THIS conservative puts the War on Terror above everything else. It's an old baseball maxim for a pitcher to strike out the guy in front of him, and not worry about the guy on base.
The deadly batter right in front of our noses is Islamic fascism, and these other debates, however important they are, will be utterly meaningless if we don't get this one right.
I know enough about baseball to know that is false. Wrong. Try another sport.
Yes, I'm aware of the deadly islamic jihadist enemy... duh... why do you join those who play one aspect of conservatism against another? Social conservatism does not oppose the War on Terror. I don't get your point, if you have one.
Daniel Pipes included Giuliani in his article about “ostriches” who denied domestic terrorism.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16926
Key excerpt: Law enforcement seems more concerned to avoid an anti-Muslim backlash than to find the culprits. This attitude of denial fits an all-too-common pattern. I have previously documented a reluctance in nearby New York City to see as terrorism the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge (“road rage” was the FBI’s preferred description) and the 1997 Empire State Building shootings (“many, many enemies in his mind,” said Rudolph Giuliani). Likewise, the July 2002 LAX murders were initially dismissed as “a work dispute” and the October 2002 rampage of the Beltway snipers went unexplained, leaving the media to ascribe it to such factors as a “stormy [family] relationship.”
*****
Here’s more from Pipes on one of the pre-9/11 terrorist attacks on NY under Giuliani’s watch (which he used as a platform to call for stricter national gun control):
Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian gunman hailing from militant Islamic circles in Florida, took a gun to the top of the Empire State building in February 1997 and shot a tourist there. His suicide note accused the United States of using Israel as its “instrument” against the Palestinians but city officials ignored this evidence and instead dismissed Abu Kamal as either “one deranged individual working on his own” (Police Commissioner Howard Safir) or a “man who had many, many enemies in his mind” (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani).
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0702/pipes1.asp
*****
Here’s information on an earlier terrorist attack on NYC while Giuliani was mayor:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801E2DD113AF936A35750C0A962958260
Key excerpt: The Mayor’s urgency to quash the widespread reports of a link between the shooting suspect and the well-known terrorist organization fit a pattern he established immediately after the Tuesday shootings. From the beginning, he personally took control of all briefings on the matter, often appearing with the Police Commissioner at his side, and took pains to dampen the rumors that might pit one ethnic group against another or raise the city’s level of fear.
Even now, Mr. Giuliani and the Police Department have refused to discuss the question of a motive in the van shootings, which left one student brain-dead, another in poor condition and two others with less serious wounds. Though many Hasidim say they are certain the students were shot because they are Jews, the police say they have not determined the shooting was anti-Semitic.
Yesterday morning, Mr. Giuliani met for 40 minutes with a group of Arab restaurateurs, business owners and community leaders from Brooklyn. He told them that Arabs as a group should not be blamed for the shooting, and the Arab leaders put out a statement expressing condolences to the families of the victims and noting that Arabs were instrumental in contributing information that led to Mr. Baz’s arrest.
*****
This particular attacker was linked to a hotbed of Brooklyn Islamofascism centered in Bay Ridge. But Giuliani didn’t follow up to see if there was a wider pattern of Islamofascist attacks being planned/supported/funded there — he treated the shooting as an isolated crime, tried to avoid admitting any links to terrorism, and met with leaders of Brooklyn’s Arab community.
The picture that is emerging when Giuliani was confronted with a terrorist attack on NYC is of a mayor who tended to deny a terrorism motive, and prosecuted the attack as a stand-alone crime (rather than what they were: part of an interconnected war the Islamofascists were waging against us). He rejected the idea that these murderous Islamofascists were basically being encouraged and deployed by a larger community of global Islamofascists (some of these communities operated right in NYC), and instead took pains to insist that Islmofascist communities as a whole were in no way responsible for the actions of an individual attacker. This is the action of a crimefighter, not a warfighter.
Even when he later called something terrorism, or broke up a terrorist plot, he didn't connect the dots back to a concerted war against us -- he just kept swatting at flies.
Yet NONE of you can come up with any real evidence that Giuliani will fight terror any better than the other GOP candidates, except that Giuliani did some grandstanding.
This is not a situation that policing can clean up like squeegee men. This is a MILITARY situation.