Monday, January 11, 2010
Mark Steyn wrote a scathing piece this week on the failure of the Obama administration to properly and honestly address Islamic terrorism. Here's a snippet: Not long after the Ayatollah Khomeini announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the British novelist suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London late one night and told his interviewer he'd converted to Islam. Marvelous religion, couldn't be happier, Allahu Akbar and all that.Read it all here.
And the Ayatollah said hey, that's terrific news, glad to hear it. But we're still gonna kill you.
Well, even a leftie novelist wises up under those circumstances.
Evidently, the president of the United States takes a little longer.
Barack Obama has spent the past year doing big-time Islamoschmoozing... at the end of it the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we're still gonna kill you.
According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world's superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can't blame the world's mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.
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Again, to be fair, it isn't just Obama. Last November, the electorate voted, in effect, to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it's all a bit of a bore, and they'd rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan.
On the other hand, if we are now at war, as Obama belatedly concedes, against whom are we warring? "We are at war against al-Qaida," says the president.
Really? But what does that mean? Was the previous month's "isolated extremist," the Fort Hood killer, part of al-Qaida? When it came to spiritual advice, he turned to the same Yemeni-based American-born imam as the Pantybomber, but he didn't have a fully paid-up membership card.
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The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist's home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious – that this "war" is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.
But the president of the United States cannot say that because he is overinvested in a fantasy – that, if only that Texan moron Bush had read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his Miranda rights and bowed as low as Obama did to the Saudi king, we wouldn't have all these problems. So now Obama says, "We are at war." But he cannot articulate any war aims or strategy because they would conflict with his illusions. And so we will stagger on, playing defense, pulling more and more items out of our luggage – tweezers, shoes, shampoo, snow globes, suppositories – and reacting to every new provocation with greater impositions upon the citizenry.
You can't win by putting octogenarian nuns through full-body scanners.
All you can do is lose slowly. After all, if you can't even address what you're up against with any honesty, you can't blame the other side for drawing entirely reasonable conclusions about your faintheartedness in taking them on.
After that cringe-making radio interview, Salman Rushdie subsequently told The Times of London that trying to appease his would-be killers and calling for his own book to be withdrawn was the biggest mistake of his life. If only the president of the United States was such a quick study.
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6 comments:
This underwear bomber thing is a joke. This isn't about Obama or anyone else addressing Islamic terrorism; its about getting the government to address what actually took place.
Here you have a guy, known to intelligence agencies to have been "radicalized" in Yemen. Before he boards the plane, a very credible witness, an American attorney who puts his reputation on the line to give this account, says that when they were still in Holland, this "terrorist" was accompanied by a well-dressed Indian-looking man who got him on board the without so much as a passport! He overheard the well-dressed man tell the customer service lady that he was a refugee from Sudan and he didn't have a passport, and they do this all the time. The woman directed him to her supervisor, and somehow he gets on the plane. This actually has made it into the press, but the government isn't commenting on it. It took them a while to comment on the fact (and this only after multiple witnesses corroborated this mind you) that another man, also who appeared to be of Indian descent was arrested after bomb-sniffing dogs were alerted to his baggage after the incident. The government's response? The arrest was unrelated!
Here is what we should be asking: How does a guy without a passport get a flight to the United States? How is it that the FBI will not release the security tape confirming of denying the existence of the well-dressed Indian man who allegedly got this guy on the plane? And how is it that a second man was arrested after bomb-sniffing dogs were alerted to his baggage, and that's somehow unrelated to the other attempted bombing - if you can call it that? Oh, I know! It was a failure of intelligence! That's the ticket! We need every single intelligence agency in the world to integrate into some monster bureaucracy so that every facet of every person is monitored continually. Then we need body scanners to demoralize everyone by looking at their naked bodies, while we fry them with radiation! This is your America, folks.
CNN interview with eyewitnesses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAtK7FFDukQ
So, Chris, your theory of the attempted bombing is what? That there is no link to Islamic terrorism?
What we need is to allow the men on the ground (in this case, TSA security) to profile and take initiative. Currently they get punished for doing either, which means no matter what defenses we put up and no matter how thoroughly we search every single person, a bomber is still going to get through. Rather than waste time on the nuns, start keeping an eye on Muslims. Be like the Israelis and ask certain questions of suspicious people. If someone buys a plane ticket with cash, call security. Unfortunately, in the PC-infested world in which we live, if you do any of the above, you'll get fired. For the sake of a few hurt feelings, thousands will die and millions will be severely inconvenienced.
Theory? What theory? Look, this is the well played out equation: Problem - Reaction - Solution. In order to arrive at the proper solution, one must understand the problem, because otherwise our reaction will ultimately be skewed by our flawed evaluation of the problem. The question is whether we should fundamentally understand the problem as an issue with Islamic terrorism or something else. In my view, it is clearly something else.
Was there an Islamic element here? Obviously there was, but what does that have to do with letting a Nigerian man with a firecracker (not an actual bomb) on a plane to the U.S. when he didn't even have a freaking passport?! That's what the problem is - utter incompetence at best. The fact that he was a Muslim is secondary. When we armed the U.S. armed the Mujahideen (al Qaeda) against the Soviets, there was an Islamic element to that too, but the U.S.'s motive was not religious - it was political.
By the way, tell me how you profile Islamic terrorists? Do we single out Arabs? Persians? Indonesians? That certainly wouldn't have worked here, so that couldn't be a workable solution.
So what do we do now? How about let's single out all the non-white people? How about every person who is not of European descent gets tagged as a potential terrorist, and all the innocent white people get left alone? Is that it? But then, says Janet Napolitano, "What about homegrown hillbilly terrorists? What about all the Tim McVeighs, Terry Nichols', and homeschooling weirdos out there?" So guess what. Everybody is the enemy. Its not just Muslims; the enemy is you and me and everybody we know. Because all must be conditioned to the police state. Everyone must carry their papers. Everyone must capitulate!
You can point the finger at the Muslims or the liberals or whomever, but in the end, it will just fuel the fire of the philosophy of divide and conquer. You'll snitch on your neighbors, they'll snitch on you, and everybody will be the reluctant sibling of Big Brother because the alternative will be unthinkable. What's the alternative? Freedom.
We profile like the Israelis profile... they don't have bombings or hijackings. What they do is ask questions and single out suspicious behavior. In some cases, color of skin may play a role, in others, country of origin. It is NONSENSICAL to strip search all people alike (actually, it's not alike, you're MORE likely to be searched if you're NOT Muslim than if you are). Either way, the people doing the security should be allowed to think rationally and act accordingly. A guy who is about to blow himself up is probably going to show some signs... someone who buys a ticket with cash should probably be watched carefully...
As it is now, the terrorists win merely by getting passed security, because then they inconvenience everyone (for a couple days, no one was allowed to use the bathrooms on planes for the last hour of the flight!). If we want freedom, we use our heads and stop being so freakin' PC.
Oops, "passed" should be "past"
They don't have bombings in Israel? Maybe not in a while, but I seem to recall several suicide bombings occurring there, and their security measures extend well beyond the airport.
Plus, the Israeli regime and their covert intelligence people engage in terrorism themselves - directly and indirectly. Who do you think helped empower Hamas?
In the spirit of not being so PC, how about we allow TSA to profile who they think belongs to domestic terrorist groups? And I doubt "behavior" is going to have much to do with it. The idea is to have some generic classification wherein everyone might subjectively fit. Listen to Erroll Southers, Obama's nominee as head of the TSA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8MaUSu4isk&feature=player_embedded
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