The ‘Co-exist’ Bombers
This
has been a strange and deadly week in America. On Monday, two bombs
exploded at the Boston Marathon, the first successful terrorist attack
on a civilian target on American soil since 9/11. And yet a mere two
days later, Boston’s death toll was surpassed by a freak fertilizer
accident at a small town in Texas.
In America, all
atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support
so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president
rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance
predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should
call into question the constitutional right to bear arms.
Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass
infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional
right to abortion, so the ongoing Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia
has barely made the papers — even though it involves large numbers of
fully delivered babies who were decapitated and had their feet chopped
off and kept in pickling jars. Which would normally be enough to
guarantee a perpetrator front-page coverage for weeks on end. In the
most recent testimony, one of the “clinic”’s “nurses” testified that she
saw a baby delivered into the toilet, where his little arms and feet
flapped around as if trying to swim to safety. Then another “women’s
health worker” reached in and, in the procedure’s preferred euphemism,
“snipped” the baby’s neck — i.e., severed his spinal column. “Doctor”
Gosnell seems likely to prove America’s all-time champion mass murderer.
But his victims are ideologically problematic for the media, and so the
poor blood-soaked monster will never get his moment in the spotlight.
The
politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of
those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing
dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the
headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a
White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds
it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his
compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the
apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot
of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have
been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared
Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials
are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April
is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s
the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the
Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium,
where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the
Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it.
But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the Bay State.
Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any
suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual
suspects.
David Sirota’s column appeared on Tuesday. By Wednesday he got his
wish, not re the Boston perp but with the Ricin guy, a man who (in
further echoes of those first days after 9/11) mailed poison-laced
letters to a Republican senator and the Democrat president. The would-be
Ricin terrorist turned out to be not a jihadist from Yemen or
Waziristan but an Elvis impersonator from Mississippi whom Senator
Wicker had once booked as entertainment for a friend’s party. Kevin
Curtis is not just your run-of-the-mill Elvis impersonator, but a
seven-time finalist in the prestigious “Images of the King” competition.
Yet he is, in fact, the second Elvis impersonator to be mixed up with
Ricin, following the arrest last year of Michael Conley in a Florida
motel room after a showdown with cops in which he brandished a vial of
white powder at them.
Despite this pattern of behavior, Mr. Sirota
is probably right. There will be no profiling of Elvis impersonators by
Homeland Security. No one will stare suspiciously if someone is seen
walking around the perimeter of sensitive facilities in a
rhinestone-studded white jumpsuit with flyaway collars. The president is
unlikely to drone Vegas. Elvis impersonators can post all the threats
they want (“If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right
place If you’re looking for trouble, look right in my face”) and the
Islamophobic security state will still pursue its peculiar obsessions.
Twenty-four
hours later, Mr. Sirota had a second feather in his cap. The two
suspects in the Boston bombing turned out to be Caucasian males — that’s
to say, males from the Caucasus, specifically the North Caucasus,
Chechnya by way of Dagestan. Unfortunately for his delicate
sensitivities, the two Caucasians were also Muslims. They were alumni of
Cambridge Rindge and Latin, one of the oldest public schools in America
and latterly one of the most “diverse,” boasting (being the operative
word) students from over 80 countries. The Tsarnaev brothers had spent
most of their lives in the United States, and lived the diversity dream.
They seem to have had a droll wit when it comes to symbolism: Last
year, the younger brother took his oath of citizenship and became an
American on September 11. And, in their final hours of freedom, they
added a cruel bit of mockery to their crimes by carjacking a getaway
vehicle with a “Co-exist” bumper sticker. Oh, you must have seen them: I
bet David Sirota has one. The “C” is the Islamic crescent, the “O” is
the hippy peace sign; the “X” is the Star of David, the “T” is the
Christian cross; I think there’s some LGBT, Taoist, and Wiccan stuff in
there, too. They’re not mandatory on vehicles in Massachusetts; it just
seems that way.
I wonder, when the “Co-exist” car is returned to
its owner, whether he or she will keep the bumper sticker in place. One
would not expect him to conclude, as the gays of Amsterdam and the Jews
of Toulouse and the Christians of Egypt have bleakly done, that if it
weren’t for that Islamic crescent you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at
all. But he may perhaps have learned that life is all a bit more
complicated than the smiley-face banalities of the multicultists.
