Will The Real Terrorists Please Crouch Down Behind Their Wives and Children?

“Israel Is the Real Terrorist” reads the gigantic banner draped from the large jewelry discounter on the corner of Schaefer and Michigan in Dearborn.

That’s one opinion. Obviously, the store owner is sincere. The message is logical, I suppose, depending on how you define “terrorism.”

If you define terrorism as possessing a first-class military armed with state-of-the-art weapons, that are deployed so carefully, only in self-defense and after years and years of provocation --and even with timeouts to ship humanitarian supplies into enemy territory--so carefully that after two weeks civilian deaths have not even reached 500--and that’s in spite of every effort by the enemy fighters to use the population as shields and bloody lambs sacrificed to the deities at CNN--then yes, Israel is the real terrorist.

Israel’s actions are not how I define terrorism, so I’m not persuaded.

Pat Buchanan recently said Israel was waging a “Blitzkrieg” on Gaza, a preposterous comparison with the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in 1939. It's the worst understatement to say there's no comparison, even as a military operation.

In the 28 days of the German Blitzkrieg invasion, Polish forces suffered 68,000 dead, and hundreds of thousands captured or wounded. Civilian deaths reached 26,000. The Nazis literally were trying to destroy Poland as part of their war aim, and in their racial insanity they despised Poles as subhuman, and consequently regarded Polish lives as having no value. The German invaders held nothing back because they didn’t care who they killed. There were no timeouts to send in humanitarian aid. There were no talks of a cease-fire. And the Polish defenders were not deliberately increasing casualties by using their wives and children as shields, nor firing their weapons from populated areas to draw down German fire on their civilian population.

Considering Israel has the most powerful land, sea, and air forces in the Middle East, and nuclear weapons, I’d say this is a piss poor Blitzkrieg. Does anyone, anyone, anywhere, seriously believe that if Israel set it's mind to destroying Palestinians there would be only 850 dead after two weeks?!!!

Anyway, I'm not convinced.

Now, if you define terrorism as holding a million and a half people hostage so you can pursue your implacable religious mission to attack your neighbor’s civilian population until you and your countrymen, wives, and children are suffering a thousand times the casualties that you can ever hope to inflict--and you don't give a goddamn and hope for more deaths, not fewer, because it serves your strategic purpose--then I would say Hamas are the terrorists.

If you define terrorism as being sworn to the existential elimination of an entire people (Jews) because your insane god can’t stand the idea of giving back territory he has stolen, or sharing it with anyone of another religion, then I would say Hamas are the terrorists.

If you define terrorism as deliberately waging war on a civilian population without regard for life in order to achieve your political aims by any means necessary, then I would say Hamas are the terrorists.

But that’s one opinion. It’s all in how you define it.

Why We Need an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

I believe it was Oscar Wilde who said something like, “lots of people think a thing, without thinking it through."

And, by way of example, and just in time for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, Detroit’s most prominent columnist, sports writer, and author, Mitch Albom, has decided to raise alarms about the TSA’s failure to spot fake bombs or bomb parts during test screenings. (“This failure should sound the alarms”).

I’m hardly going to minimize the seriousness of the TSA’s failures. I think airport screening should be privatized, but that’s for another post, or someone else’s. Obviously, it’s not acceptable to have this kind of a failure rate.

But it's Albom’s utter failure to see any bigger picture that reveals his own failure—or unwillingness—to think the thing through. And to me his narrow point of view is just as scary as what's got his nose out of joint: that, "six years after the fact, we still have disinterested agents.”

Disinterested agents? How about disengaged commentators?

First off, when it comes to placing the blame for our current high level of national expense, worry, war-making, alerts, inconvenience, and so on, he writes "we can blame ourselves.”

Read for yourselves, and you will see that Albom nowhere places the blame for 9/11, or all the other related things he’s unhappy about, on Islamic terrorism.

Yet where he really goes wrong is when he equates the TSA’s failures to spot test bombs as:

a straight line to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania six years ago.

Can you imagine how our lives would be different if those 19 hijackers had been stopped? Think about every security issue you now face in daily life, think about the economic drain on this nation, think about the war, the lives lost, the political hate, and all of it goes back to how those men got on those planes.

So you would think, before throwing hundreds of billions at a conflict in Iraq, the first, the biggest, the most obvious use of money and effort would be at the real ground zero of the Sept. 11 terrorism plan -- the airports.

Except Ground Zero of Islamo-Fascism is not America's airports. It is the Islamic world that has embraced radical jihad. If all of the nineteen hijackers had been caught, and all of 9/11’s victims spared, we would still be facing a hostile Islamic world.

