South Park vs. Al Quaeda

In one of the funniest, yet most insightful, articles that I've ever seen ex CIA head James Woosley write, he and his family shows us the secret weapon against Al Quaeda, and terrorism in general, that all of us have within us - humor and mockery. Terrorists do their thing in order to create enough of a sense of terror - of imminent danger - to cause a change in our behavior that benefits their ends. Hence the name. Now it's not easy to find humor in people being killed in front of you, nor when you have a bomb sitting next to you, but you have to admit that there is something mockable in the seriousness that the terrorists view themselves and their cause. And if its mockable, then it can be made to be humorous. Not the acts of terrorism, but the terrorists and their causes. The Woosley family notes that the best evidence of this is on South Park, and specifically in the creators of South Park's (Trey Parker and Matt Stone) movie Team America- World Police, which fillets North Korea's Kim Jong Il. When you can really laugh in the face of something terrible, that terrible thing forever loses its control over you. Then it just becomes something else to eliminate from your life, and in extreme cases, the world.