It’s
very weird to live in a society where mass death is important insofar
as it serves the political needs of the dominant ideology. A white male
loner killing white kindergartners in Connecticut is news; a black
doctor butchering black babies in Pennsylvania is not. When the manhunt
in Boston began, I received a bunch of e-mails sneering I was gagging
for it to be the Muzzies just as hungrily as lefties were for it to be
an NRA guy, a Tea Partier, a Sarah Palin donor. But, actually, I wasn’t.
On Monday, it didn’t feel Islamic: a small death toll at a popular
event but not one with the resonance and iconic quality the big-time
jihadists like — like 9/11, the embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole.
After all, if the jihad crowd wanted to blow up a few people here and
there IRA-style they could have been doing it all this last decade.
On
the other hand, it didn’t feel like one of those freelance bumblers —
the Pantybomber, the Times Square Bomber — finally got lucky. It feels
like something in between, something new. Is it just a one-off? Or a
strategic evolution?
Either way, the fatuities of the “Co-exist”
bumper sticker are not real. The disaffected young Muslim on the lam in a
car with a “Co-exist” sticker is.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346146/%E2%80%98co-exist%E2%80%99-bombers
Should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be designated an enemy combatant?
....Tsarnaev was made a citizen on September 11, 2012. Does he or does he not have the same righs as you and me?
The
Constitution says nothing about the government being able to revoke
someone's citizenship and it has a lot to say about violating an
individual's rights. The debate over whether the "public safety
exception" to reading the suspect his Miranda rights applies in this
case should be over. It is imperative at the very least that we attempt
to find out if there are any other conspirators or plots afoot.
But
taking the drastic step of declaring the suspect an "enemy combatant"
starts us down a slippery slope that we should pause long and hard
before beginning the descent. Our rights are there to protect everyone -
terrorists, murderers, child rapists, and of course, you and me. If it
doesn't work for the dregs of society, it won't work for us if we should
have need of protection from authorities.
This is not an abstract debate. Tossing aside Tsarnaev's rights because he may be guilty of terrorism will have real world consequences. I doubt whether President Obama is thinking along these lines, so the question is probably moot.
But what does it say about those Republicans who proposed the idea?
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/should_dzhokhar_tsarnaev_be_designated_an_enemy_combatant.html#ixzz2R83pfOz7
Terrorism is Used as a Tool by the State For More Control
Condoleezza Rice wrote the following in her book Joseph Stalin: Red Terror:
“The system of terror was essential to Stalinism. . . . Terror was the
creation to mold politically the control that they wanted.”
As we look back at the atrocities that have devastated America over
the past 12 years since 9/11, one has to reflect upon history and see
how it is that past dictators have profited from the use of “terror.”
.... On September 20, 2001, then President
George W. Bush said the following:
“Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
After this statement, the un-Patriot Act was signed into law, and now
Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights are violated as they are searched at
almost every airport in America through the TSA’s pretended authority,
and the government, step-by-step, aggrandizes power to itself while
consuming individual liberty.
Consider how the city of Boston was shut down and searches were made
of houses to find a suspect. What’s the next emergency that our
government might use as an excuse to give up more of our Fourth
Amendment rights?
After 9/11, America was told that we were under an extremist Islamic
threat. And now this administration (which celebrates Ramadan in the
White House, gives F-16s and tanks to the Muslim Brotherhood,
continuously sympathizes with radical Islam, opens the borders for
illegal immigration and runs guns to Mexican gun cartels to blame the
American people) has now extended the definition of a terrorist to mean
anyone who happens to be a patriot, a Christian, a gun owner, a
pro-lifer, etc. – in essence, an American (Isaiah 5:20).
Just this last week, the Equal Opportunity branch of the military put
out a training manual that labeled “evangelical Christians” as the No. 1
threat to America. Within a week USA Today’s front page stated
that “Terror Returns” after the Boston Marathon bombing, and officials
are stating that the suspects are possibly “homegrown terrorists.”
Will the threat of terror be used by our government to restrict our freedoms even more?
Fascism by the Numbers
The thuggish majoritarianism of the Obama-era left.
....
If representative democracy is "unsustainable," what is the proposed
alternative? Bloomberg doesn't say, but we think that, on behalf of the
left, we can rule out direct democracy. Many states practice it through
the initiative or referendum process, and while it is used by all
political stripes, the left shows no respect for the majority when it
sides with the right on questions such as racial preferences, tax
limitations and (at least until recently) same-sex marriage.
