Slashdot Mirror
Kutztown Students get Felony Charges
gone6713 writes "The 13 students from Pennsylvania who were accused of hacking the iBooks provided to them by the school (Slashdot had a previous story on them back in June) have offically been charged. It seems that the admin passwords were taped to the back of the iBooks!"
In Toilers of the Sea, one of Victor Hugo's lesser-known novels, is a marvelous description of how to defeat an enemy that is insidious by its nature, an enemy that has served as a symbol of the banal parasitism of evil. Towards the end of the novel, Gilliatt, the hero, is seized in an underwater cave by a devilfish, or octopus. The creature's tentacles cling to Gilliatt, and it is about to pierce his chest with its beak:
"The devilfish is cunning. It first tries to stupefy its prey. It seizes, then waits as long as it can.
Gilliatt held his knife. The suction increased.
All at once the creature detached its sixth tentacle from the rock, launched it at him, and attempted to seize his left arm....At the same time, it thrust its head forward swiftly....
But Gilliatt was on his guard. Being watched, he watched.
Gilliatt plunged the point of his knife into the flat, viscous mass, and with a twisting movement similar to the flourish of a whip, describing a circle around the two eyes, he tore out the head as one wrenches out a tooth.
It was finished. The whole creature dropped....The four hundred suckers simultaneously released their hold of the rock and the man.
This rag sank to the bottom."
It is a passage our leaders ought to be made to read and learn from if they wish to successfully prosecute the "war against terrorism." The advocates and promulgators of Islamofascism, like the devilfish, stupefy their prey, and wait, then strike. Missing from the real life dilemma is a Gilliatt. President Bush is not one, nor is Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. They attack the tentacles but, in the name of tolerance, refuse to cut off the head.
As many contributors to this publication have pointed out, most recently and succinctly by Dr. Edwin Locke and Alex Epstein in their penetrating "The Terrorists' Motivation: Islam," the trouble is not that killers have "hijacked a peaceful religion." The trouble is that Islam is not, in its fundamental tenets (if its virulent injunctions can be called "principles"), a "peaceful" religion. It is a manifesto for the conquest and destruction of all Western civilization and the establishment of a global anti-man, anti-mind theocracy.
It pursues this goal, it should be apparent by now, by employing two methods: with immediate, violent action, such as indiscriminate bombings; and by an osmotic process of invading a Western country with a fifth column that works to alter Western laws to tolerate its presence, while at the same time preaching the abandonment of those laws in favor of law based on an intolerant Koran.
The Koran cannot be compromised, repudiated piecemeal, or "modified" so that it posed no threat to the West. It cannot be "secularized" without destroying Islam. Islam can no more be "perverted" or "hijacked" than can Nazism, Fascism, or Japanese Bushido. Islamic clerics know this, as well as rank-and-file Muslims, which is why they are largely silent on the matter of terrorism, with the exception of an occasional equivocating expression of public regret for the bombings.
The most serious problem is that the current conflict is being treated as a mere "war against terrorism." It has devolved into a mere cops-and-robbers manhunt for terrorists and suspected terrorists and their cells. It may was well be put on a par with a campaign to stamp out "violent bank robberies."
This is not to deprecate the heroic efforts of Britain's authorities in tracking down the London "Islamikazies" of 7/7, which includes a "shoot to kill" standing order and the suspension of "racial profiling" to identify suspects. But that is merely rounding up and obstructing the "foot soldiers" of the Islamafascists. The parties guilty of associating with the 7/7 bombers, and with the ones who botched a second round of London bombin
I can't believe no one has brought up The Right To Read. I know people like to dismiss RMS as a crank, but here we are -- what seemed like paranoia becomes more true every day.