You Haven’t Listened

Jumping to Conclusions

It Ain’t that Hard to Figure Out, Lady

You Didn’t Hear That!

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

A Message to Beheaded Christians

Terrorism: Being Honest About the Enemy

From liberal New York Times columnist (not a Fox News pundit) Thomas Friedman, thoughts on the inability of the Obama White House to honestly discuss the nature of the terrorist threat.

I’ve never been a fan of global conferences to solve problems, but when I read that the Obama administration is organizing a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism for Feb. 18, in response to the Paris killings, I had a visceral reaction: Is there a box on my tax returns that I can check so my tax dollars won’t go to pay for this?

When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.

Last week the conservative columnist Rich Lowry wrote an essay in Politico Magazine that contained quotes from White House spokesman Josh Earnest that I could not believe. I was sure they were made up. But I checked the transcript: 100 percent correct. I can’t say it better than Lowry did:

“The administration has lapsed into unselfconscious ridiculousness. Asked why the administration won’t say [after the Paris attacks] we are at war with radical Islam, Earnest on Tuesday explained the administration’s first concern ‘is accuracy. We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism, and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it.’

This makes it sound as if the Charlie Hebdo terrorists set out to commit a random act of violent extremism and only subsequently, when they realized that they needed some justification, did they reach for Islam.

The day before, Earnest had conceded that there are lists of recent ‘examples of individuals who have cited Islam as they’ve carried out acts of violence.’ Cited Islam? According to the Earnest theory ... purposeless violent extremists rummage through the scriptures of great faiths, looking for some verses to cite to support their mayhem and often happen to settle on the holy texts of Islam.”

President Obama knows better. I am all for restraint on the issue, and would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.

Friedman then goes on to make an important distinction among Muslim communities.

Something else is also at work, and it needs to be discussed. It is the struggle within Arab and Pakistani Sunni Islam over whether and how to embrace modernity, pluralism and women’s rights. That struggle drives, and is driven by, the dysfunctionality of so many Arab states and Pakistan. It has left these societies with too many young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand, who then seek to overcome their humiliation at being left behind, and to find identity, by “purifying” their worlds of other Muslims who are not sufficiently pious and of Westerners whom they perceive to be putting Muslims down. But you don’t see this in the two giant Muslim communities in Indonesia or India.

Friedman, in other words, is not keen to blame all of Islam for terrorism, but neither is he unwilling to honestly voice the problem.

Remembering 9/11: Our Enemies Meant What They Said

This classic column from Jeff Jacoby appeared on 9/13/2001.

NOW THAT IT HAS HAPPENED TO US, the White House is not calling for “restraint.” The State Department is not concerned about “escalating the cycle of violence.” There are no editorials imploring the parties to conduct a “peace process” and “sit down at the negotiating table.”

Now that it has happened to us, the TV anchors are calling them terrorists, not “militants” or “activists.” Washington is not being warned to avoid a “provocative” response, or cautioned against retaliation that is “excessive and disproportionate.”

Now that it has happened to us, our eyes have finally opened. Now at last we understand that there is a war underway — and we are in it. For years we have acted as if the front line were elsewhere, and as if our job was to watch from the sidelines and make sure our friends didn’t defend themselves too aggressively. Now, after the worst massacre in US history, only the willfully blind can fail to see that the front line is here. The war between freedom and slavery, between hope and hopelessness, between the decent and the indecent, will be won or lost in America. For it is America that stands for everything our enemies hate.

But let us be honest. Those enemies have not been shy about declaring their enmity. Time and again they have announced that they despise us; time and again they have called for our destruction.

They have announced it from the mosques of Gaza, as broadcast live by the Palestinian Authority: “Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them — and those who stand by them. They are all in one trench, against the Arabs and the Muslims.”

They have proclaimed it a religious duty, as in the fatwa of Osama bin Laden, publicized worldwide in February 1998: “To kill the Americans and their allies, civilians, and military is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

They have made it a national crusade, as when Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, exhorted Islamic militants in 1994 to “hijack planes,” “blow up factories in Western countries,” and “declare open war on American interests throughout the world.”

How often have we seen them burning American flags? How often have we been demonized as “the Great Satan?” How often have they attacked US citizens, US embassies, US assets? For at least a decade it has been apparent that the most intense hatred of the United States and its values could be found in the world of Islamist fundamentalism. But too many Americans — and too many of their leaders — preferred not to notice.

“The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of ... the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the U.S. Marines a tough lesson in [Beirut]” exulted Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Yasser Arafat’s newspaper, on Tuesday. “These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history.... They are the most honorable among us.” Over and over and over, our enemies have talked this way. Did we think they didn’t mean it?

Upon releasing its annual report on global terrorism last year, the State Department observed that “the primary terrorist threats to the United States emanate from two regions, South Asia and the Middle East.” That is, from the regions where Islamist fanaticism is concentrated. But the US government, it would seem, couldn’t be bothered to listen to its own warning.

Or to the warnings of the enemy. In some ways, the worst thing about this week’s slaughter is not that it occurred, not even that such obvious terrorist targets as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the Pentagon! — could be so easily attacked from the air. The worst thing is that we were so unprepared for it even after the attack on USS Cole last fall (17 murdered). Even after the bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (224 murdered). Even after the blowing up of the Khobar Towers barracks in 1996 (19 murdered). Even after the car bomb at the US military center in Riyadh (5 murdered). Even after the first World Trade Center bombing (6 murdered).

It’s clear that under the Obama Administration, we have regressed to a pre-9/11 viewpoint. Part of the reason for this has been the success of Bush Administration anti-terrorism efforts, which have given the American people a sense of security.

But a big part has been the fact that Obama is a liberal, and liberals have (at least since the late 60s) never wanted to confront America’s enemies. Sometimes this has been because liberals were simply on the other side (Vietnam) and sometimes because liberals, even if they couldn’t justify the acts of America’s enemies, believed at least that those actions were “understandable” and a response to evil things America has done.

America, for liberals like Obama, is pretty much always at fault.

Perhaps we will get away with the pre-9/11 attitudes, especially given that most of the anti-terrorism infrastructure remains in place. But then, maybe we won’t.