Tom Tancredo and the Mecca Option

Little known Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo kicked up a bit of a firestorm recently when he told a small crowd of people in an Iowan restaurant that taking out the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina should be an option if Islamic terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in the United States. He had floated the same idea a couple of years ago when he was a guest on a talk radio program.

Evidently, Tancredo seems to believe that the mere suggestion that Mecca and Medina could be destroyed in a retaliatory attack will serve as a deterrent to terrorists from engaging in such an attack. Personally, I think that Tancredo has lost all sense of reality.

The message that Osama bin Laden has repeatedly preached to the people of the Muslim world is that the United States is at war with Islam. If al-Qaida or some other Islamist terror group were to set off a nuclear bomb or other device to cause a mass casualty incident in the United States, a retaliatory strike on Mecca and Medina would play right into their hands.

If Islam's holiest sites disappeared under a couple of mushroom clouds, does anybody really believe that hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world will meekly abandoned their faith because Allah did not stop the attack? I believe the more likely response is that the world will experience a paroxysm of violence like it has never experienced before. Westerners in Muslim countries will be hunted down and killed by angry mobs. European cities with large Muslim populations will be engulfed by riots on a scale that would dwarf the riots that swept Paris almost two years ago. The Arab oil states would cut off their oil supply and sabotage their oil sites to prevent their take over by American military forces.

Of course, not everybody shares my opinion of Tancredo's remarks. LaShawn Barber, the African-American version of Michelle Malkin, supports Tancredo "100 percent". The majority of the comments to her post are from her troglodyte fans in agreement with her and Tancredo. They remind me of a student I had when I was a student teacher at West Hempstead High School back in 1992. His solution to everything was "why can't we just bomb them?"

It seems lost on many people that many problems do not have quick solutions. Unfortunately, we live in an era where a segment of the world's Muslim population embraces an interpretation of their religion that sanctions terrorist attacks on civilian populations. They are like a cancer that must be rooted out. It will be a problem that will be with us for many years, perhaps decades, and it will only end when the message and tactics of fiends like Osama bin Laden are decisively rejected by Muslims. How we get to that point is a different topic.