What this would seem to leave is some sort of system in which an
elite would further "democracy" by both reflecting and directing the
will of the people. That is essentially the century-old idea of
Progressivism, and of its not-too-distant cousin, fascism.
We use the F-word not to inflame emotions but to provoke thought, for
we find the behavior of the Obama-era left only disturbing, not
alarming. The scapegoating of minorities, the thunderous demands that
the Will of the People be done, have an authoritarian feel. But they
don't have much authority.
Why? Because the conception of "the people"--the idea that allows the
left to imagine it commands the support of a vast majority--has no
organic reality. You've heard of the expression "reducing a person to a
statistic"? The Obama-era left seeks to inflate a statistic into a
people.
Take the "1%." This refers not to an identifiable group of people but
to a statistical artifact: the 99th percentile of income distribution
in any given year. Some people, like George Soros (long may he live),
can assume they have a permanent place in the 1%. Others fall in
briefly because of a sudden windfall or the one-time sale of an asset.
Simple probability dictates that most people will be in the 98th
percentile or below their whole lives, but that isn't part of their
identity. Not everyone resents great wealth; many admire or aspire to
it. And even those who identify as "the 99%" have an ideological kinship
with superrich lefties like Soros.
"The 90%" who supposedly support gun background checks is an even
more evanescent construct--the result of a poll, which presumably
questioned a few hundred randomly called people, few of whom likely had
thought deeply about the subject. And while there are certainly
Americans who define their identity in part by their aversion to guns,
many others define it by their affinity for them. We'd guess that
overall the latter outnumber the former, and we're fairly certain the
latter tend to be more intense with respect to this aspect of their
identity.
The senators who voted down the gun-control measures did so on the
basis of a deeper understanding of the constituents they represent than
can be conveyed by a single number from an opinion poll. They're
professional politicians, and they managed to get elected, in most cases
from states Barack Obama never managed to carry. If they misjudged
popular opinion, they can be voted out of office. It's an example of
representative democracy at its best.
When fascist or socialist movements have managed to gain a foothold,
it has been by appeal to a pre-existing organic source of identity,
whether national, ethnic or religious. Today's dominant strain of
American leftist thought is multiculturalist, not nationalist, which
means leftist identity politics is mostly a matter of trying to forge
alliances among disparate and potentially antipathetic ethnic and other
identity groups.
Multiculturalism is pernicious in many ways, but perhaps its only
virtue is that it is self-limiting because the identity coalitions on
which it relies are inherently unstable. The left's desperate attempts
to conjure up a 90% or 99% supermajority are reflections of weakness,
not strength.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578432832764057060.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Obamacare To Encourage Employers to Hire Immigrants Over Citizens
Actually, it’s a combination of Obamacare and the immigration reform bill that has been introduced into Congress.
Under the terms of the immigration reform bill, nearly 11 million
illegals will be granted a provisional legal status to live and work in
the US. However, that legal status will mean that they will be
considered to be the same as people classified as ‘not lawfully present’
under Obamacare.
The significance of this is that provisionally legal immigrants
(still illegal in my book), are not required under Obamacare to obtain
health insurance nor are they eligible for Obamacare tax credits.
Employers who hire them will not be required to provide health benefits
for them and the employers will not be penalized for not providing
health coverage.
When you boil all of this down, employers will reap up to $3,000 in
savings by hiring an illegal, oops, I mean a provisionally legal
immigrant over hiring a US citizen and this is how it works:
“Employers who don’t offer insurance face fines based on
full-time staffing levels, regardless of whether the workers are
immigrants or U.S. citizens. However, employers who offer insurance can
face fines if the coverage costs workers more than 9.5 percent of their
pay. If the insurance is too costly, the worker will become eligible for
Obamacare.”
“The employer then would be charged by the government, up to $3,000
per full-time worker who receives Obamacare subsidies. But since
legalized immigrants wouldn’t be eligible for Obamacare, their employers
would not be fined for hiring them and not subsidizing their insurance
coverage.”
As an American citizen that has been out of work for any length of
time, how would you feel if you knew that an employer hired a
provisionally legal immigrant over you because it saved him money with
Obamacare?
I would be irate! But once again we see where our liberal government
extends more benefits to illegal immigrants than they do to American
citizens. The combination of Obamacare and the immigration reform bill
will only serve to make it harder for American citizens to find work and
in some cases keep their jobs. Imagine competing with a new ‘legal’
workforce of several million people who will cost employers less to hire
than you.
