Ignoring Islamo-Fascism at our Peril

By Alan Caruba

In early November 2009 Americans were shocked to learn that an Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, had shot and killed twelve soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, and wounded thirty-one others. Because of the unrelenting political correctness prevailing in the Army and other services, all the signs that Hasan was a ticking time bomb were ignored.

Hasan was known to be a Muslim, had exhibited signs of a growing fanaticism, occasionally showed up in the post exchange dressed in Arab garb, and as it turned out later, was being mentored by Yemen’s al Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki , an American citizen who was later killed by a drone strike. As Hasan stood before the soldiers, firing at them, he yelled “Allah Akbar.”

This and other attacks, planned, failed, and thwarted occurred before and since 9/11; an attack that stunned Americans, all contribute to the worldwide terrorism intended to bring about the domination of Islam. Not only has the memory faded, but in 2009 the Obama administration did away with the earlier description of “a war on terrorism”, it ordered the Pentagon to replace it with “overseas contingency operations.”

The administration’s magical thinking about the Islamo-fascist threat makes one wonder why it has a Department of Homeland Security.

When it became known that the New York City Police Department was training its force to be especially watchful for any signs of terrorist attacks and was paying close attention to the mosques in the city and across the river in New Jersey, there was an outcry that totally ignored the threat. Initially they were rebuked by the Governor of New Jersey, a state where the 1993 attack on the Twin Towers was planned. One of the conspirators arrested lived in my hometown!

A report by the NYPD notes that Newark police officers worked closely “at all times” with their New York City counterparts. Much of the criticism of the NYPD’s program has been due to its success!

In a new book by Peter Feaman, “The Next Nightmare: How Political Correctness Will Destroy America” ($14.99, Dunham Books, softcover), a trial lawyer with thirty years’ experience, warns against the way Americans are leaving themselves vulnerable to future attacks. “Intolerance of Christianity and Judaism, and violence against infidels, is preached weekly in mosques across the United States.”

A great deal of the problem is that Americans believe that Islam is a "religion." Historically, it has been a cult of conquest that merges its belief system with a political agenda in which Sharia law is intended to be imposed throughout the world. Its early, swift spread was based on terror and warfare.

No other “religion” preaches death to believers of other faiths. No other “religion” demands that apostates who convert be sentenced to death. No other “religion” resorts to intimidation on the scale of Islam. It is fascism masquerading as religion.

“At the end of World War II,” notes Feaman, “there were about fifty mosques located in the United States. Today there are more than 1,300—and the number grows monthly.” Much of the funding comes from Saudi Arabia for Sunni mosques and Iran for Shiite mosques.

There are moderate Muslims seeking reform within Islam and there are Muslims who are loyal Americans. They are, however, vastly outnumbered by those with very bad intentions.

The NYPD program aimed at monitoring mosques is critical to thwart future attacks. “The six men of the al Qaeda sleeper cell in Lackawanna, New York—who were arrested by the FBI in 2001 for attending an al Qaeda terrorist training camp in Afghanistan—all belonged to the same Lackawanna mosque.”

“In Florida’s Dade and Broward Counties, an imam and his two sons were arrested on May 14, 2011, charged with funneling money to the Pakistani Taliban…”

“A Sunni mosque in suburban Beaverton, Oregon was the meeting ground for six members indicted by federal authorities in 2002 for conspiring to provide aid to the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists.”

The Al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn has been in the public spotlight for more than ten years as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism, sedition, and treason. The imam there, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, was convicted in 1995 of conspiracy to bomb New York City landmarks.”

Islamo-fascism is spreading everywhere, but especially in Europe where many acts of terrorism have occurred. By 2050, Muslims will be in control of most European nations by sheer weight of numbers. The “Arab spring” is rapidly becoming the means by which Islamists are gaining control throughout those nations that overthrew their mostly secular dictators.

If we don’t want a repeat of the Fort Hood murders—labeled “workplace violence” by the Obama administration—if we don’t want another Times Square car bomb that mercifully was disarmed, if we want to be protected against future attacks, we must rid ourselves of the political correctness that will get us killed.

The notion that the New York City Police Department would come under fire for acting preemptively to prevent further attacks in the city is beyond absurd. It is suicidal.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Purim 2012: Obama, Israel, and Iran

By Alan Caruba

On the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar (a lunar calendar), Jews around the world will celebrate Purim. This year it begins at sunset on Wednesday, March 7 and concludes the following day. If I was an Iranian ayatollah, I would be worried.

