Go ahead, try to terrorize me, pleaaassssee!

A dead skunk stinks. Politics stinks even more. But terrorists trying to brand themselves as a legitimate movement, while hiding behind religion or political beliefs, are at the pinnacle of stinky land.
Pamesa Valencia, a Spanish soccer club, recently called off a game with Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv, citing the volatile security situation in the Middle East.
In a world where teenage boys strap bombs to themselves, it’s no wonder that people think twice before attending official functions.
Never in our lives has concern over terrorism reached such levels that in some parts of the world, taking our kids to a sporting event has become an affair of hope, albeit one that requires constant looking over the shoulder.
An unattended car, a brown bag left on the bench, everything is suspicious. Someday, animals might even be used to wreak havoc, and when that happens, stadiums will be equipped with a security perimeter equaling that of Fort Knox, the fortified compound that stores the gold reserves of the United States.
The canceled soccer game is just one example of how sports has suffered from politics. During the Cold War, Olympics were boycotted by both sides, while in 1972, Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group, left 11 Israeli athletes dead.
The Athens summer Olympics scheduled this August will be another great target for terrorists.
Although Greece claims to have rid itself of the homegrown terrorist group November 17, we all know that there are plenty of others, al-Qaeda & Co. being just one of them, who would welcome the chance to make a bloody statement with their name attached to it.
They don’t give a damn whether an innocent bystander gets blown to pieces, leaving a family in pain for eternity. They truly don’t.
The mentality they try to spread to the public is a classic “us versus them” belief. Although their activities are confined to a handful of individuals, what they are trying to do is to create the illusion of a struggle between classes, civilizations and religion, when in fact it’s just cold-blooded murder.
They have taken Carl von Clausewitz’s description of war ― “Military activity is never directed against material forces alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated” ― to the extreme.
Only in this case, what these individuals are bent on is the destruction of our morals, since they cannot possibly win a military confrontation against a united world.
There are two things that we can do. We can roll over and keep canceling games until there are no more games left to cancel, leaving us sitting at home, watching games on TV and gaining weight. Or we can show them our will.
What we have to realize is that whether we get killed, choose not to attend a game, or get a tan after watching too much TV, the bottom line is that we are the ones who are losing.
Terrorists could even try to act before the Games, in an attempt to create a consensus that Athens isn’t safe enough. We cannot bow to these acts. What we can do is to be on our very best terrorist-kick-ass mode and fill up every match to the last seat, cheering for the losers as well as the winners.
Because the only thing terrorists really fear is the wrath of the public.

by Brian Lee