Radical Muslims Aren't Cricket - or Are They?

Some things just seem to happen at the same time to get you thinking about certain things in strange and new ways. Recently I read a post over at Instapundit about Osama Bin Laden's vision of globalization vs. the West's.

Don't forget that the 9/11 attacks were, to a great extent, the start of a war on globalization, as symbolized by the World Trade Center. "The towers are economic power," Osama bin Laden said in an October 2001 interview. It's globalization—the worldwide spread of people, capital, products, brands, and ideas—that's the real threat to the terrorists...

As serendipity would have it - while all this was going on I was reading Douglas Adams classic Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker's Trilogy). The book is a continuation of the adventures of Arthur Dent and Ford Perfect and the gang. The central plot revolves around the past, present and future doings of the people from the planet Krikkit (pronounced the same as "cricket" and strangely enough the basis of the English game of the same name).

According to the book, the people of Krikkit believed in "peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms." It occurred to me that outside the bit about sport - Douglas Adams just as easily could have been describing Radical Muslims.

Through a series of circumstances the people of Krikkit are unaware that there are other beings in the universe. In fact they are unaware there even is a universe. One day a space ship crashes on their planet and they find out that they are not alone. This they do not like - so they use the technology that was crash landed on their planet to make war on the rest of the universe so that they can once again be alone.

Radical Muslims are attempting to use the technology that in a manner of speaking has crash landed in the Middle East to wage global war on all the people of the world who are not Muslims. The people of Krikkit may have been even harsher since in regards to outsiders they did not believe in "convert or die" - just "die". But then again the people of Krikkit loved sports so maybe that offsets and puts them back equal with the Radical Islamists.

If only the Radical Islamists were as fictional as the people of Krikkit.