Posted on 01/09/2010 6:01:26 PM PST by hwkbeer
Mark Steyn, seems to pretty much nail it for me.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTE3NTI1MWViMzRjYWI5ODY1OTI0YWNiNWNkOTMxZTg=
Thanks for the link
Reminds me of the end of the South Park episode when they went to Afghanistan. Stan makes a really PC speech and the Afghan kid says, “That’s fine...but we still hate you.”
Happy to hear it. No link. no text. Nice post.
Unless you're evading FR rules...?
When you post an article, please fill in the necessary information in the header.
We fixed it for you this time, but in the future make the effort to properly post an article.
Thanks
de nada
In short: I am a mooslim. I will kill you and your children. Infidels must submit or die. Have a nice day.
The entire article unless the publisher is on Jim Rob's no-no list. Else 300 words.
In this case, National Review is not on the list so you could have posted the entire article.
I don’t know. Just saying it’s a Mark Steyn article will get me to clink the link. ;)
But Were Still Gonna Kill You
Isolated extremists? This war is about the intersection of Islam and the West.
By Mark Steyn
Not long after the Ayatollah Khomeini announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the British novelist suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London late one night and told his interviewer hed converted to Islam. Marvelous religion, couldnt be happier, Allahu Akbar and all that.
And the Ayatollah said hey, thats terrific news, glad to hear it. But were still gonna kill you.
Well, even a leftie novelist wises up under those circumstances.
Evidently, the president of the United States takes a little longer. Barack Obama has spent the last year doing bigtime Islamoschmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmos closure and his investigation of Bush officials to his bow before the Saudi King and a speech in Cairo to the Muslim world with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it, the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But were still gonna kill you.
According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the worlds superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you cant blame the worlds mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.
For two weeks, the government of the United States has made itself a global laughingstock. Dont worry, the system worked, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano. Dont worry, he was an isolated extremist, said the president. Dont worry, were banning bathroom breaks for the last hour of the flight, said the TSA. Dont worry, U.S. border-security officials told the Los Angeles Times, we knew he was on the plane and we had decided to question him when he landed. Dont worry, Obamas chief counterterrorism John Brennan assured the Sunday talk shows, sure, we read him his rights and hes lawyered up but hell soon see that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements.
Oh, thats grand. Try to kill hundreds of people in an act of war and its the starting point for a plea deal. In his Cairo speech, the president bragged that the United States would punish those in America who would deny the right of women and girls to wear the hijab. If hes so keen on it, maybe he should consider putting the entire federal government into full-body burkas and zipping up the eye slit so that henceforth every public utterance by John Brennan will be entirely inaudible. Americans should be ashamed by this all-fools fortnight.
On Thursday, having renounced over the preceding days the system worked, the isolated extremist, the more obviously risible TSA responses, the Gitmo-Yemen express checkout, and various other follies, the president finally spoke the words: We are at war. As National Reviews Rich Lowry noted, they were more or less dragged from the presidential gullet by Dick Cheney, whod accused the commander-in-chief of failing to grasp this basic point. Again, to be fair, it isnt just Obama. Last November, the electorate voted in effect to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides its all a bit of a bore and theyd rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan.
On the other hand, if we are now at war, as Obama belatedly concedes, against whom are we warring? We are at war against al-Qaeda, says the president.
Really? But what does that mean? Was the previous months isolated extremist the Fort Hood killer part of al-Qaeda? When it came to spiritual advice, he turned to the same Yemeni-based American-born imam as the Pantybomber, but he didnt have a fully paid-up membership card. Nor did young Umar Farouk, come to that. Granted the general over-credentialization of American life, the notion that it doesnt count as terrorism unless youre a member of Local #437 of the Amalgamated Union of Isolated Extremists seems perverse and reductive. What did the Pantybomber have a membership card in? Well, he was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning jeep into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, had been president of the Islamic Society of Queens University, Belfast. Yassin Nassari, serving three years in jail for terrorism, was president of the Islamic Society of the University of Westminster. Waheed Arafat Khan, arrested in the 2006 Heathrow terror plots that led to Americans having to put their liquids and gels in those little plastic bags, was president of the Islamic Society of London Metropolitan University.
Doesnt this sound like a bigger problem than al-Qaeda whatever that is? The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonists home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is likewise a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious that this war is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.
But the president of the United States cannot say that because he is over-invested in a fantasy that, if only that Texan moron Bush had read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his Miranda rights and bowed as low as he did to the Saudi king, we wouldnt have all these problems. So now Obama says, We are at war. But he cannot articulate any war aims or strategy because they would conflict with his illusions. And so we will stagger on, playing defense, pulling more and more items out of our luggage tweezers, shoes, shampoo, snowglobes, suppositories and reacting to every new provocation with greater impositions upon the citizenry. You cant win by putting octogenarian nuns through full-body scanners. All you can do is lose slowly. After all, if you cant even address what youre up against with any honesty, you cant blame the other side for drawing entirely reasonable conclusions about your faintheartedness in taking them on.
After that cringe-making radio interview, Salman Rushdie subsequently told the Times of London that trying to appease his would-be killers and calling for his own book to be withdrawn was the biggest mistake of his life. If only the president of the United States were such a quick study.
Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn
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