Death Wish Caucus

For anybody not following this, late last year six imams (Muslim clergy) were taken off a flight at the Minneapolis airport, after praying loudly in the waiting area, seating themselves in the same pattern as the 911 hijackers, making anti-American statements, and demanding seat belt extenders they didn't need. A number of passengers became concerned and reported the behavior; airline personnel then became concerned enough to have the men removed from the flight. It remains unclear what the imams were up to. One suggestion was that it was a test of our air security measures. More likely it was a deliberate provocation designed to elicit complaints, which could then be used to claim racial profiling.

In fact, the imams proceeded to file discrimination lawsuits against the airline and against the individual passengers who had drawn attention to their behavior. The "John Doe" amendment described below was intended to protect individuals from retaliatory lawsuits if they in good faith report suspicious behavior. Without such protection, private individuals could be sued by Islamic advocacy organizations (like CAIR), and in a worst case lose their savings and homes defending themselves in a protracted and expensive court battle.

Incredibly, or maybe not so incredibly, Democrats have succeeded so far in killing the John Doe amendment, essentially on grounds of political correctness -- that it would encourage racial profiling of Muslims. Andy McCarthy below refers to these Democrats as the "Death Wish Caucus."

So far, then, if you see suspicious behavior that seems to indicate a possible terrorist threat, keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. Or, speak up as we have been encouraging people to do, and risk becoming the target of an expensive discrimination lawsuit, I assume in a Federal court.

This is madness.

Byron

Flying Imams, CAIR and Democrats Defeat Common Sense National Security

The Suicide of Reason

Below is from David Warren's review of Lee Harris's new book, The Suicide of Reason. Harris is very, very good, and he's exactly right about this. Those who counsel understanding and negotiation as responses to radical Islam show themselves to be completely clueless about the nature of this enemy. Terms like "fanatic" or "terrorist" indicate nothing about what motivates these people. Fundamentalist Islam is a more formidable opponent than Nazism or Communism ever was, or ever could have been. Resurgent Islam is not going to fall of its own weight; it will have to be defeated.

Byron

Americans, and other English-speaking peoples, had enough trouble trying to grasp what made Nazis and Communists tick. They were fanatics, to be sure, yet even they could speak, to some degree, the "common European language" of reason and self-interest, and to that degree could be bargained with.

With "Islamism," we encounter an ideology that goes not against but with the grain of [its] society [Harris argues that Nazism and Communism went against the traditional Christian grain of their societies, and for that reason were easier to throw off], and makes its appeal to that society's ancient aspirations. Mr. Harris is hardly alone in noticing that, but nearly alone in explaining coherently why we Western children of the Enlightenment, and especially his fellow American liberal individualists, are peculiarly ill-equipped to defend ourselves against it.

[ ... ]

We are not dealing with an anomaly, as our use of that word "fanatic" would suggest, but of an alien social order that is perfectly viable, and entirely non-Western in its premises.

We in the West, and especially we in such places as North America and Australia, have lived so long and so comfortably with the contrary premises that we cannot look at the enemy without translating his behaviour into what is familiar to us. We imagine him to be playing by our rules, even when he is obviously not. We dream about "negotiating." We suffer hallucinations in which we describe the means and ends of the Jihadists in our own political vocabulary of give-and-take.

We have been made myopic by the very success and endurance of our own social order, forgetting that it is itself a fluke of history.

There is no inevitable progress in this world toward democracy and the rule of law. And there is no law of nature that ensures the triumph of reason over zealotry.

Yikes

There has been great reluctance in some quarters to recognize that the war on terror is a religious war. The people who staff the universities and the media are overwhelmingly multicultural secularists, with a strong antipathy toward religion. They would like to deny that what they perceive as ancient systems of absurd superstition can have any genuine causal force in the modern world. Religion is viewed as vestigial, a quaint survival from simpler and darker times, something in the process of withering away in the clear light of logic and science.

From that perspective, religious conflicts are presumed not to have genuine integrity on their own terms, but always occurring as by-products or proxies for ethnic conflicts, poverty, sexual repression or, above all, for the effects of sheer ignorance and lack of education. They find it very hard to imagine that specifically religious commitments can by themselves drive behavior among people, and in situations, that cannot be characterized in any of those ways. Religion is seen as hitching a ride on something more real, like ethnic conflict -- but what if those are equally real? Or, what if it's ethnic conflict that's hitching the ride?

The rise of radical Islam is demonstrating how radically mistaken the secular liberal view can be. Religious claims cannot be reduced to something else; it's the difference between "believing that," which expresses an intellectual acceptance based on evidence, and "believing in," which expresses a passionate commitment to a way of living and perceiving the world. That commitment gets described in religious language that outsiders may be tempted to dismiss as the inane prattling of the deluded and foolish. If pointless name-calling was a productive approach, that would be a productive approach.