9/11 wasn't hatched by these 19 in the airport, it was hatched by al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And al Qaeda, and its sister radical Islamic terror armies, were hatched in the heart of the umma. Don't blame this on boxcutters. They are only tools in the hands of thinking enemies.

Albom may as well say that if the U.S. Armed Forces had done a better job anticipating the signs of a Japanese surprise attack in December 1941, and thwarted it, all of the trouble of World War II would have been spared.

Of course, America's role in the World War wouldn’t have been over that easily even if we had stopped the attack on Pearl Harbor: there still would have been the menace of Imperial Japan’s expanding war, and Hitler’s depredations in Europe, and both Axis powers having already laid plans that included us--whether we willingly decided to go to war or not.

So sooner or later, with or without Pearl Harbor, we were going to be in it. Our islolation was an illusion. The Axis who started all the fuss weren’t going to stop until enough of us made up our minds to stop them.

Now Albom apparently believes that if 9/11 had been prevented, we could have drawn a big sigh of relief, and then gone right back to what we were doing before without all this bother and waste of time over a so-called war on terrorism. (As I recall, what Democrats were doing on 9/10/2001 was still re-breathing into brown paper bags over the 2000 election in Florida).

Yet I can't imagine how merely preventing 9/11 would have been the end of radical jihad's efforts to kill Americans. And I can't imagine that we would all be safer, more prosperous, and doing fine, if we had stopped this single attack.

Think about this.

Osama bin Ladin would still be running al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and the Taliban would still be ruling in Kabul and Kandahar; Saddam and his sons would still be tormenting Iraq, and revving up his nuclear program, (because there's no way sanctions would have lasted until 2007); the Saudis would have continued with their export of Wahhabism, without benefit of the closer, if imperfect, scrutiny there's been because of 9/11; Iran would still be run by crazy mullahs, and now in an arms race with Iraq; the Syrians would still be occupying Lebanon; the wall of separation between American domestic law enforcement and national security would still be up.

Last but not least, if it weren't for the magnificent response of the coalition since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and determination to roll up and interfere with terrorism around the world, the last American response to terrorism the Islamists would have had to go by to judge our resolve would have been the weak inaction we showed following the bombing of the USS Cole.

So why does a bright and otherwise thoughful writer like Mitch Albom get it so backwards, figuring that jihadist terrorism didn't bring us 9/11, but it was 9/11 that brought us jihadist terrorism?

I don't know. But if that's what he really thinks, then he needs to go back and think about it again. And this time he needs to think about it all the way through.

Alleged Newspaper Questions Reality of Global Jihad

In today’s Detroit News, the important wire story about the arrest of three jihadists in Germany caught assembling bombs to blow up Americans was run under the large headline, “Alleged attack plot foiled.”

There’s nothing in the story itself to call into question the truth of what German authorities described of the jihadist plan, nor any other reason to question the reality of the attack plot itself--described by many accounts as “massive.” It was not merely an “alleged attack plot.”

Nor did the rest of the liberal press seem to feel the need to question the reality of the plot, judging from only this sampling of headlines:

“German Police Arrest 3 in Terrorist Plot” -- The New York Times
“German shock at bomb plot arrests” -- BBC News
“German police hunt for terror plot 'back-up team'” -- Guardian Unlimited
“3 planned 'massive airport bombs'” -- CNN International
“Germany arrests three in 'massive' terror plot” -- CTV Canada

As of yesterday there were three suspects in custody, “two German converts to Islam and a Turkish citizen who prosecutors said shared a ‘profound hatred of U.S. citizens.’” German police have launched an international manhunt for as many as 10 more. (“10 More Sought in German Terror Plot”).

There was a very real cottage used to store explosives that was surveilled by as many as 300 law enforcement officials for months; and the jihadists had “obtained military-style detonators and enough chemicals to make bombs more powerful than those that killed 191 commuters in Madrid in 2004 and 52 in London in 2005.”

We understand that the high scrupulosity of professional newspaper editors--not to mention fear of libel lawsuits--require that media descriptions of persons accused of crimes but as yet not convicted of any charge be called “alleged” murderers, rapists, perjurers, etc. This signals that the accused may in fact be innocent and pure as the driven snow.

Like anything, the media is sometimes recklessly inconsistent about this rule about alleged wrongdoers or wrongdoing "alleged"--see for example, the thousands of references to the “Duke rape supects,” the "NSA domestic spying program,” and almost every word printed about the “outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s exposure of Bush administration lies about Saddam’s attempts to buy yellowcake from Africa”--not a single word of which was ever true, nor ever was granted the benefit of a single “alleged” in the major media.

