Why Are We Still Asking Why?

By Alan Caruba

We are now nearly nine years passed the attack on September 11, 2001 that killed some 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and seventeen years since the first attack, a car bomb, failed to bring down the Twin Towers.

Jihadists have been killing Americans for a long time; from the 1983 attack on the Beirut Marine barracks to the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, the recent Fort Hood attack, and now the abortive car bomb attack in Times Square.

Why are we still asking why?

Why is the mainstream press publishing headlines such as the Associated Press gem, “NY car bomb suspect cooperates, but motive mystery” or USA Today’s “Motive of NYC car bomb suspect remains a mystery.”

Why does the press continue to speculate or to publish the now standard “explanations” that the terrorist, whether it be Major Nidal Malik Hasan who killed 13 Fort Hood soldiers while yelling “Allahu Akbar” or the latest manifestation, Faisal Shahzad, who tried to kill countless Americans in Times Square on Saturday evening is motivated by anything other than Islam?

Every other reason than Islam is offered and this opinion-shaping process is getting old. Since 2002 the U.S. has tried dozens of Muslims involved in various plots.

It’s not some odd mental derangement. It is Islam.

It is not all Muslims, many of whom have ample reason to fear the jihadists in their midst, but there have been enough jihadists and more than enough terrorist events worldwide to recommend a united front against them.

It can be argued that more Muslims have died at the hands of the jihadists than “infidels”. A website, www.thereligionofpeace.com, has recorded 15,247 Muslim terrorist incidents since 9/11 and yet all manner of U.S. officialdom keeps saying there must be some other reason than Islam.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first response was that the car bomb might have been put in Times Square by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.” How detached from reality is the Mayor? Having asked, it’s worth noting that he also once proposed putting windmills on top of all the city’s buildings to generate electricity.

No one is more skilled at denying reality than Muslims themselves. Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, followed the breaking Times Square bomber story. “We are shocked, why did he do this?” asked one man in the street in Peshawar.

Did it have anything to do, as Dawn reported, with the fact that “In the 1980s, when Shahzad was a child, Peshawar was a staging post for the mujahideen who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a place frequented by Osama bin Laden and swollen by a morass of two million Afghan refugees”?

Dawn interviewed Advocate Kifayatullah Khan, a former member of the provincial bar council. “He said the family believed that Shahzad had been framed. ‘The entire family is highly educated and enlightened. The villagers don’t believe that Shahzad could act in such a manner.’”

As any observer will tell you, an advanced education is often a component of the jihadist’s decision to use terror against America. Major Hasan and even 9/11 pilot, Mohammed Atta, were college graduates and Shahzad was a 2000 graduate of the University of Bridgeport (CT) with a degree in computer science who is a naturalized American.

Islam is in confrontation with every other religion worldwide and has been since the seventh century. It lacks any theological impetus toward tolerance. Its holy book, the Koran, heaps calumnies on Jews, Christians, and “those without a book”, Buddhists and Hindus. Any criticism is justification for threats and worse. It sanctions the killing of infidels and apostates,

It is the state religion and the highest legal authority of Middle Eastern nations that have proven resistant to any true modernization beyond the adoption of Western technology. All, with the exception of Turkey, are dictatorships or monarchies though Iraq, liberated by U.S. intervention, is moving slowly toward democracy.

Despite a long history of terrorist acts in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai, and in the nations of Israel, Lebanon, Kenya, Tanzania, Russia, Iraq, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sudan, some people and elements of the nation’s media keep asking why!

For now and into the immediate future, it would be a good idea if the U.S. State Department stopped giving out visas like lollypops to Middle Easterners and others from predominantly Muslim nations.

It would be a good idea if the Department of Homeland Security would begin paying more attention to Arab visitors as well as native-born and naturalized Arabs in America instead of members of the Tea Party.

It would be a good idea of the U.S. military would take off the politically correct blinders and stop blathering about “diversity.”

It would be a good idea if we stopped listening to the eyewash of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and other apologists for Islamic terrorism.

At some point Americans have to stop asking why we are targeted.

We know why the car bomb was set to kill Americans in Times Square. We know why the Christmas Day bomber came close to killing those on the airliner. And we know that militant Muslims will try again.

For seven of the last nine years the Bush administration kept Americans safe from further attacks through vigilance and the preemptive use of power. Since the advent of the Obama administration in 2009, terrorist incidents have increased.

Worried about terrorism? We now have a president who, in his book, Audacity of Hope, wrote: “The stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their [Arab-Americans'] sense of security and belonging.... I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010