Let me put this in perspective: A company has 50 full time workers,
all US citizens, working for them. The immigration reform bill passes
and becomes law. The employer discovers that he could replace 20-30 of
his workers with provisionally legal immigrants and thus save the
company up to $60,000-$90,000 a year by not having to provide them with
health coverage. In a struggling economy, that’s a sizable annual
savings. The end result is another 20-30 Americans losing their jobs to
Obama’s illegal aliens, and this probably won’t be the only company to
take advantage of the situation either.
The immigration reform bill is a very dangerous piece of legislation
that will only hurt the American people and economy. There is only one
reason for the immigration reform bill and it is to secure 11 million
Democratic voters. Think about it!
Middle School Anti-Bullying Lesson Includes Lesbian Role Play
Young girls at a New York middle school were instructed to ask one
another for a lesbian kiss and boys were given guidance on how to tell
if women are sluts during an anti-bullying presentation on gender
identity and sexual orientation, angry parents allege.
The special health class was held last week at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, NY. The students were separated by gender – with students from Bard College leading the workshops.
Parents are especially furious after their young daughters were told
that it was perfectly normal for 14-year-old girls to have sex and there
was nothing their parents could do to intervene. The boys and girls were also given a sexual vocabulary primer – that included words like “pansexual” and “genderqueer.”
“I am furious,” said Mandy Coon, whose daughter was in the class. “I
am her parent. Where does anyone get the right to tell her that it’s
okay for her to have sex?”
Coon told Fox News that her daughter was upset by the classroom
lecture and was confused about why she had to ask another girl for a
kiss. “She told me, ‘Mom, we all get teased and picked on enough – now I’m
going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I
could kiss her,’” Coon said.
She said the school told her that the purpose of the lesson was to “teach girls boundaries and how to say no.” “They also picked two girls to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date,” Coons said.
Paul Finch, the superintendent of the Red Hook Central School District, told the Poughkeepsie Journal that the workshop focused on “improving culture, relationships, communication and self-perceptions.” He told the newspaper those were issues the school was obligated to teach under the state’s Dignity for All Students Act.
The state law requires schools to create a safe and supportive
environment free from discrimination, intimidation, taunting, harassment
and bullying, the newspaper reported.
Parents said they were not notified about the class or the subject matter. “The school is overstepping its bounds in not notifying parents first
and giving us the choice,” parent Tara Burns told Fox News. “I thought
it was very inappropriate. That kind of instruction is best left up to
the parents.”
Parents of male students were also upset after the college-aged
lecturer discussed items like condom usage and whether girls are sluts. “I was absolutely furious – really furious,” said the parent of a
13-year-old who asked not to be identified. “They were teaching the boys
how to decipher if a girl is a slut.”
The parent said the boys were told you could make that determination by how girls dress or how many boys they date. “We don’t judge people like that in our family,” she said. “We don’t
call women names because of what they wear or who they date.”
The parent told Fox News that boys were also instructed to always have a condom in their wallet. "These are just kids,” she said. “I’m dumbfounded that they found this class was appropriate.”
Coon wondered why the school district allowed college students to lead the workshops without teacher involvement. “Those student were not licensed, they are not trained professionals,” she said.
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/middle-school-anti-bullying-lesson-includes-lesbian-role-play.html
Why Individualism is more compassionate than Collectivism
Throughout most of the world people are taught to look at reality in a
very polarized way. When certain issues are presented to us through
mainstream circles they are usually oversimplified to the point where
all concepts are either black or white, and all people are either good
or bad, with no in between.
The reality of the situation is that things are much more complicated
than that, there are usually many different ways of looking at things
and many different sides to the story. This is especially true in the
study of philosophy, because terms are constantly being redefined and
ideas constantly reexamined with every new generation of philosophers to
accommodate the new insight and information that has become available
over time.
One polarity that is vastly misunderstood and oversimplified by the
general population is that of individualism and collectivism. Now, it is
true that many different people have many different ideas about what
these words mean, but what really determines the true value of any
concept is the consequences that come as a result of that concept being
implemented by society.
The mainstream stereotype of an individualist is someone who is selfish
and who has no desire at all to participate in the community. The
contrasting view of a collectivist is apparently someone who cares about
the tribe as a whole, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice
their own well-being for the sake of the tribe. While this may be what
these names have come to represent in our culture, and the stereotypes
may be true in some cases, these definitions are overlooking the impact
that these philosophies have on the real world and the realm of
politics.