Obviously, the story about the German terror plot against US and Western interests is not just a crime story in which suspects (and even the crime itself) must be given the editorial kid-glove treatment (“alleged attack plot”). In fact, it's not a crime story at all, because it's a war story. The story is as big as the war on terror. Or, by the same token, and depending on your political point of view, it may be as small, or as questionable, as the ("so-called") "war on terror."

Am I being too persnickety about the Detroit News’s poor choice of words? More than likely, knowing me. But then again, the devil is in the details, and details add up.

By means of incessant use in mass media of sneer quotes, references to merely “alleged” terrorist links and plots, and endless jabs at “Bush’s war in Iraq” and the “so-called war on terror,” the left manages to feed at least some Americans' desperate fantasy that we are still in a September 10, Islamist-radical free world.

If you don’t think this incessant drip-drip-drip of skepticism has its effect, then consider this.

In late September 2001, the American public was crystal clear that Al Qaida and Islamic terrorists had struck us on 9/11, and would strike again if we didn’t strike back.

Since then, there have been literally thousands of reports daily and hourly from all over the globe of terror attacks, kidnappings, bombings, beheadings, radical threats, fatwas, exposures of plots in mosques, of terror cells, cries of Death to America!, threats of nuclear jihad, foundings of radical Islamic republics, murders of journalists, murders of missionaries, murders of women and children--all of which were matter-of-factly reported and news-crawled (sans the adjective “alleged”) beneath our very eyes. And in every instance these brutal attacks and murders manifestly were rising directly up out of the increasingly violent pathology that is the Islamic world. The average American today knows exponentially more about the extent and virulence of global jihadism than he ever did before 9/11, and that's even if he only halfway pays attention.

And yet now, in September 2007, tens of millions of Americans who once knew better on 9/11, now question not only the reality of the “so-called war on terror,” but even whether it was Islamic terrorists--and not conniving Americans--who knocked down the World Trade Center in the first place.

Such are the power and importance of words.

Is CAIR Really the 'Muslim NAACP'?

This Spring, the Middle East Quarterly published a lengthy article by Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, “CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment.”

According to the article, CAIR continues to presume to speak for the entire American Muslim community in spite of criticism from many quarters that they are badly compromised as "a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas,” (according to Stephen Emerson) and an organization that the almost-always wrongheaded Senator Charles Schmer recognizes as an organization “"which we know has ties to terrorism."

Meanhwile, according to Pipes and Chadha,

CAIR, for its part, dismisses all criticism, blaming negative comments on "Muslim bashers" who "can never point to something CAIR has done in its 10-year history that is objectionable." Actually, there is much about the organization's history that is objectionable—and it is readily apparent to anyone who bothers to look.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Pipes and Chadha have bothered to look--carefully. Read the rest of this detailed story here.

Media's Domestic Lying Program Still Going Strong

Lately I keep having a recurring dream in which I pick up my local newspaper and read a headline like: “Americans Fear Lack of Government Snooping on Terrorists Will Lead to Some of Us Getting Blown Up”. Then beneath this lengthy headline I am treated to an incisive and well-written analysis of how many Americans find “troubling” or “disturbing” that their government is carelessly neglecting, or even resisting, making an effort needed to hunt down, infiltrate, and intercept, some very determined bad guys who want us all dead.

The article goes on to describe how, in response to this trend of citizen anger, the government begins to wake up and get serious about hunting down the bad guys, aggressively, without putting theoretical worries about terrorists' civil rights above the rights and lives of our own citizens.

Then I always wake up laughing at such a ridiciuous a dream. Even if such a thing ever happened, (it just might after our next 9/11), the papers wouldn't report it.

What I find in the real, waking world are articles like today’s “Court ruling stirs fear of secret spying”, on the front page of the Detroit News.

The article, by the News's Muslim Affairs correspondent Gregg Krupa, reports dismayed reactions to yesterday’s ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the one that reversed the awful decision of US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that ordered an injunction against the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). According to the article no one was happy about the ruling except some joker from the Department of Justice. No one from the News asked me if I liked it. I did like it. I liked it a lot.

Anyhow, instead of waking up to my dream article where everybody is worried that we aren't connecting the dots, I see just another story about how our civil rights are more threatened by Dick Cheney than by those guys with their suicide belts and their Korans. And the dots just go unconnected.

