Hump Day Everyplace Else Is Backlash Day in Dearborn

The news of our government’s failures of imagination, failure to connect dots, and otherwise fail to keep a jihadist murderer off Flight 253 has almost made me forget about the “backlash” angle. Then last night Dawud Walid was teleporting all over the TV news, fretting about a “backlash.”

And then there was this in this morning’s Detroit News: “Yeminis, Muslims fear backlash.”

Today is now December 30, five days after the attempted slaughter of 290 people by Muslim soldier, Umar Farouk Abdullamutalab. Even if one takes into account how many of us have been busy with after-Christmas bargain-hunting, don’t you think we could pull a backlash together faster than that?

Now, reporter Catherine Jun is taking up the cause, writing, “The terrorist attempt on Christmas Day is the latest incident making American Muslims cringe, fearing that one errant individual will again cast suspicion on the whole religious community.”

One errant individual? Does she mean just the one errant individual on Flight 253 on Christmas Day? If 2009 has underlined any reality, (other than the reality we all warned you about if you elected Barack Obama), it’s that Islamic jihadists all over the world are even more numerous and determined to make religious war on us today than they were on 9/11.

On the 23rd, two days before Farouk’s bomb attempt, TIME reported there were “more terrorist threats were uncovered in the U.S. during 2009 than in any year since 2001”—12 of them (now 13) in 2009. It may look like one person to someone. But to me it looks like a horde trying to breach our weak defenses.

Jun’s article continues:

"He's ruining our reputation," said Moad Taleb, a Yemeni Muslim living in Dearborn, referring to the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to detonate a bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam, Netherlands.

"It's a sad thing that we're being pointed at because of one person."

One person? The guy who killed the arch-abortionist Tiller was one person. Islamic jihadists are estimated in the millions.

But anyway, who’s pointing at Yemenis in America? Our blog, like many others, has been quite outspoken about the Christmas Day attacker. We don’t have much patience, (or tolerance, if you insist,) on defenders of Islamist jihadism, nor rationalizations about its root causes and list of grievances. I am pretty disgusted at the security failures, and at CAIR’s craven efforts to twist yet one more Islamist attack on innocent Americans into an attack by Americans on innocent Muslims.

But outspoken as we are, I have not once pointed at the Yemeni community in Dearborn. Like the fabled targeting of Arabs since 9/11 for “discrimination and hate crimes,” and the “backlash” that Muslims are forever bracing for and insisting they suffered in the undocumented past, the persecution of Yemeni Muslims in Dearborn is a fantasy.

Not that that stops the press from reporting on it.

Yet Dawud Walid of CAIR Michigan continues to suggest that “misinformation about Islam abounds after such incidents. Walid said that the vast majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world do not support al-Qaida.”

Oh, yeah? Actually, information about Islam always surfaces after these incidents, as more and more Americans are forced to face facts about these determined enemies, and what they believe. That’s what bugs Walid.

Nor is Walid right about the “vast majority” of Muslims not supporting Al Qaeda. Support is mixed, at best, but significant. According to one poll from earlier this year, large majorities of the world's Muslims agree with al Qaeda's goal of pushing the United States to remove its military forces from all Muslim countries and substantial numbers, in some cases majorities, approve of attacks on US troops in Muslim countries.

Walid has seized on the almost too-hard-to believe coincidence of a second young Nigerian male drawing attention to himself on Flight 253 on December 26 by locking himself in the bathroom for an hour and refusing to come out. “The man was cleared after authorities confirmed he had been sick.” What happened to him doesn’t really sound so bad, considering, but now we’re being lectured now that Yemenis are afraid to fly:

Mahdi Ali of Detroit says he travels to Yemen every few years to visit cousins, aunts and uncles.

The engineer at General Motors now shudders at what could happen to him on a plane.

"I'd be afraid to go to the bathroom," said Ali, a father of four. "I'd be afraid to move."

Here’s a question for you, Mr. Ali, father of four. You say you’re terrified of being detained for a short time and released?

Would you be more, or less, afraid to bring your family on a plane with Umar Farouk Abdullamutalab?