Erik Rush: "Kill them All!"

Erik Rush the author and columnist, the same Erik Rush who along with much of the media wrongly assumed the Oklahoma City Bombing was perpetrated by Muslim terrorists, is at it again. After the Boston Marathon massacre, Rush tweated, ""Yes, they're evil. Let's kill them all." We, of course, still don't know that it was Muslim terrorists and should probably mention the obvious fact that only a very small percentage of the over 1 billion followers of Islam in the world are terrorists. In fact, it's rather easy to make the case that a larger proportion of the Christian population are violent and that if we count the Crusades or even the complicity of the Church in the Holocaust, Colonialism and most of the evil wrought by the West, many more have died in the name of Christianity than Islam. But let's ignore the rather obvious and rational arguments and consider the issue from the other side.

Isn't "kill them all," in fact, the rallying cry of terrorism itself. It presumes an other that is anonymous -- an other that encompasses everyone that disagrees with their ideology or is even tacitly attached to the wrongs they believe have been committed against their faith and countries (in some cases legitimately, though this never legitimates terrorism in my mind). This is the rationale of terrorism. If you are not with us, you are against us. Since everyone in the West is complicit in the crimes against Islam, no one is innocent and it is thus okay, nay necessary, to kill innocent civilians in their attempt to promote their cause. It is not that they think their acts will lead to changes in the West toward their beliefs, it is the presumption that terror besets fear and fear undermines the Western beliefs they critique. "Kill them all" puts us right in line with this reasoning, undermining the notion that all have access to freedom and the absurd assumption that all members of a group can be grouped together without differentiation, agency or individuality.

If we were to take absurd arguments like this to their absurdist extremes, we should kill all alienated white male loners with access to guns, as they are the most likely to go on killing sprees. Hate mongers like Erik Rush play into the hands of the terrorists by propagating the hatred they desire. There is no nuance, no humanity, only hatred in the face of violence. I have heard people on the left calling for Rush to be fired, but I disagree. We do have freedom of speech in America and it is our job to critique fools like this and show the country how foolish they are. One hopes his rallying cry falls on deaf ears and no harm comes to the many million innocent Muslims living peacefully within our borders today.