George Rebane
The 9/11 observances yesterday were not as mixed of a bag as some commentators concluded. It was evident that both the somber observances at the three memorial venues, and the demonstrations at the proposed Cordoba Mosque were political in nature. Our leaders are stepping further back from the unifying anger that the attack by Islamic terrorists evoked nine years ago.
Today Islam is mistouted as a religion of peace, the terrorists as “cowering” splinter groups to be treated as organized crime syndicates, and there is no mention of the cultural and human rights asymmetries between the Islamic and western countries of the world. The attacks have now been reframed as “public tragedies” more akin to natural disasters. The Muslim face of the ongoing assaults has been grotesquely lipsticked over.
A regular RR reader offered that “9/11 is our generation’s Pearl Harbor”. I know how she may have meant it, but the dissimilarities between them are of a magnitude that I took considerable time to refute the proposition in my 11sep10 9:18am comment to the post ’11 September 2001’. The only things that the atrocities had in common were that they both were surprise air attacks which killed about the same number of Americans. That one was against military targets and the other against civilian institutional targets is just the beginning of the tale of two very different events and conflicts.
Yesterday’s political characterizations of 9/11 revealed once more the widening divide between our leftwing progressives and rightwing conservatives. Progressives are consistently for policies that weaken America in all its aspects, redistribute its wealth as widely as possible, become at one with and dependent on the global collective, and renounce our sovereignty sustaining religious and secular traditions, values, liberties, and rules of law. There may be other reasons that allow one to reliably predict a progressive stance on any given issue, but I do believe Occam is amply served by positing these criteria for their public policy decisions.
In the remainder I want to remark on the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the return to the minimization of the Islamic threat as merely an ongoing assault by a criminal and “cowardly” fringe.
The left is for building the Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero, and cite tolerance and religious freedoms as their basis. The left has made clear that it daily finds new tolearances for all religions and belief systems save for Christians, and recently Judeo-Christian traditions. When the obvious sensitivities of the location are brought up, the progressives ignore those and return immediately to arguing denial of religious freedom and American intolerance for minorities. They were also successful in suppressing their outrage at Imam’s thinly veiled threat that the Muslim street would once again erupt into violence if the plans for the Cordoba House were hindered. Talk about burying a story.
I wonder if an analogy would make things more clear. By any measure, the dropping of Big Boy and Fat Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW2 saved at least a million lives that would have been lost and many more maimed had the United States been forced to invade Japan’s home islands. In terms of reducing net human suffering, these atomic bombs were instruments of great mercy.
But whether in 2010 you accept this argument or not, it would be grossly insensitive and a huge blow to Japanese-American relations if some American sponsored Christian organization would insist on building a monument in Hiroshima (it doesn’t even have to be at Ground Zero) depicting the Enola Gay as part of a memorial to its mission of mercy in ending the war and saving countless lives by sacrificing the relatively few. In the Smithsonian YES, in Hiroshima NO – the difference is beyond obvious.
Finally, our President, who depicts the Islamic terrorist as being “cowardly”, is telling a lie to the less-read American people that itself is disingenuous and cowardly. History has not recorded a more dedicated zealot and warrior than the fanatical Islamist. Nowhere have we seen a culture produce a ready supply of people of all ages, educational levels, countries of origin, race, gender, financial standing, and on and on, all who are ready to martyr themselves at a moment’s notice, or wait patiently in our midst until it comes time for them and us to die for Allah.
To detonate oneself or turn your AK-47 on fellow soldiers in the certain knowledge of death are not the acts of cowards. And mischaracterizing them as cowards does a gross disservice to America, for we are denied knowledge of our real enemy. These Muslims are possibly the most heroic fighters the world has ever known, and the belief system that underpins their courage puts a pale on anything we have to offer in response.
Seldom have Americans sacrificed themselves with such immediacy and resolve (the torpedo bombers at Midway come to mind). In the Islamist jihad such sacrifice is a daily event, with thousands of Muslims waiting in the wings at their turn for glory. Their hatred for everyone and everything western is comprehensive and complete. They look equally at the infidel soldier and the infidel baby, both are abominations in the sight of their god. For an open society like ours, these fanatics and zealots (i.e. ragheads for short), who launch themselves from within our tolerant culture, are the greatest danger to our way of life. They know it, and we don’t.
The first dictum of war is ‘know your enemy’, and today our leadership denies us that knowledge at every turn while sacrificing our military into an endless piecemeal grind. We are engaged in a conflict that the country no longer supports because our politicians successfully deny its true nature – compare today with what happened after Pearl Harbor. Given our progress in denial, will this year’s “public tragedy” turn into next year’s observance of our “September troubles”? Maybe they’ll even serve punch for everybody at the nearby Cordoba Community House.
[19sep2010 update] Few westerners are aware that Mohammad wrote the first part of the Quran in Mecca and the second, more voluminous, part in Medina. The Quran admonishes its readers to obey the latter parts over the former parts if there is any contradiction. The video below makes this clear and expands on the geo-strategic goals of all Islam as laid out in the Quran. H/T to RR reader for sending the link.
rebanesruminations.com 
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