Do America's Enemies Deserve Our Respect and Empathy?

In a recent speech at Georgetown University Hillary Clinton urged Americans to empathize with and respect our enemies--namely Islamic fanatics who want to kill us and obliterate our way of life.

After those words were uttered by a woman who apparently wants to be America's next president, I think I heard Gen. George S. Patton bellowing epithets from the grave. Patton was notorious for his epithets.

Patton, the no nonsense American general known as "blood and guts" who helped push the Germans out of North Africa and Sicily during WW II and who drove the U.S. Third Army deep into the heart of Germany, said this about America's enemies:

“May God have mercy on my enemies because I won't.” 

That's poles apart from what Hillary Clinton had to say last week about America's enemies and how we should deal with them:

"Show Respect for America's Enemies"

"This is what we call smart power...showing respect, even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible empathize with their perspective and point of view."

I can just imagine what Patton would say about "smart power" and the preposterous notion that we should have respect for and empathize with our enemy's point of view.

He no doubt would have used one of his favorite words: Bullshit!

I wonder how Hillary's statement might have resonated if she had made it during WW II after the world learned what the Nazi's did in death camps like Auschwitz and what the Japanese did in places like Nanking, China?

Oh, but the war against radical Islam is different, some might argue. Really? You mean beheading journalists, slaughtering innocent aide workers and educators, murdering Christians and Jews, and even butchering Muslims who don't adhere to radical Islam is not the same? Really?

Murder is murder no matter who commits it, how it's committed, or in what decade it is committed. Empathy and respect be damned.

And what if President Roosevelt had gone to Congress seeking a declaration of war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and said:

"We must have empathy for the Japanese who did this to us," instead of what he actually said, which was: "Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

Enemies are enemies. Empathizing and respecting their perspective is a ludicrous thing to say. It is especially preposterous for someone who wants to occupy the White House and become our military's Commander-in-Chief.  

Patton understood that the way to win a war was to fight it, not chatter about it while giving a $200,000 speech. The last thing he would have counseled is for American leaders to engage in fearful hand wringing and hope those who want to destroy us will somehow come to love us if only we are benign, compassionate and work harder to understand their perspective.

General "Blood & Guts" Patton

In a 1944 speech to the Third Army Patton told his men this:

   

"We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home."

Is there any doubt who started the war on terror? On September 11, 2001 when those hijacked planes flew into the twin towers, into the Pentagon, and into that Pennsylvania farm field, we were at war--even if the current feckless occupant of the White House refuses to call it that.

When you are attacked, no matter what your political affiliation may be or on which side of the political aisle you may sit, you basically have two options: you either capitulate because you are afraid to fight, or you respond with "extreme prejudice," as we used to say in the Army.

Regrettably, the current administration seems to have resurrected a third option--one that was proven woefully ineffective back in 1938. It was called appeasement. And Adolph Hitler laughed all the way to the Eagle's Nest.

After Hillary Clinton's ill-advised and placatory remarks you can almost hear the terrorists hooting and whooping in their desert bunkers and strongholds.

I wonder how Patton might have dealt with the brutal Islamic State currently slaughtering its way through Syria and Iraq.

I can't imagine him telling the men of the Third Army to respect and empathize with that vicious rabble; to try to understand why they hate America or why these cowards are beheading American and other Western captives.

After Patton read the Koran and observed North African Muslims during WW II, we have an idea what he thought of Islam. In his book, War as I Knew it, published posthumously in 1947, he wrote:

"What if the Arabs had been Christians? To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing."

Not a sentiment that would make the apologists for Islamic radicals and terrorists happy.

Nor would Islamic suicide bombers have embraced one of Patton's most famous statements:

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other dumb bastard die for his country."

Amen, General.