‘Macho swagger’

Editor:

I don’t know where to begin with this latest Father Gregorio rant against the government and the military (“Expensive war helps create economic wreckage” Aug. 28). It now boils down to “macho swagger” as the root cause for our current domestic and world situation. I guess I had it wrong at what was in play at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Belleau Wood, Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Inchon, Khe Sanh, the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, Mogadishu, Kuwait, Kabul and Baghdad, just to mention a few places.

Just because no Iraqis were involved in 9/11 doesn’t mean there weren’t elements in Iraq favorable to 9/11. Have you forgotten the street scenes of candy being thrown in celebration on 9/11? I also challenge you to read OBL’s 1996 and 1998 fatwas against the west and please note they were written years before 9/11. You call it USA macho swagger. I call it radical Islamic fascism. How many 9/11’s do you need before it gets into your brain that radical Islam has no room for you or I?

So, the current war is the shabbiest you say? Chamberlain refused to face Nazism for what it was and the threat it posed. He allowed himself to be dictated to by Hitler while claiming peace was at hand. He ignored things uttered and written by Hitler. Things like all Jews should be eradicated off the face of the earth, that kind of stuff. Chamberlain didn’t have that “macho swagger” and refused to believe some one could be so evil as to actually carry out a threat like that. He chose the good path, as you say, and walked away. Tell that to the survivors of the concentration camps and to all those who suffered through WWII. It is quite clear to me, and those who bother to read the fatwas and look at their videos (especially those aimed at their children), that radical Islam has one intention, to take over the world. It is the Nazism of our time. Are you the Chamberlain of our time? All I can say is thank God there are those with “macho swagger” to keep you and I safe from those who would destroy us.

Butch Summers

National Park