We in the secular West have our hands full here, and I doubt we yet have any good estimate of just how full. We have mostly not even reached the point where we are able or willing to correctly identify the nature of the adversary, because we have trouble thinking in religious terms. We are still in the stage of denial where we imagine that religious conflict can be stuffed into one or another familiar secular category then dealt with in those terms. Thus the pathetically hopeful search for the elusive Moderate Muslim Majority, that mythical large group who are just like us, the ones who have no serious belief in their religion and who can therefore be bought off with the usual inducements, like fawning attention and approval, community benefits, and neighborhood services. But the relevance of such people in a war waged by the radicals seems pretty limited. They're just fodder along with the rest of us.

We are nowhere close to coming to grips with this; we are clueless and floundering. It may be that our academic, media, and policy elites no longer have even the vocabulary to talk about religious commitments, except derisively.

Andrew Norfolk's article is chilling, more disturbing than anything I've read in the last year. Somebody please tell me why I'm wrong to feel that way.

Byron

Amateurs

The lefty meme all over the internet is that the London-Glasgow attacks are the laughable work of pathetic amateurs, being hyped by Bushitler and his allies to increase the credibility of his ridiculous "war on terror." It's all about a failed administration trying to wring some political advantage out of a couple of trivial incidents by hysterical but calculated overreaction. The amateurish nature of these attacks was also stressed this morning by George Stephanopolous when he interviewed Chertoff on ABC, and stated in much stronger form by former-CIA-agent-gone-lefty-nutcase Larry Johnson on Keith Olberman's MSNBC show Friday night.

There are at least two responses to that kind of nonsense.

First, they failed to produce large explosions this time, but those mistakes will not be made next time. Every failed mission is a learning experience. We saw that with the failed 1993 attempt to bring down the World Trade Center. Clinton rolled over and went back to sleep, but al Qaeda learned that the buildings could not be destroyed by an attack at their base, and they got busy developing Plan B, involving airplanes full of jet fuel. That took a while, because it required getting some jihadis through flight school, but they were patient.

Second, there is the following point, made in a blog comment: "If the 9/11 terrorists had been caught before they flew, they would have been found to be unarmed (just carrying harmless little boxcutters, for crap’s sake!) and with a foolish unworkable plan. Hijack four airliners with boxcutters? They would have been considered clearly delusional amateurs, and it would have been considered laughable (by the likes of Keith Olbermann and his band of idiots) to think that they could do more than just maybe cut a few people on board. Olbermann would ridicule the Bush administration for trying to deflect attention from the “stolen” election, by accusing our friendly Muslim brethren of Flying While Arab."

This is the same Soros-funded, internet-based Left that is now leading the Democratic Party around by the nose, demanding that all candidates sign on to the demand for timetables for withdrawal from Iraq ASAP. Hillary Clinton tried to hold out, but recently has caved. The prospect that these people could end up in control of US national security is chilling.

Byron

Amateurs

The lefty meme all over the internet is that the London-Glasgow attacks are the laughable work of pathetic amateurs, being hyped by Bushitler and his allies to increase the credibility of his ridiculous "war on terror." It's all about a failed administration trying to wring some political advantage out of a couple of trivial incidents by hysterical but calculated overreaction. The amateurish nature of these attacks was also stressed this morning by George Stephanopolous when he interviewed Chertoff on ABC, and stated in much stronger form by former-CIA-agent-gone-lefty-nutcase Larry Johnson on Keith Olberman's MSNBC show Friday night.

There are at least two responses to that kind of nonsense.

First, they failed to produce large explosions this time, but those mistakes will not be made next time. Every failed mission is a learning experience. We saw that with the failed 1993 attempt to bring down the World Trade Center. Clinton rolled over and went back to sleep, but al Qaeda learned that the buildings could not be destroyed by an attack at their base, and they got busy developing Plan B, involving airplanes full of jet fuel. That took a while, because it required getting some jihadis through flight school, but they were patient.

Second, there is the following point, made in a blog comment: "If the 9/11 terrorists had been caught before they flew, they would have been found to be unarmed (just carrying harmless little boxcutters, for crap’s sake!) and with a foolish unworkable plan. Hijack four airliners with boxcutters? They would have been considered clearly delusional amateurs, and it would have been considered laughable (by the likes of Keith Olbermann and his band of idiots) to think that they could do more than just maybe cut a few people on board. Olbermann would ridicule the Bush administration for trying to deflect attention from the “stolen” election, by accusing our friendly Muslim brethren of Flying While Arab."

This is the same Soros-funded, internet-based Left that is now leading the Democratic Party around by the nose, demanding that all candidates sign on to the demand for timetables for withdrawal from Iraq ASAP. Hillary Clinton tried to hold out, but recently has caved. The prospect that these people could end up in control of US national security is chilling.

Byron