Japanese Americans during World War II. While the Japanese Americans in the US were treated very badly (horribly, unconscionably, terribly, unfairly, come up with your own adverb.....), the Japanese living in Japan were our enemies and, as such, we had every right to fight them.

Just like the Japanese from Japan attacked us in an unwarranted, vicious, sneaky, underhanded attack on our soil (Hawaii may not have been a state in 1941, but it was still part of the US and, as such, attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor was an attack on our soil), the Islamists attacked us in an unwarranted, vicious, sneaky, underhanded attack on our soil (The World Trade Center in NY and the Pentagon in Virginia). Both enemies had/have a goal of global subjugation, both enemies need to be totally defeated on the field of battle.

Since the Japan of 2010 and the Japan of 1939-1945 are very different, it is part of our culture to forgive them as a country and understand that as a people, the situation is different now from what it was during World War II. But since we are still in the equivalent war with the Islamists; Al Qaida, Al Aksa, Hammas, Hezbollah, Fatah, Ahmadinejad, Assad, etc.; we need to fight our enemy and the enemy of the civilized world with the same zeal that we fought WWII.

While I have strong doubts that this will ever occur, it is possible that, if our society survives this challenge and we're not all wearing burkhas in 2075, that perhaps by then the people who are now Islamists will have embraced the peaceful path of Islam and appreciate the freedom we all have to practice our own religions in the US. And, if that happens some remote time down the road, then and only then can we begin to treat them the way we currently treat the people of Japan.

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