I Would Rather Die Fighting than Wait for My Enemy to Kill Me

"But I am of the House of Éorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

“...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.” ~ Winston Churchill

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Seven United States presidents failed to bring justice for the 1983 Beirut bombing that slaughtered 220 Marines and 21 other US service members.

The IDF accomplished that task when it took out Nasrallah and gutted Hezbollah. Crowds across the Middle East now celebrate his death.

Syrians gathered in the rebel stronghold of Idlib on Saturday celebrating news of the death of Hassan Nasrallah. Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse

Of course, don’t think that just because many in the Middle East, especially in Syria, celebrate Nasrallah’s death, they are on the side of America or Israel. They could also be feeling humiliation that their enemy destroyed an evil that should have been done away with by their own governments. Nothing is ever that simple.

In the West, at least we have the freedom to criticize our government and point out our own leaders’ responsibilities for inciting much of the unrest in the Middle East. People seem to forget that the very fact we can protest is one of the great reasons we should be thankful to live here.

Anti-Israel demonstrations at UCLA, California

You cannot kill an ideology, people say. Meaning, it’s useless to fight against Hamas and those who strive for a Caliphate where everyone is either Muslim or they are dead.

Actually, you can kill an ideology. It seems to be dying in the West.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth fighting for, people say.

I am accused of supporting genocide because I stand with Israel. I’m constantly lectured that “The death of even one baby is evil” and “We all need to love one another” and that I am actively participating in the killing of Palestinian babies.

If people really believe this, then they need to protest against the killing of ALL babies everywhere. They need to protest equally against every injustice, every war, in the entire world. But they don’t do that. All they do is to repeat meaningless slogans driven into their brains by propagandists.

Of course, the death of even one baby is wrong. Of course, if everyone just loved one another, the world would be a paradise. Who would argue with that? Who wouldn’t pray for peace? Who wouldn’t want to set that example of living a peaceful life?

But who does. We can’t even stop hating our neighbors. Remember what happened during Covid and how easily people turned against one another, even within their own families. People caved in and took a shot so they wouldn’t lose their jobs. And who can blame them? But if we give in so easily when it isn’t a life and death situation, how will we hold up when it is.

The world is a cruel place. It’s beautiful, but deceptively so. We love to watch animals in the wild. At the same time, it’s horrific. Their lives revolve around eating or being eaten.

With humans, three days without food is all it takes, and the cultured facade is ripped away. Life is reduced to basics. Alliances are formed, the weak are abandoned. It’s in those moments that we find out who we are, if we are courageous or cowardly. If we kill to save others, or to save ourselves. This can be a decision for some, while for others, they can choose to sacrifice their own lives for the lives of others. Horrible decisions that no human should have to face, but we do. It gets messy. Often, restoring peace requires death.

And here’s something that seems to be forgotten. We all die. This is the ultimate fact of life. And we should die. We are not meant to stay on this planet forever. How we live our lives and how we choose to die is important.

I know this is an uncomfortable topic. But I am not apologetic. It’s strongly on my heart because I have experienced it. When I lived in Luxor, I had to make a choice to wait to be attacked or to confront the enemy.

I have many new subscribers who haven’t heard this, and it bears repeating anyway. I chose to go down to the gate of my friend’s villa and face a mob of men who had vowed to attack her in the night and take her villa by force. They had already rattled the back gate and yelled to scare us. Gitte had pleaded with one man that she knew to come and talk to them, but they had beaten him away with sticks. After that, the entire West Bank went silent to our calls for help, and we knew we were on our own. I could have abandoned my friend at that point, scurried away under cover of darkness and saved myself. But I could not in good conscience do that.

Gitte and I found what weapons we could, a hammer, a stick, and prepared to lock ourselves in the room at the top of the villa and wait. But really, what could we do against 20 men. I looked over the wall of the villa, where they roamed like hungry wolves. I got angry. I thought, forget it! I’m not sitting here, just waiting for them to attack.

I went down to the gate, which caused looks of shock on their faces. This, they did not expect. I declared in a loud voice that I was an American citizen. I said I understood that they were going to attack the villa and warned them that my country—and my president—wouldn’t tolerate such treatment of one of its citizens.

This happened during Covid, when Donald Trump was president. Immediately, the men backed down, assuring me that they loved America, and they had nothing against me. Now, that was a lie. They hated America. But they also feared it. Not because of the words I said, but because of the power behind those words, and because of the strength and confidence with which I said them (no matter how scared I felt inside).

