Islam is Not the Enemy

As a superhero, there is one thing you must learn quickly in order to survive:

Know who your enemy is.

This can be a difficult lesson to learn. I can't think of how many times an ill-advised hero-on-hero fight has given the bad guys key time and opportunity to advance their plans just a little further. Testosterone, ignorance and suspicion have rarely mixed well.

That's one of the reasons why it alarms me to see people who are otherwise dedicated to fighting the bad guys chase bogeymen in the dark while the bad guys advance their plans.

It's actually a credit to MariaS that she's dedicated herself to fighting Islamic extremism. The fight against Islamic extemists is a fight that the rest of us must all be together in, by one means or another.

And MariaS is chasing bogeymen in the dark.

Channelling Brigitte Gabriell, MariaS seems to think that Hezbollah terrorists taught the Mexican drug cartels how to make the carbomb that recently exploded in Juarez, Mexico.

Juarez borders El Paso, Texas.

The problem for Gabriell's suggestion is that it doesn't make sense. The only proof offered that Hezbollah taught the Mexican cartel how to make that bomb basically unfolds like this: the Mexican cartel used a car bomb, Hezbollah uses car bombs; ergo, Hezbollah taught them how to make the bomb.

The problem is that the far-more likely scenario is that the Mexican cartel learned how to make that bomb from remnants of the Medellin Cartel, for whom car bombs were a frequently-used tactic.

Most famously, on February 16, 1991, the Medelin cartel detonated a 440-pound car bomb outside a bullfighting ring in Medelin. On average, carbombs set off by the Medelin cartel killed approximately 20 people and wounded nearly a hundred -- each time they did so.

The Medelin cartel is believed to have been largely broken up by 1993, when the United States teamed with the Colombian government to eliminate them.

Whenever cartels like the Medellin are dismantled, it's inevitable that some members will escape. So when one weighs the odds of Hezbollah terrorists crossing half the world to each the Mexican cartels how to build these kinds of car bombs, when that kind of expertise is available much closer to home, it simply doesn't make sense.

Some serious, concrete, material evidence is necessary.

This logical error shouldn't surprise anyone coming from MariaS. When it comes to Muslim extremism, she can't tell the difference between moderate Muslims and Muslim extremists. So she evidently assumes that moderate Muslims don't exist.

Her assumption that all Muslims are the enemy leads her to fight even those who would fight alongside her against Islamic extremists.

Which brings one back to the issue of hero-on-hero fights. What is a hero who can't tell the good guys from the bad guys and so spends all their time fighting other heroes?

The answer is that such a hero may as well be a villain. She's doing far more to help than advance their plans than she is doing to stop them.