Our Choice: Kill or Be Killed. Which One is it Going to Be?

From Julia Hartley-Brewer, at Telegraph UK, "Islamic State cannot be defeated with kindness. It's time to kill or be killed":

Contrary to popular belief, peace, love and understanding don’t stand a chance.

The tributes to the dead in the Paris terror attacks have been deeply moving. The candlelight vigils have been eerily beautiful. And the images from around the world of public buildings lit up in the tricoleur have been a vivid reminder that, regardless of our national or religious differences, we are all one humanity.

All of these niceties are heart-warming and reassuring at a time when the world seems a very uncertain and frightening place.

Indeed, there has been much written and spoken since the bloody horrors of Friday night about how, in the fight against evil, it is peace, love and understanding that will win. How, in the battle against men with guns, grenades and suicide vests, it is the simple courage of people standing together that will ultimately triumph.

Those platitudes might sound great, they feel very nice to say and they are certainly reassuring to hear and read.

After all, we were all raised on fairy tales that told us, again and again, that in the end it is good that will overcome evil every time.

There is just one crucial problem: none of it is true.

Good doesn’t triumph over evil. And, contrary to popular belief, peace, love and understanding don’t stand much of a chance in the face of a barrage of bullets or a suicide bomber pressing the trigger at a football stadium or in a crowded concert hall.

Indeed, the triumph of good over evil has rarely happened in human history without the helpful backing of rather a lot of guns, tanks and bombs. The good guys only win when their guns, tanks and bombs are bigger and better than those of the bad guys.

Yes, there have been plenty of peaceful protests for civil rights, democracy and even against the might of the Soviet Union during the East European so-called “velvet revolutions”. But, by and large, those successes have been won only when the men with guns chose of their own free will, in the face of the combined might of the people, to put their guns down...

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