In the end, I convinced the leader of those men to sit with Gitte and negotiate a deal for him to buy her property. Of course, she had no choice but to make a deal with him. He stated clearly and I heard him say it, that if she didn’t make the deal, he had every right to kill her. But at least the deal was made and we both lived to leave the country.

If I had not stood up for what I believed—that I was a free American and they had no right to treat me like that—I don’t know if I would be here today, writing this essay. Of course, it’s possible that my bravado wouldn’t have worked. I could have been beaten up or worse. But at least I didn’t cower in inaction or lie to myself that everything was going to be okay. I took charge of my fate.

I cannot return to Luxor, much as I loved it in many other ways. Times have changed for the worse. The hatred is no longer hidden beneath a thin veneer of smiles. The United States has a different president now. A man who abandoned his own people in Afghanistan and lost the respect of the world in that moment.

It frustrates me that so many in the West don’t understand the thin veneer of smiles and the hatred that lies beneath. Incredibly, they side with the men, with the ideology, that would kill them because, oh well, it can’t be destroyed.

I can warn people all I want. I can tell them my story; and I still have more to tell when the right time comes. I can share the stories of those who live in these Islamic states and have stood up to these regimes at great personal cost. Still, people will not believe it.

But I can tell you, I know what I would do because I’ve faced such a choice. I would rather die fighting than wait for my enemy to kill me.

Americans are fortunate to live in a country where enemies don’t press in on every side. We’ve yet to know what it’s like to be invaded. And as much as Americans are guilt-ridden about our nation’s power and how we influence and outright bully smaller nations, the fact is that we all benefit from that power. If we lost it, those who complain the loudest would be crying the loudest to have that protection back again.

If the day comes (and I pray it doesn’t) that YOUR BABY is threatened by a force so evil that they are beating down YOUR door and are about to take YOUR BABY and dash it against the stones, I can assure you that you will fight back with everything you have. And no one in a foreign country will have the right to tell you otherwise.

If Mexico was doing to your neighborhood what Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are doing to neighborhoods in Israel, you would DEMAND that your government obliterate them. You would want to win against your enemies, and you would rejoice when those who vowed to exterminate you were exterminated themselves.

Regardless of the corruption of our leaders, because this is part of living in our fallen, sinful nature—that leaders become corrupted— we can thank God for the one thing that Americans have that no other nation has: a constitution that keeps power-hungry leaders in check.

That, right there, is worth fighting for, isn’t it?

The solution cannot be to just give in. To shrug our shoulders and say, we can’t “fight an ideology”, only to turn around and post vicious condemnations of Israel and “Zionists” on social media, demanding they surrender and give up everything they have fought for since their founding. We cannot in good conscience demand this knowing we would not do the same if we were attacked. This is irrational, hypocritical thinking.

We will never defeat evil in this world, because God has put this world into the hands of the Evil One and only God can do that. I don’t understand all of it, I’m just a finite human being. But I can see, just by looking around me, just by what I have experienced in my own life, that more is going on than these physical wars.

What we can do is stand against evil—and not insist that evil doesn’t exist or somehow, it’s not our responsibility. I learned that clearly at the gate in Luxor. I stepped in and averted the battle before it was too late. Because I stood up, willing to fight, I was able to negotiate for peace. It didn’t mean that the greater war was won. But I had a small victory that day. We can all have those victories in our own lives.

We can recognize it is in our best interests to form alliances with others who have the same values—but we must actually KNOW what those values are. If we don’t, we are lost. If we stand together (despite all our faults and mistakes), we will be strong enough to keep the forces of evil at bay. Sometimes we gain ground and sometimes the enemy does. But we never stop fighting for our children and our children’s children, so they can remain free.

We should never say that our enemy’s ideology can’t be destroyed but ours can.

We aren’t living in a video game or a movie with a happy ending. We might die fighting. I’m not saying everybody has it in them to be a warrior, or that everyone should be one. There are many different ways to fight and not all of them require guns. Prayer is a weapon, too. But we’d be in bad shape if we didn’t have real warriors on our side. Plenty of people died for the freedoms we now enjoy. We should honor them, not spit on their graves.

There is a battle raging on this earth that goes beyond physical wars. It is a spiritual war, and it’s heating up. We should think carefully where we stand.