To be an individualist has nothing to do with selfishness. It is simply a
way of looking at the world where you see billions of individuals,
instead of various groups of people separated by race, nationality,
gender, religion or social status. Oddly enough, it is collectivism that
allows for people to be divided into groups and puts the innocent at
risk by devaluing the lives of individuals.
The reason why this is such a danger is because when people are
grouped together in a political sense, large numbers of those people can
be held responsible for anything that an individual among them may or
may not have done. Furthermore, when sacrifice is seen as a virtue it
becomes even easier for a tyrant to come along and take advantage of
this perspective for their own ends.
This idea of collectivism is the mindset that allows tyrants to wage
war. If each individual on this earth was held accountable for their own
personal actions then the full scale war that we see today would never
even materialize to begin with. If individuals were actually seen as who
they were instead of what group they belonged to, there would not be
millions of lives sacrificed for the sake of hunting down a few among
them who were accused of some real or fabricated transgression.
Likewise, it is this mentality that is the root of all the bigotry
that separates humanity. If all of the people on the earth were seen as
individuals then racism, sexism, classism and other forms of
discrimination would cease to exist and everyone would be responsible
for their own actions.
The rhetoric behind collectivism sounds great at face value, but the
real life consequences of this world view tell a very different story.
It may be natural for humans to form social groups, but we must
recognize that those groups are all filled with unique individuals who
should not be forced to compromise any of their freedom for the sake of a
group or authority figure.
Respecting the rights and needs of individuals is actually a much
more caring way of looking at things, than grouping people into
categories and expecting them to forfeit their personal sovereignty to
satisfy the whims of other human beings.
http://truththeory.com/2012/03/02/why-individualism-is-more-compassionate-than-collectivism/
PK'S NOTE: Though I know the word, I looked up its meaning:
1. total rejection of established laws and institutions.
2. anarchy, terrorism, or other revolutionary activity.
3. total and absolute destructiveness, especially toward the world at large and including oneself: the power-mad nihilism that marked Hitler's last years.
4. an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth.
Band-Aids for Nihilism
Should
we be surprised that a large segment of a culture that has divorced
itself from the traditions and moral norms of Judeo-Christendom should
go haywire and engage in self-destructive and socially pathological
actions? It is an act of illusory hypocrisy when you trumpet a worldview
that tells children that they are "little animals" of chance who are on
this planet to solely experience pleasure and engage in self-interest,
and then cry bloody murder when that interest just happens to include
shooting little children in the head.
It
is highly difficult for a mentally healthy person to drink up that much
existential nihilism and to remain a rational moral being. How much
more so for those fragile psyches who view the universe as an uncaring,
inhospitable place where the only purpose to their benighted existence
is what we can scrounge up on our own? In a world of no objective
morality, whether one slits the throats of children or feeds them in a
soup line is all a matter of choice; since ultimately, the pedophile and
the saint all become food for maggots and the memory of our nobility or
beastliness will disappear as the fragile flowers of May.
An
entire parade of mass murderers has been unleashed upon the Western
world as a result of its own incoherent internal moral anarchy. It is
fueled by empty despair and volcanic anger that are obsessively directed
towards random targets by crippled and evil minds stewing in this
poisoned cauldron of nihilism. To hold an inert weapon morally
responsible for human behavior merely compounds this ideological madness
and conveniently ignores this Postmodern sickness of soul by trying to paint
over the symptoms. But then again, those who do not believe in the
immortal soul or that humanity exists for a greater purpose must find
rest and satisfaction in a materialistic explanation of evil -- that bad
things come solely from reductionist theories of faulty wiring and
chemical imbalances, and not as the consequence of brittle and alienated
people haunted by the quiet horror of their empty values and horizons.
I
tell you truly: Man unleashed from his moral restraints and the
strictures of an eternal justice and purpose is the most dangerous
created power in the universe. Deny him a firearm and he will grab a
baseball bat or the jawbone of an ass. Deprive him of the message of a
loving and forgiving God and he will band together with others of a
similar sensibility and converge upon airliners with box cutters or line
boulevards with pressure cookers filled with nails and ball bearings.
Nihilism comes in many flavors and forms -- but it certainly will not
conform to the shape of the human heart, which was designed for
something infinitely better.
Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away
But willful blindness remains the order of the day.
‘Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal
webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with
his now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan — namesake of a
14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims
.
Brutalizing
our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of
jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling
chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled
mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
At a point in the race timed to achieve maximum carnage, the Tsarnaev
brothers bombed the Boston Marathon with improvised explosive devices.
