Without a valid opposition party this country is in extreme danger due to the lack of debate regarding exactly who we are fighting. Are we in a religious war? Is it true that Islam is a religion of peace? What do we make of Sharia and what is its bearing on this war? Can Islam co-exist with other religions including atheism, capitalism and agnosticism? Does Al Queda speak to a small minority of Muslims? Is Saudi Arabia our ally and if so exactly how does their funding of thousands of Mosques and Madrassas that perpetuate Radical Islam fit into their role as an ally? How inconsequential is the support for terror amongst Muslims?
These are all valid questions that Hugh Hewitt seems to want to avoid or worse assume that they have been answered already and that there are no contradictions. Its a measure of our misunderstanding of our enemy that President Bush has been seen several times to be associating with Muslims who were later prosecuted for aiding Terrorists. Exactly how much of a misunderstanding of Islam must be present at the White House for that to happen? Does Hugh want to respond to why they are so misguided in the White House? And if they are misguided enough in the White House to place the President of the United States in such compromising positions exactly why should I trust that they have a grip on the facts?
In this latest attack against Rep Tancredo Hugh goes completely over the top in what Glenn Reynolds called a Righteous Fisking of Rep. Tancredo's article in the Denver Post. Not sure if Glenn just has a delightfully wicked sense of irony or he was simply unaware of the marvelous contradiction in praising both Hugh Hewitt's attack on Rep Tancredo and Mark Steyns takedown of multicultural ideas regarding Islam on the same day but, I report you decide. Lets get on to Hugh Hewitt's soft-minded attack on Tancredo. Hugh will be in bold cause we don't want to miss a single word.
He fails because he doubles down on his absurd insistence that "bombing Mecca" ought to be "on the table." No serious politician in the country has come to Tancredo's defense, and indeed I have not seen any credible authority on war or religion endorse this foolishness. No serious Christian theologian can endorse what is obviously an immoral threat against another faith.
Excuse me for offering this observation but these are the same serious politicians who allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place. Pardon me for not being impressed by the absence of any honest inquiry going on in regards to our enemies by our politicians after all they are so busy taking polls on how they should feel. We have an entire party in the Democrats that may at this point believe that 9/11 was the invention of President Bush and his Mossad Allies then we have a bunch of Republicans who absolutely refuse to consider where we might have gone wrong. Witness the idiocy of grown men still insisting that there was no collaboration between Al Queda and Saddam. At least Rep Tancredo is considering the worst case scenarios which if you haven't realized it yet has been notably absent from our political discourse, even as every expert declares that it is not a matter of if but when we get attacked by WMD's.
In regards to any credible authority on war coming to his defense, that is absurd, any credible authority on war will tell you that no options are ever taken off the table. We bombed the hell out of civilians in WW2, French, Italians, Belgians, Germans, Japanese and any others who might have gotten in the way of victory. Hugh doesn't take this war seriously or he would understand that wars are not nice, he is still playing cricket, he doesn't believe the barbarians are at the gates wishing to rape, pillage and burn their way through him. If he did have that sort of attitude this conversation wouldn't be happening.
This lack of urgency in regards to our war is prevalent amongst our political and intellectual elite who cannot for the life of themselves see war as the brutal horrible thing it is. That lack of understanding of war leads to the idiocy of us apologizing for not handling Korans of terrorist thugs with white gloves, it leads to assinine discussions on whether having someone stand for 1 hour is torture and it will ultimately lead to us losing unless some seriousness enters the fray.
And the last sentence in Hugh's paragraph is illustrative of a dangerous multiculturalist view of our war. Islam is not a religion in the sense that we understand it but a way of life, it does not compare to Christianity in anyway except for the parts that Mohammad borrowed when he formulated Islam. Witness that Islam gave its conquered foes but three choices convert, pay a poll tax or die. Certainly Christianity has seen its bad episodes but none of them could be justified by the written word of God in the Bible whereas all of Islam's worst characteristics are called for by its writings. Indeed one of the most horrible crimes that we are witness to these days, that of beheading your foes was practiced by Mohammad himself; imagine Christ in the same position.
