You know that sinking feeling you get when a Fox News analyst advocates the use of death squads as a solution to the problem of radical Islamism? No?
You're about to.
Cartoon villain and weekend Fox News host Jeanine Pirro did a segment on Saturday in which she explained her views on radical Islamists quite clearly: "We need to kill them. We need to KILL THEM":
Apparently other Muslims should be the ones responsible for accomplishing this mass murder. "Our job is to arm those Muslims to the teeth, give them everything they need to take out these Islamic fanatics, let them do the job, and when they do, we need to simply ... look the other way."
According to Pirro, we know this strategy can work — just look at the example of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's regime in Egypt. In her telling, Egypt is now a paradise free from the blight of radical Islam because of al-Sisi's hardline tactics, which have involved human rights abuses on a massive scale — including the massacre of more than 800 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful and unarmed, in August 2013. (The news that radical Islam has been eradicated from Egypt would, I imagine, come as a surprise to Egyptians, including al-Sisi himself.) Troublingly, Pirro includes the followers of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in her definition of radical Islamists who presumably must be tracked down and killed. That would include 100,000 people in Egypt alone, many of whom are women and children.
You might think that advocating the immediate extermination of an entire political group would be enough work for one monomaniacal monologue. But Pirro had some more gripes to raise, including:
- Why haven't we cut off aid to Pakistan, an "Arab country" that does not "support this mission" of mass-murdering its resident radical Islamists? (Pakistan, in fact, has been at war with extremist groups for years.)
- Why doesn't anyone listen to Jeanine Pirro when she warns us about the dangers of a "reverse crusade"? (Perhaps because "reverse crusade" sounds like a Cosmo position of the month?)
- Did you know that Muslims had been invited to worship at "our national cathedral"? (Less peaceful worship and more mass murder of Islamists, guys, that's how you combat radicalism.)
- "Are we morons?" (You brought it up ... )
- "Make no mistake, there will be efforts to limit our free speech, our First Amendment rights, to comply with Sharia law." (As opposed to the good kind of First Amendment limitations, like those that would keep Muslims from worshipping at the National Cathedral? It's getting hard to keep track of all these rules, Jeanine.)
- "They have conquered us through immigration. They have conquered us through interfaith dialogue. And they have conquered us by co-opting our leaders into a position of embarrassment." (Got that? Interfaith dialogue is an extreme option that should only be considered if Jeanine's "KILL THEM" strategy doesn't pan out.)
- "Why can't our president even say the words 'radical Islam' or 'Islamic terrorist'?" (Very niche speech impediment. Whoa if true.)
- "It is time for this to be over." (This video is over seven minutes long. AGREED.)