Will Bin Laden Have the Last Laugh?

           



            Yesterday, on the thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I found myself once again reflecting upon that day and the differences in the world before and after.

            Thankfully, we haven’t experienced another attack on that scale since that day. Our intelligence and military services have done an outstanding job in combating Islamic threats. Many have sacrificed much to keep us safe and I am proud to have played a small part in that.

But that isn’t the whole story…

            Remember when metal detectors were the only security needed at the airport? I do. I also remember when the people who feared their communications being monitored by the government were kooks and the police didn’t drive MRAPs.

            I even remember a time thirty years ago, during the Cold War, when the ‘commies’ were the bad guys and we weren’t afraid to call them that.  I remember a President with the courage to refer to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. I can still hear his command, “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear. Down. This. Wall.” His words struck like hammer blows.

            We knew who the bad guys were and weren’t afraid to admit it. It was a cold war, but war nonetheless. We knew what it took to beat them and we did it with neither excuse nor concession. Those were the days before political correctness.

            Those days are gone.

            Today, America’s second longest war turns 13. In spite of continued attacks, aggression, threats, and foiled terror plots, the media and Whitehouse policy are in chronic denial about the threat we face from the ‘religion of peace.’

            Terrorist acts are now called ‘workplace violence’ or ‘man-caused disasters.’ 80 year-old grannies are stopped at TSA checkpoints just as often as Middle Eastern males between the ages of 16 and 45.

            This narrative of the religion of peace is propagated in the media as well. When was the last TV show or movie you saw in which the Muslim was a bad guy? When the movie version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears was made, the Muslim terrorists were replaced by neo-Nazis. News outlets do all they can to deny Islamic radicals too, warning instead of the threat of right-wing extremists. Last night, the President led his ISIS remarks by declaring the group is not Islamic.

Really?

(Dr. Bill Warner has a presentation which shows how ISIS fits perfectly into Islamic philosophy and are no different than the prophet himself. See it here.)

For years, we have bent over backwards to deny the savagery committed in the name of Allah. We have bowed to the mandates of political correctness and we have paid the price. It must be said that this President not the only one to do so, but he does seem to be the most adamant about it.

Here are just a very few examples of the damage done while we buried our heads in the sand:

2009

·       The administration abandoned the T-word for the more benign term “man-caused disasters.”

·       13 unarmed soldiers were killed and over 30 wounded by a Muslim soldier shouting, “Allah uh Akbar!” on Fort Hood, Texas. This was called “workplace violence” by the administration. The victims were denied the purple, which meant that the survivors and families of the fallen would not receive the benefits they deserved. (Berkowitz/World News, 2013)

·       Citizens of Iran rise up against their government in the wake of elections they believe to be corrupt. America offers them no support. Many are arrested and killed.

2010

·       Arab Spring begins in December in Tunisia and soon spread to Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. The administration choses to back the Muslim Brotherhood in spite of their radical, anti-western, anti-Semitic, philosophies.

2011

·       We pulled out of a ‘stable’ Iraq, leaving a void of power without having any idea who would fill it.

·       Syrian uprising against President al-Assad. America backs the rebels, many of whom are linked to Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations.

·       Libya revolts. America backs the Muslim Brotherhood with supplies and air strikes. The rebels take over the country, murder Khadafy, and install an ant-American Islamic government.

·       Egypt falls. Thousands of Christians are murdered and hundreds of churches are destroyed. America does nothing.

·       Iranian citizens rise again, attempting to shed the yolk of radical Islam and are put down once again with an iron fist. Once again, America does nothing.

2012

·       Iraq’s vice president is charged with murder and flees the county. Iraq begins its spiral into civil war. America does nothing.

·       The same year – The American ambassador to Libya is murdered along with three other Americans in a well-planned and coordinated assault. The attack is painted as a spontaneous response to a YouTube video. The maker of that video is imprisoned. The attackers remain free.

2013

·       Syrian government is accused of using chemical weapons against rebel forces. The administration urges American to aid the rebels, including U.S. troops on the ground. The initial claims are refuted by many in the international community who say evidence points to the rebels being the initiators of the chemical attack.

·       ISIS grows out of the Syrian resistance and sets its sights westward toward Iraq. Intelligence services inform the administration of this development. Nothing happens.

·       The Boston Marathon is hit with two homemade explosive devises killing 3 and injuring 263 others. The two suspects are Muslim immigrants. This aspect is downplayed by the media and administration.

2014

·       Well, you get the point. Just turn on the TV.

 

The administration may deny the enemy, but they cannot deny the threat.

As such, they must cast an ever wider net to catch ‘bad guys’ instead of focusing on the one group that has conducted every attack since Oklahoma City 19 years ago. Our reluctance to identify the bad guys has muddied the water, causing every American to become a terror suspect.(At least I hope that's the reason, anything else is too terrible to go into here.)

Recent revelations of governmental agencies spying on, targeting, harassing, or otherwise molesting innocent Americans in the name of security have a lot of people wondering if it’s gone too far.

When two dudes with explosive pressure cookers can shut down one of the city of Boston and cause its residents to effectively be placed under martial law, we got problems.

When the IRS and other agencies are weaponized and used to target citizens and groups based purely on political beliefs, we got problems.

When Americans must censor their own speech out of fear that someone is listening, we got BIG problems.

When veterans,Christians, libertarians, Constitutionalists, soccer moms, and Tea Partiers are considered as big a threat as jihadists, we got HUGE problems.

Are we moving from a philosophy of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ to one of ‘if you havenothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?’

If we treated radical Islam today as we treated communism all those years ago, we could effectively manage this threat both globally and domestically without turning every American into a suspect.

Between 1917 and 1991, we defeated imperialism, fascism, and communism in rapid succession. Those adversaries had the military and economic might of nation states with millions of troops and the latest military hardware. We faced annihilation at their hands, but we still respected freedom at home and abroad (except for the Japanese internment camps which were a disgrace). We didn’t militarize our police. We didn’t restrict travel. We didn’t eavesdrop on every citizen and we didn’t shred the Constitution. We faced the enemy head-on. We called it what it was.

And we were victorious.

Today, a few scruffy savages are able to terrorize us into surrendering our rights for the sake of a little imaginary security.

Al-Qaeda's goal 13 years ago was to weaken America, to make us prisoners of our own fear. It didn't work then, but, if we continue down our current path, the result will be that same. We will succeed where they failed in bringing our own country to its knees, so afraid of these boogeymen that we gladly give away what's left of our rights, becoming prisoners in our own homeland. And in doing so, we will invite tyranny the likes of which this country has never seen.

Then Bin Laden's victory will be complete.