Death to the Infidels!

We’ll get to the aftermath of the horrific Islamofascist attack in Kenya this weekend in a moment, but first, a look another type of totalitarian religion, whose all-encompassing worldview causes its believers to frequently say and occasionally act, in ways that a more rational person would likely avoid.

Or as Jim Treacher writes today at the Daily Caller:

As the disaster that is Obamacare looms closer and closer, the leftists defending it are screeching louder and louder.

Last week a couple of lefties, a journalism professor and a Sacramento Democratic Party apparatchik, used Twitter to wish death on the children of anyone who disagrees with them about gun control. Now, another of their fellow Obama cultists wants infidels dead for opposing Obamacare:

Click to enlarge.

“Nonbelievers.” What a revealing choice of words. Twitter’s 140-character limit really forces the truth out of these Marxists, doesn’t it?

Thanks to the great Nick Searcy for screencapping that, because Stephanie Handler has since deleted her Twitter account, as well as her LinkedIn profile that identified her as a UCSF employee working in “University Development and Alumni Relations.” She’s still listed in the UCSF directory.

Ace describes Handler’s tweet as an example of “More Hate from the Ideology Which Supposedly Makes No H8 a Foundational Principle:”

It’s interesting to me that she links 18 ounce sodas to this. The message is clear and unmistakable: If you refuse to obey our orders about what we currently believe is healthy, we need you to die.

And so it came to pass that once again an angry, primitive tribe dreamed of converting other tribes to its beliefs by the sword, or being Smited by the Health Gods.

Handler is now of course, playing the “botched joke defense,” a topic that Ace has memorably written about before, and…curiously enough, so is the man whose socialist medical plan bears his name. Or as Allahpundit writes today, “Revealed: Obama came up with ObamaCare because he needed a throwaway applause line in a campaign speech:”

Dan McLaughlin’s right: This really is the most Obama thing ever.

Knowing what you know about him, if you had to guess the genesis of his biggest domestic legislative initiative, which would you guess? That he spent years studying the issue, consumed by the intricacies of health-care policy and determined to make a difference if ever placed in a position to do so? Or that he needed a killer line for one of his speeches and couldn’t let pass a golden opportunity to grandstand? QED. Even the transformation of American health care is but a subplot to Hopenchange image-making.

Soon-to-be-candidate Obama, then an Illinois senator, was thinking about turning down an invitation to speak at a big health care conference sponsored by the progressive group Families USA [in January 2007], when two aides, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the moment.

Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health care by the end of his first term?…

“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.”…

The candidate jumped at it. He probably wasn’t going to get elected anyway, the team concluded. Why not go big?

OK, so socialist medicine, which has been the one box on the scorecard that the New Deal, Great Society, and New Left hadn’t been able to punch during the 20th century, to neutralize American exceptionalism the way that it previously neutered England and Canada, was just a throwaway line by a longshot presidential candidate. Hey, if you say so, JournoList. Though as Allahpundit adds:

What’s striking about this story is how it mirrors the genesis of his half-assed “red line” on Syria. That was also the product of an idle remark that sounded good at the time on a subject that Obama obviously didn’t consider a high priority. Just as health-care reform became a test of his credibility on the left as a candidate, propelling him into a fight he didn’t necessarily want, the “red line” became a test of his credibility as commander-in-chief. The big divergence among the two comes right before the outcome: O felt comfortable plowing ahead on O-Care because he had tons of support for it among his own party, but when it came time to punch Assad in the face, the support wasn’t there so he chickened out. He’s willing to damage himself and his party to pursue idealistic policies that are virtually guaranteed to backfire in implementation, but he’s not going out on the limb by himself.

A very different group of “nonbelievers” were being tested for their religious faith in Kenya on Saturday. “Survivors reveal how gunman executed non-Muslims — after asking them to name Prophet Mohammed’s mother,” the London Daily Mail claims. The “death to the infidels!!!!!!” tone of both radical Islam and the radical left, and their shared hatred of free markets and free people has been previously explored in a book and articles by Jamie Glazov of Front Page. Regarding the former group, as Roger L. Simon wrote last night, “Islam Needs an Intervention:”

Meanwhile, another large sector of our society wants us to throw up our hands at the whole thing — let these madmen destroy each other.  I am sympathetic — how could I not be?  We have already lost so much in treasure, human and material.

But I will remind those people — and myself — that in our tradition we are our brother’s keeper.  And that is one of the most important values, if not the key value, that gave us this great country.

Furthermore, such a violent ideology left unchecked could destroy the world. It already infects over a billion Muslims, with painfully rare, though highly laudable, exceptions.  (The depressing truth is that I met almost all of them in my job at PJM. Where are the rest? Why is it there is no really organized attempt within Islam for any kind of serious reform — only the most momentary lip service after a terror attack?)

So back to the question of how to stage this intervention.  This is extremely difficult, but I am going to take a flyer with some suggestions. I invite all to respond.  (And, yes, I know, rounding up all the Muslims in the world for an intervention like your Cousin Phil is a tad inconvenient, but think metaphorically.)

There’s another large group of true believers, whose messianic leader refuses to negotiate with reason, that could also use an intervention.

Yes, Handler and Allan Brauer, the (now dismissed) Democratic party flack who tweeted death wishes on Friday to the children of the aide of Sen. Ted Cruz were speaking metaphorically. They’re not terrorists; they’re not going to cause anyone harm. But if ObamaCare is implemented as planned, we’re about to hand literally life and death power over everyday citizens to an ideology that views the starboard half of the aisle as something less than fully human. Or as Glenn Reynolds described Handler’s call for a painful end to the “nonbelievers:”

So, politicized “death panels,” then. Pretty much what I figured.

Personally, I prefer a government that isn’t driven by religious fervor and blind faith. A separation of the church of Obama and the state, in other words. Not to mention a lot less state as well.

How about you?