Posted on 11/25/2002 7:23:13 AM PST by JohnGalt
November 22, 2002
LITTLE WHITE LIES by Thomas Fleming
"From the mountains of Afghanistan to the valleys of Bosnia to the plains of Africa to the forests of Asia and around the world we are on the ground working with our Muslim partners to expand to the circle of peace, the circle of prosperity, the circle of freedom." Secretary of State Colin Powell, in pronouncing these glorious phrases (we hope he did not actually break precedent and write them himself) sounded like a Fourth of July orator invoking the rock-bound cliffs of Maine and the sunny shores of California.
Secretary Powell is apparently unaware that there are forests in Africa and plains in Asia, but the myopia is pardonable when you are running circles around the rest of the world. What the secretary would prefer not to bring up is the fact that in both Africa and Asia Muslims, many of them funded by "pro-Western" governments and oil sheiks, are engaged in a genocidal massacre of Christians. Presumably the genocide in Nigeria and the Sudan is not the partnership Secretary Powell envisions, presumably the Islamic terrorism in Indonesia and the Philippines is somewhat outside the circle. In Bosnia, where the United States supported an Islamic that wanted to impose Islamic law on a Christian majority, one of our Muslim partners was none other than Osama bin Laden.
Not content with repeating the palpable absurdities that are the staple of the multiculturalist left--a critic of the administration would use harsher language--Powell went on to describe plans to bring more Muslims into the United States and to excoriate those who sing "the siren song of the bigots, extremists who cloak themselves in false spirituality in an attempt to divide and to weaken us." Whether he was talking about Osama bin Laden or Pat Robertson (guilty recently of hinting that Islam may not be entirely a religion of peace), was not entirely clear upon the first reading of the AP report of Powell's address to a group of Muslim leaders. But if by "bigots and extremists," Powell means Muslims who claim religious support for terrorism against Christians, then he should have named the man who introduced this belief into Islamic thought: Muhammad himself.
We all know that the Bush administration is caught between a rock and a hard place. They are going to war against a country full of Muslims (Iraq), supporting what may be Bibi Netanyahu's quest for a final solution of the Palestinian problem, while still wanting to make nice with oil-rich states we pretend to believe are "moderate." There is nothing moderate, from the Christian point of view, about Saudi Arabia, which forbids Christian symbols and preaching the gospel and funds anti-Christian Islamic movements around the globe. Saudi Arabia spawned Osama bin Laden--and the Saudi millionaires who continue, according to reports, to support him.
Pat Robertson has the issue right. He knows that Islam, despite the existence of millions of "bad" Muslims who reject some of the fundamental tenets of their faith, is a religion of war not peace, that any country with a sizable population of even bad Muslims contains a ticking time bomb, ready to go off in hard times when confused people begin looking for their spiritual roots. When Christians find their roots, they find the Prince of Peace. When Muslims rediscover theirs, it is Muhammad the terrorist.
I wish no ill to Muslims, either as human beings or as adherents of a religion I reject. I would like to leave Muslims alone, in exchange for being left alone. I do not support, at this point, the planned invasion of Iraq, and I agree with the many patriotic Israelis who realize that Sharon and Netanyahu, egged on by their supporters in the United States, may well bring about the total destruction of Israel. I cannot, however, swallow the lie that Islam, as a religion, is compatible with our Western way of life or that global terrorism is not a legitimate expression of authentic Islam.
So long as America's political leaders continue to treat the people as children, so long as they continue to misrepresent the most basic facts of the life-and-death struggle confronting America and the West, our foreign policy will be confused and dangerous, and our control of our own borders and destiny will become more tenuous with every passing day.
Telling fairy tales about a nonexistent partnership with terrorists in order to justify the importation of more Muslims may seem, to State Department staffers and gofers, like a brilliant move. In the short run it might bump President Bush from being, at the moment, the most popular Republican in the century-and-a-half history of his party to being the most popular Republican who will ever live. But in telling their little white lies, they are playing with fire, as many a parent has learned after lying to his children. When the time comes to ask the American people to defend their borders and their interest from a global jihad, these lies will inevitably come back to haunt them.
P.S. Our Muslim Partners Expand the Circle
Nigeria is in "the forests of Africa," where Colin Powell says our Muslim partners are "expanding the circle of peace." The past few days, however, our Muslim partners in Kaduna (a large town in northern Nigeria), have not been listening to Secretary Powell's speeches: They were too busy killing Christians and burning their churches.
The trouble started when a newspaperman, knowing the Prophet's eye for beauty, suggested that Mohammed himself would have approved of the Miss World Contest. To protest this affront, Muslims (no, not radical Islamicists, but Muslims) first burned down the newspaper and then went on a killing spree that left more than 100 people dead and 500 injured. Some of the victims--all or mostly Christians, so far as we can tell--had been stabbed first and then set on fire. According to the AP story, "hordes of young men, shouting "Allahu Akhbar," or "God is great," ignited makeshift street barricades made of tires and garbage, sending plumes of black smoke rising above the city." Although it is now that Muslims started the riot and destroyed at least four churches, a later AP story, published in the Washington Post, preferred to give the impression that Christians were to blame for the violence: "In neighborhoods dominated by minority Christians...youths smashed windows and set fires in mosques used by the ethnic Hausa and Fulani Muslims who dominate Kaduna."
Kaduna, though the majority of the population is Muslim, has a sizeable Christian minority. Of course, Christian and pagan Nigerians have fought back against the Muslims' violence, but what Western reporters like to call a civil war or ethnic conflict in northern Nigeria is nothing less than an ongoing genocide. The next time Colin Powell is chatting it up with our Muslim partners, he might ask them about the millions and millions of dollars they have poured into Africa for the sole purpose of exterminating Christianity--and, of course Christians--on that continent.
On the same day Nigerian Muslims were crying "down with beauty," another peaceful Muslim was taken into custody in Indonesia on the charge of plotting the terror-bombing in Bali that claimed 200 victims, and still another peaceful Muslim (Palestinian, this time) tried to blow up a busload of schoolchildren, and still another Palestinian Muslim in nearby Lebanon murdered an American Christian whose sole crime was preaching the Christian gospel of peace.
This has not been an unusual week. Every day around the globe committed Muslims are murdering and massacring Christians, and yet American politicians go on pretending that these criminals are merely a handful of extremists. Only this September, Antony Sullivan--longtime whitewasher of Islamic aggression--called upon President Bush to remove "Sudan from the list of terrorist-sponsoring states, though Dr. Sullivan knows full well that the Sudanese regime has refused to end the orgy of terrorism and violence directed at is own Christian population.
In repeating the mantra that "Islam is a religion of peace," our leaders are acting like children who protect themselves from the bogeymen by pulling the covers up over their heads--except in this case, the bogeymen are real.
What kind of idiotic criticism is this? Because Powell said:
From the mountains of Afghanistan to the valleys of Bosnia to the plains of Africa to the forests of Asia
If the author has some valid criticism to make it would be better to leave out gratuitous swipes.
What is wrong with Powell's turn of phrase alone? That would be like being upset because one refers to America "from sea to shining sea" and then someone makes snide observations about how this leaves out the fact that there are deserts in America.
Needless to say I read no further as the author betrayed an axe to grind from the git-go.
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