4 Reasons We Need to Start Making Fun of Terrorists
A lot of people have a strong interest in portraying terrorists as dedicated, evil badasses. Hollywood, is always desperate for proper bad guys. There are people who are trying to get you to vote for their terror safety laws or sell you terror safety equipment. And of course, there are the terrorists themselves.
When they convince us that they're dangerous Bond-level supervillains, we have to deal with minor airline travel annoyances. But more importantly, we are sending a message to people who sympathize with the terrorists' cause that, "Hey, this works! They're very effective guys!"
Governments and financiers will continue to see the terrorists as movie cops -- sure, they may be loose cannons and have to turn in their badges every couple months or so when they blow up some civilians, but dammit, they get the job done. And look so cool doing it!
Because they never look behind them.
We're going about this all wrong, talking about how evil and dangerous they are. What we need to start doing, like we do to any troll (and that's what they are, murderous trolls) is to start embarrassing them. And there's plenty of material! Such as:
Most Of Them Are Nincompoops
Cracked covered a bunch of Three Stooges-style terror plots a while back.
But while those are particularly fantastic screwups, they aren't the exception, they're the rule. Just like most tropical storms fart themselves out before they become a hurricane and get near land, most terrorist-wannabes appear to step on rakes or slip on banana peels or something before they get anywhere near a target.
One group of suicide bombers got together for a group hug before they presumably gave the team cheer, signed each other's yearbooks and went off to martyr themselves. Only they hugged too hard and blew themselves up.
Another set of dumbfucks decided to go with the cyberterrorism route (can't blow yourself up that way) and attack the website for Belvoir Fortress, which used to be a Crusader outpost in Israel a really long time ago, making it one of the least effective ideas for jihad you could think of. As if deliberately trying to lower the bar even further, they actually ended up attacking the website for Belvoir Castle instead, which is a tourist attraction in England which hosts an annual teddy bears' picnic.
This is what happens when you join a cause that violently hates education.
I'm not saying they never blow anybody up -- we all remember September 11, the London subway bombings and other attacks. Some of them are definitely less mentally defective than others. But we're already doing everything we can to guard against that stuff, and making them sound more scary and badass really isn't going to help us do it better. Whether you look at a terrorist as Goldfinger or a strung-out methhead isn't going to affect how hard you try to stop him from blowing things up, it just affects how cool he gets to look while doing it.
They're Mentally About 12-Years Old
Another reason it's really hard to maintain any respect for these guys is the retarded ideas they come up with. One enthusiastic terrorist wannabe published an online propaganda magazine where he suggested covering a "tractor" or "farm vehicle" with swords and I don't know, driving it slowly through the enemy I guess. Osama bin Laden objected to this, but because it was too barbaric, not because it sounded like a jihadi equivalent of, "Hey, what if we had a dinosaur with a railgun mounted on it ... and also Batman is riding it."
This is what you nerds like, isn't it?
Sure, one terrorist killed three people with a bulldozer rampage in 2008, but 1) that was a construction vehicle, not a tractor and 2) he would have been caught much, much earlier if he'd been carefully strapping swords onto it instead of just stealing it and heading right for the street.
Even in their own training videos they release that are supposed to be inspiring other jihadis, they look like tools. In a highlight reel assembled by blogger Jarret Brachman from actual al-Qaeda videos, they do activities more suited for a summer camp than a terrorist camp, like showing off backflips for the other terrorists:
"Ahmed, are you watching? I'm gonna go! I'm gonna do it!"
Or riding around on each others' shoulders:
"Neeeeeerrrrroooonnng, I'm an airplane!"
But, hey -- when security restrictions stop you from entering actual flight schools, what are you going to do. Got to get your flight hours in somewhere.
But why such a slow song, you might wonder. Why not Yakety Sax? Well, as you wish.
They're Raging Hypocrites
So, OK -- they may be an incompetent bunch of man-children. But, at least from the perspective of a pious Muslim who thinks America is the enemy, they mean well, right? They're at least really sincere about wanting to get their countries back on track with good Muslim values and fight Western corruption.
Well, no. By now you've seen Osama bin Laden's compound. While it was architecturally a piece of shit, it was luxury living in Pakistan, in a neighborhood popular with retired generals and other Pakistani elite. His last known videos showed him roughing it in a cave, which is how he wanted his followers to think of him. He was asking them to live on bread and pious fervor, running from cave to cave, so he couldn't very well tell them he was living in a nice house with satellite and Internet and three wives.
This was custom-built for him. Terrorists must fucking hate architecture.
And a lot of porn! Bin Laden's computers were full of porn, although no one can say if he was watching it himself or not. It's not an isolated incident either. While we obviously can't get statistics for just terrorists, the average resident of Pakistan is apparently really horny, leading Google searches in "horse sex," "donkey sex," "rape sex," "child sex" and other wonderful, wholesome things. Which is both what you wouldn't expect, and after some thought, exactly what you would expect from a repressive religious state.
And they don't just fantasize about boning donkeys. Some of them went out and did it, and a lucky few got caught on U.S. surveillance video, making some soldier's day I bet.
Not as funny for the donkey, who had to spend six months recovering.
And the same group that won't let women learn or show their faces or do anything because they "value" them and want to "protect" them also likes to rape and sell them. I'm pretty sure even super-extreme Muslims who want a veil on every woman would blanch at that.
And what were the 9/11 hijackers doing before they departed on their holy mission? Why, visiting strip clubs of course! And they were shitty tippers apparently.
They're Self-Destructive
On top of all that, let's take a look at what they were trying to accomplish in the long term if they ever got their shit together. Bin Laden told his followers to stay away from small attacks and try to go for a big one, on an important date like July 4 or September 11. The reason that all their terror attacks hadn't driven the U.S. out of the Middle East, he reasoned, was because none of the attacks were big enough.
That's right. He thought if they could just blow up a whole city or something, America would go, "Oh man, too rich for my blood! I don't want to play anymore!" and bring all our troops home. Just like after Pearl Harbor! Or September 11! That's exactly what America does every time someone lands a massive, horrible attack on us!
Funny thing, there weren't any American troops in Afghanistan before, I don't know, 2001 or so.
Even watching a movie about a fictional attack -- by aliens -- on Independence Day, stirred up millions of Americans to an irrational level of adrenaline and patriotism. An actual attack could very well get even tofu-eating treehuggers to vote for a nuclear option before they thought better of it.
"KILL THEM ALL! SALT THE EARTH!"
Sure, it would have been a terrible tragedy all around, but the point is that any people backing these guys need to know that their master plan is to keep poking beehives harder and harder until the bees ... go back in the beehive. They need to know these loonies are going to get them all killed.
And that's why we need to keep making fun of their stupid, stupid plans.
For more from Christina, check out 6 Bizarre Ways Architecture Is Designed to Ward Off Ghosts and The 6 Most Insane Crash Diets of All Time.
