9/11's Aftermath of Lethal Tolerance

By Alan Caruba

The one thing I have never understood is the way Americans seem to refuse to accept the fact that the worst attack on the homeland since Pearl Harbor was planned, funded, carried out by Muslims, and was celebrated by Muslims around the world.

Perhaps the reluctance to relate the attack to “a religion” had to do with the way whole generations of Americans since the 1960s have passed through schools that indoctrinated them to believe that America has been invading other nations wrongly, supporting allies like Israel wrongly, and deserved to be attacked because of it.

Perhaps the election of a President with a Muslim name makes people reluctant to associate 9/11 with Islam?

The President, Barack Hussein Obama, is the son of a Muslim father he venerates even though he deserted and divorced his mother. He became the step-son of another Muslim his mother married, spent four years growing up in Indonesia surrounded by Muslims, until he was returned to the United States to be raised by his grandparents. While growing up in Hawaii he was mentored by a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA and during his college years, a close friend was a Pakistani with whom he traveled to that nation.

In “Audacity of Hope” he wrote, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

In retrospect 9/11 was entirely predictable. American military had been under attack since 1983 when a marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by a suicide bomber. After that, there was a succession of embassy bombings, an attack on the USS Cole.

In 1993 the first attempt to destroy the Twin Towers was unsuccessful, but was treated like an ordinary criminal case instead of the warning for heightened vigilance..

How many more Americans will have to die before we acknowledge that the enemy is Islam and the attacks reflect—not all, but many—Muslims’ view that America is, in Osama bin Laden’s words, the “great Satan”, while Israel is the “little Satan”? It took a decade to hunt him down and kill him. In the end, he was found in Pakistan, a mile from that nation’s equivalent of West Point.

This is not a call to punish American Muslims who are loyal to the nation, but even in our military service, the 2009 Fort Hood massacre by Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army Major, serves as a reminder that it is hard to know when the desire to strike fellow Americans will occur; dubbed the “sudden jihad syndrome.”.

Even in the wake of 9/11 when many in the Middle East were dancing in the streets and handing out candy to celebrate, President Bush went to great lengths to separate the perpetrators from the rest of the Muslim population of the nation and the world. The end of Ramadan was celebrated in the White House under Bush and, of course, by Obama.

One wonders how long it will take for the vast body of evidence that a war is being waged by Muslims around the world against those they scorn as “unbelievers” and against whom Islam calls for “a holy war.”

Recent reports from the Middle East indicate that, over the past five years, scores of Christians living in Egypt were murdered and that women and children are being abducted, tortured, raped, and forced to convert to Islam; 550 cases have been documented. The tiny Christian community in the Hamas-run Gaza strip is under siege. In Indonesia, Muslim protesters forced a church to shut down during Sunday worship. Name the nation, Iran, Lebanon, Kenya, Kuwait, Turkey, and what emerges is a consistent pattern, one that mirrors the way Islam was spread by terror and conquest since the seventh century.

Post 9/11 is testimony to a suicidal tolerance that ignores the message left by the ruins of the Twin Towers, the attack on the Pentagon, and the deaths of more than 3,000 innocent people on the airlines and in those buildings who were deemed the enemies of Islam for no other reason than being Americans, for being “infidels.”

It is a fearful prospect that a nuclear mushroom cloud could rise over Israel and, in all likelihood, over New York and other U.S. cities if we do not end this foolish “tolerance” that preys on an American value we hold dear and which may well doom more Americans.

The official policy of two administrations has been to pretend that Islam is not the enemy. The Obama administration went so far as to tell NASA that its new mission was Muslim outreach. And Islam is reaching back, but not in gratitude for ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein or protecting Afghanis against the Taliban. The hatred of America, of Christians, Jews, and all other faiths is costing lives every day.

The lesson of 9/11 is that Islam cannot be tolerated.

© Alan Caruba, 2012