D12HW5 Figurative Language

1.
As with a schoolyard fight, a few shoves could result in punches being thrown, and those punches could result in an all out brawl.

I used this sentence to describe the way that small-scale strikes or skirmishes between coalition and Iranian forces could spiral into a large-scale military conflict. I thought it was a creative way to relate international politics back to the human tendency to allways want vengence to the point where it gets very ugly.

2.
Many Arabs could be "pulled off the bench” and convinced to resist a perceived “anti-Muslim Crusade” by the U.S. and other Western powers (Katel).

Here I used the figurative language, "pulled off the bench." It's a term I have heard in several places now including my International and Domestic Terrorism class. It refers to a situation which causes moderate people, who till that point had been neither largely liberal or largely conservative, to move "off the bench" and into one of those more extreme categories.