Like Passover that celebrates the liberation of Jews, their exodus from Egypt in the days of the pharaoh, Purim celebrates a victory over the evil prime minister of the Persian empire ruled by King Ahasuerus. Haman was the archetype anti-Semite and, as the story of Esther relates, he was angered by the refusal of Mordechai, the leader of the Jews, to bow to him. Haman convinced the king to issue a decree for the extermination of all the Jews on 13 Adar.

At various points in Jewish history, leaders, prophets, and fate—some would call it God’s intervention—have occurred to protect Jews from those who hate them and seek their destruction. In the case of Purim, it happened that the king had ordered the death of his wife, Vashti, who had failed to follow his orders. He held a beauty contest to find a new bride and Esther was chosen. She soon found favor with him, but she had prudently not revealed that she was Jewish.

When the Jews faced extermination, however, she invited the king and Haman to join her for a feast where she revealed she was Jewish to save her people. Haman was hanged and Mordechai was appointed the prime minister in his stead. A new decree was issued, granting the Jews the right to defend themselves and, on the 13th of Adar, they dispatched many of their enemies. On the 14th, they rested and celebrated.

Among Jews is a joke, a lighthearted parody of grace before dining that goes “They tried to kill us. They didn’t. We won. Let’s eat.”

Given the events of this week as the President spoke to the convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), followed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the fate of Israel again hangs in the balance due to the repeated threats of annihilation by the Iranian regime and the prospect of their acquiring nuclear weapons. Both leaders stressed their opposition to this. Both stressed it was not just a threat to Israel, but to the entire world.

The ayatollahs would be wise to read the “Megillah”, the scroll of Esther, an integral part of the celebration of Purim. Reportedly, Netanyahu give Obama a copy when they met to discuss the Iranian threat.

Netanyahu’s speech stressed the right of the sovereign nation of Israel to defend itself and the President’s speech affirmed that Israel has the right to defend itself “by itself” while promising that “I have your back.”

In a Wall Street Journal commentary, “The ‘Jewish’ President”, columnist Bret Stephens cast great doubt over Barack Hussein Obama’s trustworthiness. “Here is a president who fought tooth-and-nail against the very sanctions on Iran for which he now seeks to reap political credit. He inherited from the Bush administration the security assistance to Israel he now advertises as proof of his ‘unprecedented’ commitment to the Jewish state.”

“His defense secretary has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of a U.S. military option against Iran even as the president insists it remains ‘on the table.’ His top national security advisers keep warning Israel not to attack Iran even as he claims not to presume to tell (Israeli leaders) what is best for them.”

Stephens cites a book by Peter Beinart, due out next month, called “The Crisis of Zionism.” Chapter five is titled “The Jewish President.” Beinart points out that Obama’s views about Israel have been shaped by his friends Rashid Khalidi and former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Beinart warns that Obama’s views were shaped as well by “a coterie of far-left Chicago Jews who ‘bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state.’”

“…But the important question here isn’t about American-Jewish attitudes toward Israel,” concludes Stephens, “It’s about the president’s honesty…On the evidence of Mr. Beinart’s sympathetic book, Mr. Obama’s speech at AIPAC was one long exercise of political cynicism.”

If a March 5 Debka File report is accurate, then the President has “decided to let Israel have weapons systems suitable for long-range military operations and strikes against fortified underground targets. They include four KC-35 aerial refueling aircraft, doubling the number already in the Israeli Air Force’s inventory, and GBU-31 Direct Attack Munition-JDAM bombs of the type which serve U.S. bombers, especially those based on aircraft carriers.”

So we are left to sort through the text of AIPAC speeches and other scraps of information to determine the future. The Debka File report appears to signal a change of attitude toward Iran after three years of fruitless and humiliating efforts to open negotiations with that nation.

After three years, Obama has had a challenging learning curve to disabuse him of his beliefs regarding Islam and the Middle East. He entered the White House with some serious reservations about Israel that have been reflected in his prior behavior toward the Jewish state.

His administration has committed as many, if not more, grave errors of political correctness regarding the Islamic war on the West than Carter’s or Clinton’s. The Obama administration made it known that there would no longer be any reference to the global war on terror, substituting “overseas contingency operations” in its stead. The brutal Fort Hood attack was not labeled an Islamic massacre but rather “workplace violence.”

Obama has learned that pretending that Islamo-fascists either don’t exist or don’t mean what they say does not solve the problem. To his credit, he authorized the killing of bin Laden and the drone attack on al Qaeda’s Anwar Awlaki, the mentor to the Fort Hood killer.