IEDs are small but potent homemade bombs — crude explosives and
unforgiving shrapnel encased in easily portable pressure cookers. The
bombs are simple to make. They won’t kill thousands or even hundreds of
people like hijacked planes or heavy chemical explosives will. But
that’s not the objective. The goal is to instill terror into the flow of
everyday life. IEDs are made for “soft” targets. They are easily
camouflaged amid the traffic, the everyday debris, and the
eight-year-old boys frolicking as they wait for Dad to cross the finish
line.
Willful blindness
remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade Center
was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and
thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would
have been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially,
the instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to
suggest “Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario —
namely, that jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had,
yet again, attacked innocent civilians — became the least likely
scenario in the minds of media pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed
(to Gaia, I’m sure) for white conservative culprits with Tea Party hats
and Rush 24/7 subscriptions. As our Kevin D. Williamson quipped, the “literal Caucasians” they got were not quite what they had in mind.
To
listen to the commentary was to assume that the jihad’s nimble
post-9/11 shift from heavy bombs and airliner missiles to IEDs had never
happened. Prior to 2009, much agitprop was made over the thousands of
American troops killed and maimed by IEDs in Iraq — they signified, the
Left told us, that George Bush had brought al-Qaeda to previously
jihad-free Baghdad. So did IEDs at the Marathon mean the same jihad had
now come to Boston? Perish the thought. Surely the Marathon bombing was
the work of either the right-wing extremists Janet Napolitano has been warning us about since 2009, or those notoriously violent Catholics and Evangelicals that today’s Army equates with Hamas and Hezbollah.
But
no: It was in fact the jihad that stubbornly refuses to be wished away.
It will have to be defeated. It was never a molehill we were
exaggerating into Mohammed’s mountain. After 1,400 years of aggression,
we can safely say it is not anytime soon going to evolve
into the ballyhooed “internal struggle for personal betterment” — not
for the tens of millions of Muslims for whom Islamic supremacism is,
quite simply, Islam.
So will we be roused to meet the challenge?
Doesn’t seem like it. On Friday morning, the damning and utterly
predictable details began pouring in the second the jihadists were
identified — “Outlook: Islam”; a YouTube playlist
called “Terrorists” that included the ditty, “I will dedicate my life
to jihad”; a wife who abruptly converted to Islam and began dressing in
what a neighbor called “the Islamic style”; an apparent reverence for
the notorious
sharia jurist Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. Yet the media commentary, even if
it grudgingly mentions these things, internalizes none of them. “How
shocking it is,” we’ve repeatedly heard, “that the brothers Tsarnaev
want to mass-murder Americans. After all, they’re Chechen Muslims, and
the Chechens’ beef is with the Russians, not us.”
Good grief. It
is the Uighurs all over again. You’ll recall the Uighurs — they were a
group of Turkic-speaking jihadists from the Xinjiang region of China,
detained at Guantanamo Bay because they trained in Afghanistan with an
al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization (the East Turkistan Islamic
Movement). At least some of them fought against American forces.
Nevertheless, we released them. Stroking its bloated chin, our
government rationalized that they could not be enemy combatants because
they weren’t our enemies — their beef was really with China,
right? After all, Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re very nice
people, so why should we assume they might have a problem with us?
We are in a war driven by ideology. “Violent extremism,” which is the
label the government and the commentariat prefer to put on our enemies,
is not an ideology — it is the brutality that radical ideologies yield.
Our enemies’ ideology is Islamic supremacism. To challenge and defeat an
ideological movement, you have to understand and confront their vision
of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and biases will not do.
Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian nation-states.
They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they
distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames
matters as Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace else.
The fact that you think this is nuts, or that I’m nuts for saying it out
loud, has nothing to do with whether they believe it. They do — and
they don’t care, even a little, what you think.
You do not defeat an ideology by hoping it will change or disappear.
You have to challenge it, to make it defend its baleful tenets in the
light of day. You cannot protect yourself from its violent outbursts
absent understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting that its
teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and
committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy
— one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists
before they strike.
Asked about his “outlook,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
offered a pregnant response, “Islam,” that raises more questions than it
answers. There are all kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind
that is far more widely held than we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until
we get beyond that discomfort, until we are prepared to ask, “What
Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic supremacism as the
pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring
nightmare.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346145/jihad-will-not-be-wished-away
No comments:
Post a Comment