WaPo, Fareed Zakaria: Post-9/11, we're safer than we think

Washington Post ^ | September 13, 2010 | Fareed Zakaria

[maggief]

EXCERPT

I've been asking these questions for a few years now and described our "massive overreaction" in a 2008 Newsweek essay but with little effect. During the Bush years, there was a reluctance on the left to acknowledge that the administration could have done anything worthwhile to counter terrorism. The far greater problem is on the right, where it has become an article of faith that we are gravely threatened by vast swarms of Islamic terrorists, many within the country.

This campaign to spread a sense of imminent danger has fueled a climate of fear and anger. It has created suspicions about U.S. Muslims -- who are more assimilated than in any other country in the world. Ironically, this is precisely the intent of terrorism. Bin Laden knew he could never weaken America directly, even if he blew up a dozen buildings or ships. But he could provoke an overreaction by which America weakened itself.

[bioqubit]

yutz

[RachelFaith]

Bull.

Utter and completely more lies.

Islam is the 21st centuries Nazism. And we are in 1930’s about now. If we stop Islam now. And I mean All Islam. By means of preemptive international war, we will save MILLIONS of American lives and Western Civilization.

If we do not. If we appease, if we work with the “moderate Nazis” in Islam, they will betray any good faith, and repay it with mass murder using nuclear weapons.

If Hitler had had the Bomb in 1941, do you think there is any doubt about him using it?

Iran will get the bomb and radicals like bin laden will use it, if not Iran de facto as a state.

Total war is never a thing to call pretty or even justified. But it is sometimes the only thing that stands between a future and the end of it all.

Islam is the greatest threat to the world that the would has ever yet known.

Islam. Not some radical few extremists. Islam itself. All of it. All of them.

Believe it.

[Cobra64]

Americans better buy firearms, ammunition, and learn how to use them effectively.

[sageb1]

Really? Then why am I on Revolution Muslim’s hit list?

[MamaDearest]

WaPo, Fareed Zakaria: Post-9/11, we're safer than we think

The Muslims are Coming

Snips:
. According to statistics provided by the CBP to Homeland Security Today Magazine, nearly 6,000 “Special Interest Aliens” (SIA) “from just a handful of Muslim countries” were apprehended trying to sneak into the U.S between 1999 and 2010. The largest number were from Pakistan (1,222), followed by Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Yemen.

. In May, authorities were looking for a Somali with supposed “al-Qaeda ties” who skipped the border. At the same time, the CBP were looking for an al-Shabaab-connected American who allegedly smuggled more than 200 Somalis into the country. The justice department announced just this month that it had charged 14 Somalis with aiding the organization.

[munin]

Islam itself. All of it. All of them.

Believe it.

Yoy are exatly right, I have been telling anybody that would lissen what you so eloqently wrote, but nobody will lissen, most just walk away and call me an old fool, but you keep it op. Sooner or later we are going to have to do this job. GB

[wac3rd]

Libtards fight every day and night (many of them Jewish - see Soros, Schumer, Bloomberg, Feinstein) to dis-arm the US population.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Consider the source, I suppose (from the name, sounds like a Moose).

[HiTech RedNeck]

Well, I would beg to differ in the sense that there ARE such people as “moderate Muslims” and they aren’t even all that rare. If there weren’t, there wouldn’t have been any prospective Muslim allies for Bush to seek after in the post-9/11 action. Also, we wouldn’t be hearing the familiar screams of dismay from each nominally Muslim community which accepted a Taliban offer to solve its relatively minor crime problems, only to discover themselves under the iron boot of a tyranny.

The big risk, the big danger, is when such a group voluntarily “rededicates” itself to the core Koran. We now have a newly hatched set of radicals.

[nathanbedford]

My reply to the original article:

The author has made superficially persuasive points. His points would have much more substance if we lived in a world before Hiroshima, but we do not. We live in a world in which a handful of suicidal, Islamist zealots could very well smuggle an atomic weapon across our unguarded Mexican border and detonate it virtually anywhere in America.

We live in a world in which those same Islamists could smuggle a mason jar containing a virus and release it virtually anywhere in America.

The maxim: We must get it right 100% of the time and the terrorists need only get it right one time, is absolutely true in our world of weapons of mass destruction. This changes the whole game and renders this article utterly irrelevant.

The relevant discussion can only be how do we wage war against terrorism more efficiently, less expensively, and less intrusively?

But wage it we must.

[Tunehead54]

As long as the muslim usurper is in the whitehut the danger of a major hit is astronomical because any enemy can be assured of a hopelessly pathetic PC response to any attack. ;-(

[RoadTest]

Unlike most politicians, Geert Wilders is putting his life on the line, just like a Marine, standing up and facing those Muslims squarely.

He came to New York for the 9-11 memorial and spoke eloquently there of resistance to the Islamic attack in the face of a general Western faintness of heart.

Sounds like I’m off the subject but I’m not. Pray for Geert.

[RoadTest]

How can there be “moderate Muslims” when, if they read the Koran, they go radical and violent?

It sounds like moderate Muslims aren’t Muslims at all.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Can we spare the strawmen please? This is a serious issue.

More than “reading” is needed. Surely you understand the parallel in the Christian experience, and there are also parallels in the experience of Judaism and other religions in which it is possible to be liberal, nominal, “cultural,” or a dabbler.

Generally Muslims are counted as people who call themselves Muslims.

[RoadTest]

I can’t spare the straw man because I don’t know what you’re talking about.

[RoadTest]

I can’t spare the straw man because I don’t know what you’re talking about.

[ully2]

You will never be safe as long as their is an extreme Muslim out there.

[HiTech RedNeck]

figures