The leading supporter of terrorism, however, remains Iran, formerly known as Persia.

For Jewish and Christian Americans the greatest delusion about the Islamic war for world domination is the self-delusion that it is not really happening. As they celebrate Purim 2012, the Israelis harbor no such thoughts.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Good Old Days

By Alan Caruba

It started with a haircut in the morning. I sat in a barber chair I had sat in initially around the age of five. In those days, the 1940s, four Italian gentlemen cut hair and it cost 25 cents for a kid and $1.25 for an adult. Same shop, but my haircut cost $16.00 not counting the tip. Except for the owner, some lovely gals cut hair there these days.

When my parents moved to an upscale suburb of Newark, New Jersey in 1942, they paid $11,000 for a three-bedroom home with a stand-alone garage. I sold it for many multiples of that and it was essentially the same house with a few improvements. I sold because, in 2000, the town had reevaluated the property and literally doubled the taxes. Ten years later, a second reevaluation was deemed worthy of an article in The Wall Street Journal.

My parents put two sons through college on the earnings of my Father, a CPA with vivid memories of the Great Depression. He was a liberal, a Democrat, and advocate of the United Nations. Starting in the 1950s Mother taught gourmet cooking in the adult schools that sprang up after the war, earning enough to purchase the family cars and otherwise contribute to the budget. They remained married for over sixty years. He never learned to drive.

After the haircut, I topped out the gas, a little under a half-tank, and paid $21 for a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, the latter mandated by the government and heavily subsidized. The cost included state and federal taxes. I can recall when gasoline in the 60s and 70s was around 60 cents a gallon. I can also remember long lines at the pumps in both 1967 and 1973-74 when the Saudis, angered by the U.S. support for Israel, implemented oil embargoes.

A visit to the supermarket these days is a carnival of sticker-shock. The price of food has been rising thanks in part to the increase of the cost of energy to produce it and the diversion of corn to produce ethanol that reduces the mileage you get from the gas you purchase and likely harms your car’s engine. Corn is a major feedstock so the cost of a steak is rising too.

During WWII, the milk was delivered to my home by a horse-drawn wagon. Before refrigeration became widely available, we kept it in an ice box that required the delivery of large blocks of ice. There was radio, but no television. If you wanted air conditioning, you had to go to the local movie theatre. Price of admission, plus popcorn cost a kid about twenty-five cents. I saw my first television program in the 1950s. Within no time, everyone had a TV.

When I attended elementary, middle and high school there was zero talk about illegal drug use because there was none and I cannot recall any mention, let alone the teaching of heterosexual or homosexual sex of any kind. The school day began with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer. We did not have a politically correct curriculum or have to listen to fantasies about the planet heating up.

We did not recycle because everyone knew it was just the garbage.

It was the rare child who came from a family that had experienced divorce or who was being raised by a single parent. There was no segregation in the north, but my high school was almost completely white. That ratio has been reversed.

The Draft ensured that every able-bodied young man would serve a minimum of two years in the military learning the arts of warfare. We had all been born early enough to have passed through World War Two as very young children. This was followed by a conflict in Korea in the 1950s when we were teens. By the time the Vietnam War came along it was a new generation of conscripts fighting it. After that, the military became entirely staffed by volunteers.

The biggest scandal of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower involved a vicuna coat his chief of staff had accepted as a gift. It would take Watergate to stain and end Nixon’s presidency, an ugly sexual dalliance to undermine Clinton’s, and a parade of congressional felons that constitutes a non-stop perp-walk these days.

Since I was a lad the government added a Department of Education, a Department of Energy, a Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others I cannot recall. Regulation of everything has exploded. Borrowing and spending has exploded. If anybody had told me back then that the government was broke, I would have thought he was crazy, but the debt ceiling kept being raised until there is, in effect, no ceiling.

In my memory, American society began to shift from traditional values and patterns in the 1960s. The century-long failure of the South to rid itself of the aftermath of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, eventually found expression among blacks, but it also caused riots in U.S. cities.

In time, gays in New York would rebel against police harassment and a whole new movement would be sparked, culminating in the demand for same-sex marriage, along with an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. The lives of women changed with the advent of “the Pill” and demands for more equality.

Sex, drugs and rock’n roll became the order of the day. We have gone from Frank Sinatra to Lady Ga-Ga. Later generations than mine share a more chaotic vision of society and a far more costly one in which to live.

