Ideological truth is an oxymoron.  We spent the last two centuries debunking ideologies—all the different –isms, like Marxism, Nazism, Zionism, Socialism, Communism, and so forth.  We are still fighting some of those.  They’re like shingles—dormant viruses that awaken from time to time to attack the body politic.

This century we are increasing our understanding of how the human brain works.  It has a marvelous capacity for reason and logic, often creating great thoughts, inventing new technologies, and making works of artistic splendor.  It also has a nasty way of getting its wires crossed, short-circuited, and contradictory to common sense and logic.  The latter problems can often be described as brainwashing when it comes to ideologies.  Brainwashing can be inflicted by others, or it can be self-inflicted.  Ideologies are often the tools for doing both.

Small-minded people become easily addicted to ideologies.  The latter provide a closed system of minutia that’s attractive to such people, easy solutions for problems perceive in their lives, real or imagined, simple solutions that ignore complexities and conflicting relationships to other problems.  An ideology is a one-size-fits-all approach to a small life of parochial thought that allows people to get on with their mundane and sometimes suffering lives.  Ideologies encompass religion; they’re all the opium of the masses.

We can’t be too vocal in our condemnation of power-hungry demagogues who exploit these weaknesses of simple-minded people.  A radical iman preaching jihad is the scum of the earth.  But a Marxist preaching about how wonderful the world will be when workers rule, or a priest telling impoverished peasants their reward will be in the hereafter, these are in the same class and deserve condemnation too.

But those who swallow this malarkey also deserve condemnation.  They are negating their human potential to do and create great things; they are living a life of lazy intellect by accepting ideological truths as fact.  There are no seven virgins awaiting the suicide bomber; there is no worker’s paradise awaiting the Marxists’ followers, only a brutal dictatorship of the proletariat; and there is no place among the angels awaiting the pious and exploited peasant.

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Remembering 9/11 shouldn’t be a NYC event, or events at the sites where the four planes crashed.  It should be a national and world event.  Nearly 3,000 innocents died that day at the hands of Muslim jihadists, most of them Saudi Arabians who graduated from that country’s religious schools.  Bin Laden, the planner and cheerleader for the terrorist dogs, was also Saudi.

But we can’t blame one nation or a respected worldwide religion for this attack.  We must blame a terrorist ideology that exploits poverty and ignorance to brainwash its adherents and condones the torture and murder of innocents.  Religion is just the cover story—no true religion can ever condone such treacherous deeds.

We must carry on the fight against terrorism, imported or domestic.  At the same time, we can never forget the innocent victims of these terrorist attacks or the friends and families who are still grieving.  Too many Americans have forgotten.  No one should, because we are all targets now.  To give up the fight would dishonor the innocent victims’ sacrifice.  Their murders won’t be avenged until terrorism is stopped.

I lost friends and a relative that day.  I won’t forget.  You all know me as a compassionate and progressive person.  But I have no compassion for terrorism or its practitioners, only loathing.  On this day, I’ll try to get beyond that, though, and just remember who we lost on 9/11.

And so it goes…

For all readers who love conspiracies, here’s a real-life one for you: Nearly fourteen years after 9/11, all the report about that horrific day has been released except for twenty-eight pages classified as Top Secret.  It turns out that these missing pages focus on the involvement of the Saudi government’s role in the attack.  If what’s written there isn’t damaging to the Saudis, why are these pages Top Secret?  Looks like the media might be dancing to the same conspiracy band too—the media roosters certainly aren’t squawking much about it.

In this blog I’ve often referred to the duplicitous Saudis.  Most 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.  We can’t determine the Saudi government’s guilt by association, but I don’t base my claim of duplicity on the nationality of the 9/11 terrorists.  There are other facts that justify my claim.  Maybe the nationality of the terrorists is all just a coincidence—wink, wink—just like it’s a coincidence that bin Laden came from a rich Saudi family.

First duplicity fact: the Saudi royal family has always walked a tightrope by pretending to be friends with the U.S. while supporting oppressive, Sixth Century Islamic rules and sponsoring religious schools where jihad is taught.  Those schools give rise to terrorists in general and the 9/11 terrorists in particular.  Poor saps are educated AKA brainwashed by “religious leaders” who completely distort the teachings of the Koran at best and read into it violence and murder at worst.  They don’t teach; they indoctrinate.  And the Saudi government encourages this by supporting them.

