A Decade Out, We're Losing
Ten years after 9/11, the war on terror is far from over, and we are losing it.
We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Islamic jihadists who explained, in writings they left behind, that they were committing mass murder in the name of Islam, inspired by the teachings of Islam, and in defense, as they saw it, of Islam. They struck the United States in service of their hope of destroying it, and ultimately imposing upon the U.S., the West and the world an Islamic government that would rule according to Islamic law, which denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience and equality of rights for all people.
Yet 10 years later, it is not only the height of political incorrectness to speak about the motives and goals of those who attacked the United States on that terrible day. It is explicitly against United States government policy to look into such matters. The Obama administration hardly ever speaks of terrorism at all. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano famously said several years ago that she preferred to refer not to acts of "terrorism" but to "man-caused disasters," and focused a DHS report on hunting "right-wing extremists" rather than Islamic jihad terrorists.
Ten years after 9/11, we have a President who has communicated in numerous ways that the United States' new primary response to Islamic jihad terror is to redress what Muslims perceive as grievances. Barack Obama has even declared: "I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."
Obama's policies toward Islamic terrorism proceed consistently from the assumption that the conflict between the West and the Islamic world is entirely the West's fault, and that he can thus bring that conflict to an end by means of sufficiently generous overtures to the Islamic world. He has answered the question, "Why do they hate us?" decisively by saying, in effect, "They hate us because of what we are doing to them." Might they hate us for reasons of their own, rooted in their own religious and cultural assumptions that are beyond our ability to affect or change? Obama never considers that possibility.
The President has also warmly endorsed the "Arab Spring" uprising in Egypt. Contrary to the optimism with which the mainstream media have greeted it in the U.S., Egypt's Arab Spring is set to usher into power a Muslim Brotherhood? regime that will ramp up the country's already virulent persecution of Christians, impose principles of Islamic law that will subject women and non-Muslims to institutionalized discrimination, and set Egypt on a path toward open war with Israel.
Such a regime in Egypt will be no friend of the United States. And in its hostility to America, it will likely partner with the post-Gaddafi regime in Libya, which is almost certain to contain significant al-Qaeda elements. And for that we can also thank Barack Obama, who rushed the U.S. into military action against Gaddafi without considering the likely nature of the regime that would replace him. Gaddafi was terrible, to be sure. His successors, however, are almost certain to be worse.
Meanwhile, domestically Obama's Justice Department has joined lawsuits by Muslims demanding special accommodations in the workplace, forcing American businesses to change their long-standing policies, and reinforcing the Islamic supremacist principle that wherever Islamic law and practice conflict with American law and practice, it is the latter that must give way. The Obama administration has not only shown no interest in the Muslim Brotherhood organizations, such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), that are advancing its stated goal (according to a captured Internal document) of "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house." Instead Team Obama partnered with several of those organizations on more than one occasion. Obama even sent his close adviser Valerie Jarrett to be the keynote speaker at ISNA's national convention.
What could go wrong? After all, they say they're moderate!
Ten years after 9/11, the U.S. government is thoroughly compromised and naively trying to appease the Islamic jihadists who have vowed to destroy us.
Ten years after 9/11, we're losing.