Tancredo says: But in this battle against fundamentalist Islam, I am hardly preoccupied with political correctness, or who may or may not be offended. Indeed, al-Qaeda cares little if the Western world is "offended" by televised images of hostages beheaded in Iraq, subway bombings in London, train attacks in Madrid, or Americans jumping to their death from the Twin Towers as they collapsed.
Hugh responds to this valid idea with a straw-man: In fact Tancredo is preoccupied with attention-getting statements that play to the frustrated edge of the conservative camp that sees any denunciation of "political correctness" as an endorsement of their desire for blunt talk against media elites.
This week, New Jersey Transit officials joined the New York Police Department in performing hapless random searches of Granny's knitting bag and Junior's Thomas the Tank backpack to prevent the next al Qaeda attack. But not everyone is fighting the War on Terror blind. Some U.S. military personnel have been given a very clear and un-p.c. mission:
Be on the lookout for Middle Easterners carrying rocket launchers.
Yup, that's right. Many readers have e-mailed me about a recent report floating on the Internet that reveals military concerns about a suspicious trio of Middle Eastern men who apparently pointed a rocket launcher at low-flying aircraft near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma earlier this month. It's authentic. Battle Staff Directive #41, categorized as "For Official Use Only," was issued at Hill Air Force Base in Utah last week to raise a red flag about the incident at Tinker AFB:
"On 14 Jul 05, three individuals were observed outside of the perimeter of Tinker AFB, OK. They were looking through binoculars, taking pictures and one appeared to be holding a large weapon at chest level. The weapon appeared to be aimed towards a low flying aircraft. The three individuals were described as being of Middle Eastern decent and left the area when approached. The weapon was later identified as a rocket launcher (MANPAD) and the low flying aircraft to be a B-1 Bomber. FBI in Oklahoma City and AFOSI [Air Force Office of Special Investigations] determined the threat to be credible."
Someone leaked the directive to a website called Soldiers For The Truth (sftt.org) and it was picked up by another site, the Northeast Intelligence Network (homelandsecurityus.com). Tinker AFB staff and FBI officials remain tight-lipped about the incident. But Capt. Sean Carter, a public affairs officer at Hill AFB, verified the directive for me.
In a phone interview, Capt. Carter told me the memo was issued to let base personnel know that "there's a threat out there somewhere" and to inform them of what to look for to guard against possible terrorist activity. Hill AFB participates in the "Eagle Eyes" program, an anti-terrorism initiative launched by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that "enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror."
The threat of an al Qaeda attack using shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles has been of increasing concern to homeland security officials. Last year, the FBI arrested two imams in Albany, N.Y., in connection with a sting operation involving laundered funds that the defendants were led to believe were proceeds from the sale of a missile launcher to be used in a New York City terrorist plot. Federal prosecutors noted during the trial of convicted al Qaeda bomb plotter Wadih El-Hage that his role entailed "conveying military orders from Bin Laden including . . . seeking weapons including Stinger missiles for al Qaeda members." In 2002, al Qaeda terrorists used two Russian-made Strela missiles to try and bring down an Israeli-chartered airliner departing from Mombasa, Kenya.
That effort failed, but the terrorists will no doubt try, try again. Hundreds of Stinger missiles have gone missing since the first Persian Gulf War, according to the General Accounting Office. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted last year that "there are an estimated 300,000 to one million shoulder-fired missiles in the world today â thousands are thought to be in the hands of terrorist and other non-state entities." Thomas B. Hunter of Jane's Intelligence Review reported: "Al-Qaeda reportedly possesses a number of MANPADs, including SA-7s and StingersâŠIt is logical to assume that Al-Qaeda is in possession of additional MANPADs. If this is true, then Al-Qaeda represents the most significant threat to international civil aviation." Washington has been squabbling over whether and how much money to spend on retrofitting all 6,000 planes in the American commercial fleet with electronic countermeasures to combat the threat. In the meantime, common-sense vigilance is the best defense.
Thankfully, military watchdogs on guard against Islamist terrorists with rocket launchers know better than to stop Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan look-a-likes with Louis Vuitton pet carriers strapped around their shoulders.
Posted by: Steve ||
07/27/2005 15:18 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
