General Pershing stomping a nest of bandit rattlesnakes

Muslims have urged a reprimand of Massachusetts state Sen. Guy Glodis, who circulated a flier suggesting the US prevent terrorist attacks by shooting Muslim extremists with pig-blood-soaked bullets and burying them in pig guts.

The flier purports to tell the story of how General John "Black Jack" Pershing captured and executed 50 terrorists while he was a military governor in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

Before they shot the terrorists, the soldiers supposedly slaughtered two pigs and soaked their bullets in pig blood. The ritual "horrified" the terrorists, who feared they would be "barred from paradise (and those virgins) and doomed to hell," the flier states.

"And for the next forty-two years, there was not a single Muslim extremist attack anywhere in the world," the flier reads. "Maybe it is time for this segment of history to repeat itself, maybe in Iraq? The question is, where do we find another Black Jack Pershing."

Glodis forwarded copies of the flier to his Senate colleagues with a note reading, "Thought this might be of interest to you."

"By no means did I mean to offend anyone," Glodis said. "I thought it was a news item of interest for their input and comment."

Heh. Bet they love him at Democratic Party HQs in Cambridge and Amherst.

Muslims are not amused. Meantime, the Worcester lawmaker has seen his alliterative name in headlines in the Hindustan Times and the Bangkok Post.

The Pershing item has been making the rounds on the Internet. Snopes looked into the tale and reports its validity is undetermined.

True or not, the Pershing story doesn't hold a candle to what an overzealous British civil administrator, following similar logic, actually ordered done to captured Sikh rebels at Malerkotla in 1872, in an episode that marked a low point of British imperialist rule in India.