Let’s assume Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, knows his way around a battleship.
However, he clearly doesn’t know his way through the Koran. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made such a fool of himself this past weekend at the Hoover Institution where he pressed literacy as a “new” deterrent to jihad because the potential “extremist” will then “understand the Koran for what it is and not merely what his mullah tells him it is.”
No record of anyone present crying out, “For God’s sake, man, have you a brain?” or harrumphing noticeably.
From The Hill, via Weasel Zippers:
Adm. Mike Mullen, in a speech at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and al-Qaida can be deterred by the threat of retaliation, but efforts to attack the basis of extremism were essential through support of education and development.
“Attacking the humiliation, the hopelessness, the illiteracy and abject poverty which lie at the core of the attraction to extremist thought will do more to turn the tide against terrorism than anything else,” the chairman said. “We can continue to hunt and kill their leaders, and we will. But when a person learns to read, he enters a gateway toward independent education and thought. He becomes more capable, more employable, and enjoys a sense of purpose in his life.
“He will understand the Koran for what it is and not merely what his mullah tells him it is, who is equally uneducated,” Mullen continued. “He can raise his children to a higher standard of living than the one he knew, an aspiration shared by parents around the world. And his wife will help him prevent the despair that might lead a child of theirs into the arms of al-Qaida or the Taliban.”
It’s too easy just to flag such ignorance born of a stubborn, reckless and at some point criminal disregard for Islamic ideology; indeed, I’ve compiled a partial catalogue of Mullen and his mates’ political correctness-as-military-strategy.
What I want to know is who briefs this man? Who presses him to spout this non-sense about the Koran?
Big Peace