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At the time I’m beginning to write this post, a carrier battle group is headed for Yemen’s coast to enforce a blockade against Irani ships attempting to help Yemen’s rebels.  Why?  They’re supporting Saudi Arabia’s bombing of said rebels.  The Saudis announced they were going to stop but the bombing continues.  One problem?  Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend, and Iran is NOT our friend.  Second problem?  This is an internecine dust-up between Sunnis and Shi’ites, so what the hell do we think we’re doing taking sides in a religious war?  Third problem?  Al Qaeda in Yemen has been a severe thorn in our sides for a long time, so who cares if the Shi’ites wipe those particular Sunnis out?

The details: (1) Saudi Arabian royalty, in order to save their well-padded asses, have been walking a tightrope for decades, pretending to be our friends while supporting the Saudi religious schools that instill hatred and produced Sunni jihadists like bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists.  Why do you think members of the royal family fled the U.S. after 9/11?  Washington knew and still knows, at least in intelligence circles, that Saudis are duplicitous scoundrels.  They don’t want Shi’ites nipping at their backsides in Yemen and probably are rooting for ISIS in their war against Iran-supported regimes like Hassad’s because the ISIS monsters are, after all, Sunnis.  They might be supporting ISIS too; they’ve certainly supported al Qaeda, that terrorist group that now seems tame in comparison to the crazy ISIS wild boars.  For the Saudis, the only good Shi’ite is a dead Shi’ite.

Point (2): How ironic is it that Iran wants to end economic sanctions while at the same time striking out against Sunnis in Yemen?  They and their brethren are the flip side of the Saudis: for them the only good Sunni is a dead Sunni.  Makes me wonder if this internecine battle between rival Muslim sects isn’t all about greed and power and exterminating anyone who disagrees with their warped versions of Islam.  No, not wonder.  Call it bringing out this Hatfields v. McCoy’s battle into the open.  The Palestinian problem, that justifiable desire for a Palestinian state, has receded to the point where it’s become irrelevant to everyone in the region except Israelis and Palestinians, notwithstanding Netanyahu’s stupid ploys to guarantee his survival by painting it as something else.  Instead of sending our sailors into harm’s way, we should just tell the Supreme Leader of Iran’s floundering theocracy to cease and desist, or all talks about lifting economic sanctions are off.

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Genocide is extreme ethnic cleansing, a holocaust…remembering the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire!

Egypt’s persecution of Christians, once controlled by a brutal dictatorship, is now sanctioned by an equally brutal military junta.  ISIS’ persecution, at best forced conversions of Christians to Islam, and at worst their bloody beheadings, are in the news, the stories often accompanied by gruesome YouTube videos.   A recent CBS Sixty Minutes’ segment portrayed the plight of Christians in Iraq, ironically more protected under Saddam Hussein, once persecuted by al Qaeda in Iraq, and now threatened by ISIS.  Iran’s persecution of Christians has only diminished because the Ayatollahs want to remove the West’s sanctions.  Recently, Christians in Kenya (most of the 147 victims) were separated from Muslims and shot exection-style by Somalian al Qaeda members.  Where Christians and Muslims once coexisted, Christians are now in the crosshairs of radical Islam.

Religious intolerance isn’t new, of course.  It’s inherited from the ancients who followed the doctrine “My tribe…good; your tribe…bad!”  It’s inherited from that long evolutionary development of ape men and women mimicking their gorilla and chimp cousins (ever see one group of chimps wage war on another?—geez, they seem almost human!).  In the Age of Enlightenment philosophers tried to argue against ALL discrimination, but religious discrimination was so ingrained that our Founding Fathers made religious freedom #1 in the Bill of Rights.  (Never mind that it’s now being used to discriminate in Indiana and elsewhere—until we modify the Bill of Rights to bring it up to date and prohibit discrimination for sexual orientation, this will continue.  One right being used to attack another is ironic, at best, and dangerous—we consider freedom of speech a right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a theater, because that tramples on other rights.)

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How do you detect and thwart a deranged killer?  Except for close family and friends, I have no problem when someone, desperate, anguished, and out of his or her mind, commits suicide.  Yes, it’s sad they couldn’t get some help (maybe they tried).  In the new Chen and Castilblanco mystery, Family Affairs (going well, by the way), Sgt. C takes time from his niece’s case, where he’s moonlighting, to work on the detective duo’s caseload.  He proves a man who was allegedly pushed in front of a subway train actually committed suicide.  Turns out the man had pancreatic cancer.  The big cop comments that he might have done the same.

Solo suicides, while sad and perhaps evidence for negligent care in our medical system, fundamentally affect only one person, by definition.  Sure, family and friends might wonder if they or the system could have done better by that mentally ill person, but the successful suicide in this case isn’t killing other innocent victims.  How that terrible decision morphs into mass murder must be case dependent, but, when it does, thousands can suffer.

