LT. COLONEL JAMES G. ZUMWALT, USMC (RET) /ISIL “Final Solution” Does Require Killing “Their Pet Goats”

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ISIL “Final Solution” Does Require Killing “Their Pet Goats”
By: LT. COLONEL JAMES G. ZUMWALT, USMC (RET)
October7, 2014
This author needs to issue an apology.
Four years ago, after delivering a speech to a college audience on the Vietnam war and the enemy we fought there, a student asked for a comparison between our loss in Vietnam and a possible loss in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The response was, our Vietnam loss did not result in the enemy following us home; a loss in Iraq and Afghanistan would.
A follow-up question was how then do we change the mindset of an Islamic enemy so committed to killing or being killed on the battlefield.
The author’s response was we don’t change it because we can’t. The only way to defeat such an enemy was to kill him.
A week later, the author received a letter from a very irate woman audience member who was critical about giving impressionable young students such a response. She suggested, as humans, we are all capable of rational thought and, therefore, an alternative to war always exists. The recent and continuing stream of brutal videos put on the Internet by the terrorist group ISIL caused the author to reflect upon her letter again. He wondered if she finally came to recognize an enemy willing to behead innocent children is not human and, thus, no alternative to killing him on the battlefield exists. Just like ebola, the mindset of ISIL and its ilk is a disease. While no one would suggest “talking a disease down” to remove it as a danger, why then do some believe talking to any Islamic terrorist group-as the Obama administration has done-would be any more successful?
But, it is here the author believes an apology is needed.
In responding to that student’s question four years earlier on how to change the enemy’s mindset, the author regrets failing to be more definitive. His response should have been that given by retired U.S. Army Colonel Ralph Peters during a recent Fox News interview.
Asked for the best way to handle ISIL terrorists, Peters said it is “to kill them, keep on killing them until they’re all dead, and then kill their pet goat.” Undoubtedly, there are people who heard Peters’ interview and have written him a “kumbaya” letter critical of his brutally honest comment. It is a cold, hard fact-whether it is ISIL, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran, Boko Haram, Somalia’s Shabaab, Khorasan group, etc.-the enemy we face is blindly committed to eliminating all infidels. They are fearless about dying on the battlefield because they truly believe it is their springboard to an afterlife of endless sexual pleasure as guaranteed by Allah in the Quran. Our own safety turns on adherents to this ideology going the way of the dinosaur. A Muslim death wish is even evident from the ISIL massacre videos by the inactions of their victims. Captives-vastly outnumbering their ISIL captors, realizing they are about to die, make no effort to overpower their captors. They are lemmings, lacking any motivation to survive this life, apparently prompted by a motivation to access the next. The message to take from Muslim victims unwilling to save themselves to pursue their promised afterlife should be clear: their murderers will never be convinced to stop killing.
As for ISIL and those similarly motivated, a rational world should recognize but one “final solution” exists-their extinction.
While bombing ISIL in Syria is a good start on the evolution, it is not the final solution.
**Lt. Colonel James G. Zumwalt, USMC (Ret.), is a retired Marine infantry officer who served in the Vietnam war, the U.S. invasion of Panama and the first Gulf war. He is the author of “Bare Feet, Iron Will–Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields,” “Living the Juche Lie: North Korea’s Kim Dynasty” and “Doomsday: Iran–The Clock is Ticking.” He frequently writes on foreign policy and defense issues.