I’m sure you’ll all be happy to find out this morning as you wake up that the U.S. is no longer at war with “terrorism.”
I always thought that being at war with “terrorism” was a bit silly. I’m in the “bombs don’t kill people, people kill people” camp. But, I always knew that replacing the word “terrorism” would inevitably lead to circumscribing the problem in such a way that it’s solution wouldn’t really fix anything. Hot off the presses:
It’s official. The United States is no longer engaged in a “war on terrorism.” Neither is it fighting “jihadists” nor locked in a “global war.”
President Obama’s top homeland security and counterterrorism official on Thursday declared as unacceptable the terms crafted by the George W. Bush administration.
It is now solely a “war with al Qaeda” and its violent extremist allies, said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
In this case, the juxtaposition of “violent” and “extremist” is interesting. As we have seen in Britain, where Muslim extremism is rife, there are few arrests for inciting hatred against Jews, for calling for violence, and so on. What “violence” takes place or is planned there is duly policed (one assumes) but there is a blithe acceptance of the religious and political “extremism” that makes Britain a petri dish for the culture of not only violence, but of aggressive Islamization of formal and informal social institutions, most notably schools and family courts. This is the model that the Left and Obama’s administration want to emulate. In the last eight years, we in the U.S. have had encounters with non-violent “extremism” that have been obvious. The epicenter of the more public episodes has been Minneapolis: the imams in the airport, the cab drivers who wouldn’t pick up people who had bought liquor at the duty-free, and so on. In other areas of the country there have been smaller clashes. In Texas, where I live, two Muslim schools wanted to join the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools. This association includes other religious and secular schools, but they were concerned that the Muslim schools were instructing their students according to the Koran, that is to say, to consider Christians and Jews to be inferior in ways that were at odds with the purpose and philosophy of the association. CAIR got involved, but this being Texas, they didn’t get very far. Nevertheless, mosques and schools are unpoliced, so Wahhabists have a free rein to create platforms of indoctrination and networks for extremist ideology (I see Obama bowing to the Saudi king as I write this.)
The point is, that by failing to recognize that extremists who are non-violent play a substantial role in giving aid and comfort to the violent ones, you open the door to a erosion of Western values of religious tolerance and human rights from within. The banlieus of Paris and other large French cities are dotted with “no go” zones for police and emergency workers, as are other large cities in Europe. Malmo in Sweden is notorious. And this is what not addressing “non-violent” extremism leads to, and quickly.
But what are we to expect from an administration that drops charges against armed “poll watchers?” And which just gave Richard Reid leave to “pray” with his co-religionists in the Colorado Supermax?
For excellent reading on this subject, I recommend “Londonistan” by Melanie Phillips. It is a brilliant and frankly witty and frankly depressing account of the deep self-loathing and depravity of the Left in Britain and how it has opened the door wide to the “legitimate struggle” of Jihad, and incidentally, to virulent anti-Semitism.
Comments 4
Now that the Obamacrats have clarified this point, I assume they will be cracking down on the indoctrination of prison inmates into the ranks of al Qaeda and its “violent extremist allies.”
August 7th, 2009 at 11:09 am
For eight years now I’ve been seething every time I hear the plonkingly dishonest explanation that “jihad” really means “self-purification,” the so-called greater jihad recommended by Mohammed.
To judge from the evidence, Muslims would appear to approach assigning the words “greater” and “lesser” counterintuitively, to put it mildly. Bernard Lewis has pointed out that, the Prophet notwithstanding, the vast majority of discussions of the subject by Islamic scholars for the past 10 centuries concerns the so-called lesser jihad of waging war on infidels. In the Haditha, the collection of the sayings of the Prophet and his companions, there are 199 references to jihad every single one of which is about the “lesser jihad.” Around the world, jihad comes up in the conversation of Muslims, let us say, often; but the frequency with which the word is used to mean self-purification in the mouths of Muslims who are not CAIR press agents is about the same as the frequency of references to transubstantiation among Catholics.
It occurs to me that the two senses of the word can be reconciled along the following lines. To three quarts of scimitar-fresh infidel blood, at least 50% of which is Jewish, add rose hips and just a hint of lavender, stir vigorously, then pour out liberally – ideally from the skull of a Crusader – into your shower water, douche cistern, or after-shave dispenser. It will purify the dickens out of you.
August 7th, 2009 at 11:40 am
OK. So it’s the WWAQAIVEA. WWAQAIVEA is the new GWOT. It sounds like a made-up name for a banking conglomerate or a nationwide “health care” giant.
Wonder when WWAQAIVEA will start sending us printed brochures explaining what it’s doing In Our Community.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Me, I’m more in the “bombs don’t kill people if you don’t use ‘em” camp.
I don’t much care if you call them terrorists or jihadists or Islamofascists or Talibani or Al Qaeda or whatever as long as you can precede it with ‘late’.
What the new terminology means is that this administration considers the security of the country and its citizens a matter of secondary concern.
August 7th, 2009 at 6:09 pm