Such was the case of the German co-pilot who set the autopilot of that Germanwings commuter jet on a hundred foot altitude.  His suicide, if not motivated by terrorism (there’s no indication it was), has a similar effect on the friends and families of the passengers in that doomed flight.  It’s clear he hid his mental illness from Lufthansa, or so they claim—it’s debatable whether airlines do enough to prevent these six-sigma events (the lawyers are already comforting those friends and families, I bet).  His actions were deliberate too, tearing up notes from doctors and prescriptions.  Did he have paranoid schizophrenia?  Did his depression cause him to see all human beings as his enemy?  Did he hear voices telling him to go out in a blaze of media glory?  We might never know what was going through his mind.

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[I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

While drone surveillance and attacks and Special Ops are a better military solution than “boots on the ground,” there’s no doubt that ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups will only be defeated if the countries affected wage effective war against these militant Islamic groups.  The key word is “effective.”  Remember that ISIS received a big boost when poorly trained Iraqi forces ran for their lives, often in their underwear—equipment left behind, much of it American, is now in ISIS’ hands.  That has to stop.  Western presence is justified there for equipping and training local forces so that these fiascos aren’t repeated.

That said, the West isn’t doing nearly enough to hurt these groups where it’s most effective—financially and personnel-wise.  I’m reminded of World War Two where indifference, peaceniks, and anti-Semitic sentiments conspired to give Hitler a free hand in Europe.  We don’t need another Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand either and hope Islamic nations will destroy the extremists in their midst without our help.  The recent Twitter action, for example, while a good start, is a drop in the bucket.  The West needs a concerted effort to stop all finances flowing into the illegal insurgent groups.  Funds must be frozen and their propaganda machine must be dismantled.  We can be good at that, and it’s the least we can do.

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[Note 1.  Like all my blog posts, even my ones on writing, this is op-ed.  As such, I get first crack at expressing my opinions on things—I have lots of them, but you can only write so much!  But, because they are only my take on a current event or news item, you might not agree, so anyone can comment, even Mr. Putin!  Note 2.  I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

How many of these conspiracy theories do you believe?  Apollo never landed on the moon.  Bill Clinton had Vince Foster murdered to cover-up an affair between Hillary and Foster.  LBJ arranged for the murders of the Kennedy brothers.  Communist sympathizers hired John Hinckley to kill Reagan.  Putin ordered the Russian SVR to poison ex-spy Alexander LItvinenko.  Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner ordered special prosecutor Alberto Nisman murdered.  Putin ordered the Russian FSR to hire someone to assassinate opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

Some of these raise eyebrows, of course, because they trend toward UFOs and little green men.  The two that might cause some people to nod sagely are the Putin and De Kirchner references.  Why?  Because both Argentina and Russia have long-standing and violent fascist traditions associated with oppressive oligarchies.  No matter what leaders of these countries say, you’ll always have doubts.  While the U.S. isn’t necessarily beyond hanky-panky like this, we find it harder to believe, although fiction writers like me can make such things seem real (Clancy’s advice in the quote you see in the banner of this website).  Everyone loves a good conspiracy in mysteries and thrillers, but just maybe Argentina and Russia are a little too real?

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France has declared war on jihadist extremists.  The rest of Europe is at war with them too.  And we are at war with these radicals.  Indeed, the modern world should be at war with them.  There’s nothing “modern” about this fanatical thinking, this barbaric insult to true Islam and false ideology.  It’s old thinking, a fanatical vision of how much better it would be to return to the simpler days of the early Middle Ages, of Ayatollahs and warrior chieftans, feudal lords and lowly serfs, a social structure built on the primitive foundations of theologically justified despotism.  Never mind the ironies—terrorists using the internet and high-powered modern weapons to further their cause while spewing their retrograde ideologies eschewed by good people everywhere, including truly devout Muslims.  Terrorist minds are dark, evil minds, living in dark lives and thinking dark, fanatical thoughts.

But France and the rest of the world face a conundrum: how can we preserve the freedoms we enjoy and what many others yearn to enjoy when faced with these practitioners of evil?  What is the right balance between a civilized society and thugs who would tear it down?  Modern living also breeds frustration, especially among poor and exploited immigrants, and France has perhaps ignored that for too long.  Out of frustration and despair with one’s lot in life, some people are bound to lash out—it’s only human nature.  When they become violent, they can use any religion or ideology to justify their actions, a dangerous rationalization, a contagious mental virus that could destroy the rest of humanity.  How many of our freedoms do we surrender to prevent the spread of this contagion?

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