The people who control the American press, who are primarily liberals, and either ideologically committed to resisting anti-jihadist activities, or else just terrified of being called Islamophobic, are never going to report on this story fairly. They did not approve of the TSP from the outset, they consistently misreported the facts about it, and they always refer to the program, falsely, as a “domestic spying program.” And even though they knew Judge Taylor’s opinion was bad law, badly written, and certainly doomed to be overturned on appeal, (as it was yesterday), they felt they had to sign on to it as a blow for freedom and the First Amendment.

And now that it's been reversed by grown-up judges, the reporters have to defend it.

The truth is that the TSP, besides being a great idea, only ever monitored international communications, that is, communications to people outside the US, or calling or emailing into the US from foreign soil. There is nothing “domestic” about the program. Even all those critics unwittingly admitted as much when they kept insisting the TSP needed to be brought under the control of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: FISA deals exclusively with the gathering of foreign intelligence.

But has this ever stopped journalists from referring to the TSP as a “domestic spying program”? Or one that is targeted at “secret spying on citizens”? No, because such statements are inflammatory, and help create more enemies for George W. Bush.

Now Mr. Krupa shows he’s willing to get it all wrong, too, when he writes, (wrongly), that even the administration itself has come clean about all its unlawful domestic spying. Writes Krupa, “In several public statements, administration officials have said that the president has the right to order secret spying on citizens.”

Strangely, Mr. Krupa nowhere cites even one of the occasions of these alleged statements, nor who exactly was supposed to have made them.

I’ve followed this issue more closely that the average person, and I haven't heard about any such public statements by the administration--any statements that parrot, as Mr. Krupa parrots here, the left’s caricature of the TSP as the President having an unlimited “right to order secret spying on citizens.”

Rather, the administration’s statements on the TSP have been many, and are consistent.

For instance, on January 12, 2005 Alberto Gonzales said the following at a press conference:

"The President has authorized a program to engage in electronic surveillance of a particular kind, and this would be the intercepts of contents of communications where one of the -- one party to the communication is outside the United States. And this is a very important point -- people are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors. Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.

"Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda."

Almost two year laters, on January 17th of this year, Gonzales’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee explained that the TSP was now being conducted under an authorization from the FISA court, re-iterating that the court order authorizes “the Government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member of agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”

Does that sound like an administration official claiming the "president has the right to order secret spying on citizens"?

The media’s repeated insinuation, including Mr. Krupa’s here, that the targets of the TSP surveillance are innocent US citizens, can only be intended to mislead the lazy readers, or the busy readers--that is, the average readers who make no effort to look beyond what they see in the paper--to believe that Gonzales, or other high administration officials, have on several occasions gone on record saying, “Shucks, now that you mention it, we are spying on innocent US citizens! And you know what else? We don’t care who knows it! Hissss!”

I can't believe any more that this kind of misleading writing is the result of journalistic accident or laziness. It is too much of a pattern. It is meant to disinform.

Another example is Mr. Krupa’s mischaracterization in today's article of why the plaintiffs lacked supporting evidence, in the form of information gathered by NSA surveillance, a lack of evidence which helped lead to dismissal of the ACLU case.

According to Mr. Krupa, “The administration's refusal to reveal information about the program was one reason the plaintiffs could not proceed, both judges said.”

Bunk. It isn’t true; not even close.

Neither judge said anything of the kind. What the judges stated, and explained in their opinions, was that any information obtained through TSP surveillance was privileged under the State Secrets Doctrine, which was invoked at the very beginning of the case by the NSA. The opinion makes clear that the ACLU and their co-plaintiffs did not even raise the issue of the NSA’s invocation of the State Secrets Doctrine in their appeal: even the ACLU wasn’t stupid enough to demand public release of secret NSA information on terrorists obtained through surveillance.

Yet Mr. Krupa writes as if to suggest that the Bush administration was asked for the information, and then stonewalled the court by “refusing” to turn it over.

This kind of thing is meant to create the impression that the ACLU case was dismissed unfairly as a result of the the White House's somehow cheating the plaintiffs and the judicial process by holding back information.

That, and Mr. Krupa, I'm afraid, is hoping to suggest a parallel with the collateral mythology of the President "defying" the US Congress in their endless demands for White House documents and testimony so Schumer and Conyers can "get to the bottom of" the Iraq war, or the firing of the US Attorneys, or the "illegal" domestic spying program of the NSA, etc,. etc., etc.

The First Amendment guarantee of a free press provides that newspapers have the right to engage in a certain amount of lying, especially if the lies are about public figures.

I'm not planning to sue anyone over it.

But I don't have to like it.

And I don't like it. I don't like it a lot.