NO LONGER A WILL TO RESIST ISLAMIC FOES? ALEX ALEXIEV
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7315/pub_detail.asp
9/11: No Longer Any Will To Resist Islamist Foes?
As we mark the 9th anniversary of 9/11 and the second such anniversary under President Obama’s administration, it is difficult to be optimistic about Washington’s current resolve to face our Islamist foes. Much of this pessimism is conditioned by the callous disregard of the public sentiment on the Ground Zero mosque displayed by what Angelo Codevilla has aptly called our ‘ruling class’ and its minions in the media and academia. Germane as the mosque conflict is, a much greater reason to be concerned is the seeming consensus among America’s elected and self-appointed elites that the Islamist threat no longer exists.
A case in point is a recent opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria, a prominent Newsweek commentator and a mouthpiece for the received wisdom of the ruling class. America has overreacted to 9/11 and Al Qaeda is no longer a serious threat, Zakaria informs us, and its “best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.” It is worth looking into Zakaria’s logic because it is the very same logic that undergirds the Administration’s efforts to downplay the threat and blame America for it to the extent that it still believes it to exist.
To begin with, Al Qaeda and terrorism are but a deadly symptom and not the cause of the underlying malignancy which is violent Islamism. Even if Al Qaeda no longer existed, neither Islamism’s murderous fury nor its jihad against America are likely to abate. Witness, for instance, the 150 killed and four times as many injured in half a dozen suicide bombings carried out by the Pakistani Taliban in just the past week or the recent arrest of the Taliban handlers of the Times Square would be bomber Faisal Shahzad. Equally fallacious is Zakaria’s claim that home-grown jihadists are somehow accidentally radicalized over the Internet. Of the three dozen home-grown jihadists whose terrorist plots were foiled since 9/11, virtually all were radicalized at the countless American mosques, Islamic cultural centers and ‘charities’ that preach hate long before they reached out for training and support overseas. It is an uncomfortable truth that our government has long refused to acknowledge that while most American Muslims are well-off and not given to extremism, the Muslim religious establishment has been largely controlled by extremists ever since Wahhabi money and the Muslim Brotherhood started setting up the Islamist networks in America in 1963. And so it is that in the make-believe world of the administration and its acolytes, a New York imam who fervently believes in the virtues of the barbarian sharia doctrine is lionized as a ‘moderate,’ while Americans justifiably concerned about his intentions are castigated as ‘Islamophobes.’ It behooves the American public to understand as a previous generation facing a totalitarian challenge did, that the line between the useful idiot and the fellow-traveler is but a thin one.
FamilySecurityMatters.orgContributing Editor Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.
Comments are closed.
