If you were listening to Geraldo on Sunday night (okay, I apologize), you would have thought the would-be Times Square bomber was either the illegitimate son of Timothy McVeigh or an evangelical minister overdosed on steroids looking for an abortion clinic. Geraldo was practically fulminating at the mouth -- it's a white man, it's a white man -- in nostalgia for the good old days when the true enemy was some evil Ku Kluxer waving his hangman's noose.Well, it wasn't. At least the man currently under arrest, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, is no evangelical Christian and wasn't seeking vengeance against our federal government. I'm willing to bet right now he is a believer in jihad and, if he's seeking vengeance against anything, it's Western Civilization -- our way of life.
Yet only months after the Ft. Hood massacre, our government and leaders refuse to name our enemy. In fact, as a recent PJTV video reminds us, they are running the other way. Words like "jihad," "Islamic fascism," etc. -- the very ideologies cited by the 9/11 Commission as the causes of September 11 -- have now been expunged from the lexicon of our government and even our military.
Times Square reminds us how dangerously self-destructive that is. Were it not for our concerned citizenry and smart law enforcement, our civilization would be on its way out. Many of our leaders are evidently ready to hand it over.
AoS at 1620 CT: 2nd graphic deleted despite the interesting juxtaposition.