Thomas Wictor

Terrorists attacked Istanbul Attatürk Airport today, using assault rifles and suicide bombs to kill at least thirty-six people. Dozens more are wounded. A troubling video emerged: Despite the decades of violence, it seems that too many security forces still don’t react efficiently. The world must adopt new rules of engagement that allow security forces to immediately kill terrorists. Security forces must kill anyone who commits an act of terrorism.

This proposal is not vengeance or machismo. The harsh reality is that terrorists take advantage of overly restrictive rules of engagement that are a form of moral preening. Therefore the terrorists must lose this advantage.

Rules, yes. Posturing, no

A low-quality video of one bombing in Istanbul Attatürk Airport shows a police officer shooting a terrorist.

The terrorist (red arrow) and the police officer (green arrow).

The officer shoots the terrorist, who falls and drops his rifle.

Because the terrorist is now seemingly unarmed, the officer points his pistol and orders him to not move.

Then the officer realizes that the terrorist has a suicide vest. The officer runs away.

Since he was not killed, the terrorist detonates his vest.

Every civilized nation must allow its security forces to assume that all terrorists are wearing suicide vests. Security forces must kill all terrorists who engage in violence. Authorities must ban the term “neutralized” and substitute the word “killed.”

Rules to generate applause

I don’t know why the Turkish police officer didn’t kill the terrorist. In western nations, the current situation is that governments, academia, the press, and “human rights” organizations expressly state that their goal is to “set an example” for how the world should behave.

As a result, we have the nightmarish insanity of the Norwegian government and legal system.

Remember the terrorist who murdered mostly children on the island of Utøya, July 22, 2011? Here he is grimly waving bye-bye.

He killed 77 people and wounded 319 over a three-hour period. News helicopters flew around the island and filmed the terrorist murdering children. An unarmed German immigrant used his motorboat to rescue at least thirty young people in the water. He made five trips.

Then the Norwegian police told him to stop.

After Norway’s only anti-terror unit arrested the killer, the country disgraced itself in too many ways to count. The killer’s sentence was twenty-one years in a hotel.

Norwegians boast that theirs is the most “humane” culture on earth. It leads the way in sheer virtue.

What’s humane about showing the relatives of murder victims that the dead are merely props in a performance meant to garner praise from other morally corrupt nations?

This is why I admire the Arab countries fighting the war against the Islamic State. The most effective soldiers come from cultures that are indifferent to the opinions of others.

All rational people should not care in the least what others think of them.

Rules for survival

When I say that the rules of engagement must be changed to allow security forces to kill terrorists on the spot, I mean only if the terrorist is engaging in violence. On August 1, 1966, a man took an arsenal of weapons to the top of the Main Building or Tower of the University of Texas at Austin.

He proceeded to shoot passersby for an hour and a half, killing fourteen and wounding thirty-two. Three police officers and an armed civilian went to the top of the Tower to stop the killer.

From left, Allen Crum and Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez, Houston McCoy, and Jerry Day.

Houston McCoy killed the man with a 12-gauge shotgun. Ramiro Ramirez then took the shotgun from his colleague and shot the killer again at point-blank range “to make sure that he was dead.”

Was that wrong? Of course not. THIS ISN’T A MOVIE. When people transgress beyond a certain point, they lose the benefit of the doubt. To make absolutely certain that they can’t harm any more innocent people, security forces must kill them.

No rules

The Islamic State and all similar groups observe no rules of engagement. Without question, the best film ever made about fighting such people is Taken, starring Liam Neesen. He’s a retired member of the CIA Special Activities Division Special Operations Group (SOG). When Albanian human traffickers kidnap his teenage daughter in Paris to sell her as a sex slave, Neesen reacts.

People completely misunderstood the film: Neesen is ruthless in fighting those who have no rules of engagement—but he never crosses certain lines. In the west, we hear the complaint that if we fight terrorists ruthlessly, we’ll become just like them.

This is how westerners rationalize weakness and avoiding responsibility. I believe that terrorists committing violent acts must be killed. However, I’m not saying that we must create death squads that preemptively kill potential terrorists.

If a terrorist begins to shoot up an airport, fire at him until he falls down. When he’s on the floor, fire into his head to make sure that he’s dead. Don’t risk others’ lives simply to prove to an invisible audience that you’re morally superior to a rabid animal.

New rules

To end this post on a positive note, behold another mystery weapon from the war in Syria.

That’s the slowest munition I’ve ever seen.

By using the video speed of 25 frames per second and the length of the full-sized Toyota pickup converted into a suicide vehicle borne improvised explosive device (SVBIED), I was able to calculate the velocity.

That thing flew at approximately 66 miles per hour (106 kilometers per hour). It has to be a small unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) that’s also a massively powerful missile. The Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) Harop comes to mind.

It’s launched with a rocket motor; and in fact you can hear a WHOOSH! at the beginning of the video.

The United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions wrote about UCAVS. Take a wild guess what Christof Heyns said.

Is Christof Heyns eight years old? Literally nothing in that paragraph is true. A UCAV is no different from any other weapon. If a UCAV hits a busload of senior citizens, the nation that launched the missile is responsible. The “robots” aren’t flying off on their own, deciding to arbitrarily attack anything that moves.

A weirdo’s rules

Christof Heyns simply lusts after power. He’s dedicated to making life worse for everyone, based on his adherence to the letter of the law instead of its spirit. Not surprisingly, he’s already on record opposing my suggestion that rules of engagement be changed so that security forces can immediately kill terrorists who are committing violence.

None of this is real to him. Despite everything he does in the field of human rights, he’s completely indifferent to suffering. It’s all an academic exercise to him.

Never trust people who don’t know how to smile.

In Syria and Iraq, men who can both smile and ruthlessly kill are taking care of the problem.

Peace in less than five years. Guaranteed.