Posted on 09/13/2006 9:00:08 AM PDT by MNJohnnie
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1700725/posts
The enemy within -- and it's not who you think (David Warren nails Islamofascism's 5th column)
Ottawa Citizen - Canada ^ | September 13, 2006 | David Warren
Posted on 09/13/2006 10:43:18 AM CDT by GMMAC
The enemy within -- and it's not who you think
Ottawa Citizen September 13, 2006
COMMENTARY: DAVID WARREN
Listening to President Bush speak, on Monday's anniversary of 9/11, after a day of distastefully sentimental memorials, my question was not what have we achieved in the last five years, but rather, what have we learned? Bush and Blair -- the captain and vice-captain of Team West in the war against "the terrorists" so far -- are both now in the twilight of their political careers. Both have recently broken with habitual discretion, and made attempts to name the enemy. This has, if anything, added to their unpopularity, for when they mention that the enemy presents himself as Islamic, there are shrill cries not only from radical Muslims, but across the spectrum of the Left in the West.
Mr Bush, much the less eloquent of the two, has now retreated from his use of the term "Islamofascist" -- which as I said in a previous column, is a fairer label than "Islamist" for an enemy that spreads a palampore of traditional Islam, over a stuffing from the Western-bred totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. As I wrote Aug. 27, from Ahmadinejad to Zawahiri, we hear rhetoric that uses an Islamic vocabulary and crude grammar, but animated with a syntax that owes more to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, than to the Prophet and his traditional interpreters. The term is thus meant to suggest a skewed Islam, an Islam "adapted to our age" by psychopathic men, whose own Islamic learning is purposefully politicized, and aggressively de-spiritualized. Since the alternative would be to say that Ahmadinejad, Zawahiri, et al. do speak legitimately for Islam, I don't see why anyone should object to the term "Islamofascist".
Mr Blair gave an interview worth reading to the Israeli daily, Haaretz, published Monday. The editors present characterized it as "sombre". The British prime minister was still going through the motions of advocating the "peace process", and the "two-state solution" for Israel and Palestine, without (according to me) any real conviction that it could work. It is just something Western politicians do to please the figurative "Arab street", and it does not please anyone, any more. With much more conviction, he said leaders throughout the West have grasped that we are in a truly "global struggle", for which the people of the West are not prepared. The politicians have failed to explain to us how much is at stake, and how much will be lost if we are not resolute in defence of Western values.
For all its uncharacteristic awkwardness, Mr Blair's answer to a question about British home-grown terrorists donged the bell:
"It's not necessarily what have we done wrong, because part of the problem of what you have in Western opinion is that Western opinion always wants to believe that it's our fault and these people want to have a sort of, you know, grievance culture that they visit upon us and say it's our fault. And so we have a young British-born man of Pakistani origin sitting in front of a television screen saying I will go and kill innocent people because of the oppression of Muslims, when he has been brought up in a country that has given him complete religious freedom and full democratic rights and actually a very good job and standard of living. Now, that warped mind has grown out of a global movement based on a perversion of Islam which we have to confront, and we have to confront it globally."
I frankly admire both Bush and Blair, as courageous politicians, with open minds, doing their best within the limits of what is politically possible in their respective spheres. They are both towering figures, in comparison to the little men who oppose them. We won't know what trouble is, until the little men replace them.
I continue optimistic about what can be done, should we summon the will to do it. I have written repeatedly that a robust and unified Western response to "Islamofascism" could fling it quickly onto the trash-heap of history, to join Nasserism and Baathism and other earlier manifestations of Arab nationalism and socialism. Smack it hard, without apology.
My pessimism is founded in the fear that this robust and unified response cannot be mobilized. We have a huge fifth column in the West, and it is not the Muslim immigrants. They become radicalized only because our "victim culture" encourages them to nurture their grievances. Yet most, despite temptation, remain good, decent people, doing their share of the West's work.
Our real enemy is within us, in the immense constituency of the half-educated narcissists pouring from our universities each year -- that glib, smug, liberal, and defeatist "victim culture" itself, that inhabits the academy, our media, our legal establishment, the bureaucratic class. The opinion leaders of our society, who live almost entirely off the avails of taxation, make their livelihoods biting the hands that feed them, and undermining the moral order on which our solidarity depends.
What are BJ or Berglar going to do about the 100+ related DOCUMENTARIES shown on History or Discovery channel that shows the failures of the Clinton regime?
The "Almost Defunct" Air America....no wonder I don't know him...
When you look up "Race Huckster" in the dictionary, there's his picture.
Agree completely....
Sofa, this is one time I don't want to lower ourselves to their level. Respect for a Holy place, respect for the dead are a part of me. Even if I don't agree with the religion.
Kill the b*stards when they leave. If they hole up in a Holy place,that is different. They are the ones desecrating it, not us when we root them out.
That's why I've had it with anyone who says "priciple over party" then tells everyone to support a LIEberal DUmocrat that calls for Rummy's head.
Hear that, Sean Vannity?
Just here for a quick second, but did Fahrenheit 9-11, or Day After Tomorrow, or Syriana, or Brokeback Mountain have no agenda? Was Bush hatred and global warming, and anti-oil conspiracy theorists, and homosexual activists have no agenda in those movies at all? Where were the "disclaimers" in front of those movies in theaters? What a bunch of hypocrisy. Conservatives have conditions put on them and things that liberals don’t like MUST have disclaimers, but liberals get to say whatever they want, state it as fact with a total lack of evidence or facts to bck it up, and no one demands that their work be monitored or some with disclaimers. Liberals just keep finding new ways to be hypocritical and two faced.
Funny how the Syrian Goverments statements, a known State Sponsor of Terrorism, echo word for word the positions staked out by John Murtha, Kerry, Pelosie and other members of the Democrat party of treason?
Can you say staged propaganda event?
He's not a moron. He's very smart. He knows what he says will be broadcast to the sheeple. He also knows that the truth will not.
I'll have all kinds of flunkies to do that won't I???
Hyperbole?... it's a bill.
Let's just give you a taste on the sponsor Heather Wilson... so you can see what we're dealing with.
September 11, 2006
Wilson: I questioned Iraq evidence
Congresswoman voted for war despite disputes of CIA's proof
http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2006/sep/11/wilson-i-probed-iraq-proof/
Is that my only choice? A RINO vs. an equally unprincipled 'Rat? If so, I'll vote third party or withhold my vote.
Hear DEMOCRACY NOW!
on WFIT!
Monday-Friday at 9-10am
Michael Della Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is quoted as saying the following about Amy Goodman:
"She's not an editorialist. She sticks to the facts. She's not a Rush Limbaugh-type who is simply letting her ideology drive what she does. She provides points of view that make you think, and she comes at it by saying, 'Who are we not hearing from in the traditional media?'"
Their failures are widely known.....
Including at the NY Times.
This Biach was on before.
If the Republican was so bad, why didn't they run someone against him in the primary?
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