It has taken the emergence of the Tea Party movement to capture and focus the independent voters who have seesawed back and forth between the comfort of Eisenhower's conservatism to the free-spending of Lyndon Johnson, the conservative values of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s effort to force European-style socialism on America.

In my life, we have gone from the Great Depression to an era in which whole nations have discovered that a highly centralized government inherently cannot function without bankrupting its citizens whether they live in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece or in the former Soviet Union.

As international organizations have flourished, from the United Nations to the European Union, the more unwieldy, corrupt, and grasping they have become.

We live now in the Age of Terrorism. No one in authority seems to want to acknowledge the source, the threat to civilization called Islam. Few Americans knew anything about Islam before 9/11. Now you can’t get on a plane without a full body scan and search.

If your grandpa or grandma say they miss the “good old days”, keep in mind that in many fundamental ways, they really were good.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

All Obama, All the Time

By Alan Caruba

We are back to the Obama administration’s original theory of governance, “All Obama, all the time.” Having basked on the spotlight during his rather long State of the Union Speech, Obama addressed the Baltimore conference of Republican members of Congress with yet another familiar excuse, it’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

In one year in office he has learned nothing or, if he has, the lessons have been dismissed as irrelevant to his mission of “transforming” a nation that is far more focused on just surviving the worst Recession/Depression since the 1930s.

Obama seems mystified that, with the greatest majority in Congress in decades, he is unable to get Democrats to coalesce behind his major initiatives such as healthcare “reform.” Republicans wisely decided to avoid being a part of this debacle and have since been labeled “the Party of no.” Sometimes, the right answer is no.

In other parts of the world, our system of government is baffling, particularly for the way it deliberately slows the passage of various legislative proposals. Writing recently in El Mundo, a leading newspaper in Spain, Prof. Rafael Navarro-Valls, said, “The problem, it seems to me, is that we should first consider the very system of power in America. When speaking of the U.S. President as the most powerful man in the world, one forgets the rules of the political circus in which he functions.”

“America produced a political system that is burdened and slowed down by a game of opposing powers,” said Navorro-Valls, who noted that this was intentional on the part of the Founding Fathers who had “fears of kings and tyrants.”

If Obama is unable to lead his own party when it had a lock on political power in Congress, his ability to do so for the rest of the nation is indeed in question and Navorro-Valls noted that “reality is relentless when we come down from the blue sky of promises to the vulgar world of facts, so the gap between what was offered and the reality concerns the electorate.”

The power of the American electorate was seen most recently in Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in New Jersey. It will be seen again in November.

Around the world, America is watched closely and what happens here is news everywhere else. This is particularly true in the Middle East when America, following 9/11, invaded Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda, and then invaded Iraq to remove a regional destabilizing figure, Saddam Hussein. And, of course, America has long been an ally of Israel through several wars perpetrated against it by Arab nations and, lately, the Iranian proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Writing in The Jordan Times, Hasan Abu Nimah took a look at “The Arabs and Obama after a year.” The Arab fixation on the “Arab-Israeli conflict” remains the obstacle to any rational resolution; it is now past sixty years since Israel became a reconstituted sovereign nation and, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, none of the 22 Arab states with their 360 million people, have been willing to accept that fact.

Nimah bluntly said that “Until the Arabs take control of their own destiny, they will continue to wait and hope in vain that rescue will come, if not from Obama’s promises, then from someone else’s.” None of them want that someone else to be Osama bin Ladin.

The answer, of course, is to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to seek peace with it. That is not likely to happen. Nimah wrote, “The Arabs expected that with Obama in office they would see the beginning of the end of the occupation of their land.” Israel is not an occupier. Its claim to the Holy Land predates both Christianity and Islam by thousands of years.

Georgiy Bovt, writing in Izvestia, the Russian newspaper, also took a look at Obama’s first year. Suffice it to say he tore into the young President, along with the “reset” message he tried to send Russia and the rest of the world. Bovt said, “While Obama practiced conciliatory gestures, the camps of al Qaeda prepared and continues to prepare for future attacks.” He ripped the political correctness that leaves America vulnerable.

“How many more of these ‘resets' will this pillar of modern political correctness be able to withstand, with the assertion that terrorism has no nationality, nor religious affiliation?” asked Bovt. Good question!

The Russian analyst concluded saying, “We hope that he doesn’t fall quickly and disgracefully.”

Reading from the newspapers around the world, the message is the same, a distinct sense of disappointment and apprehension regarding Obama’s first year. They are not alone. If the polls are any indication—and they are—approval of Obama’s performance in office is dropping rapidly.

All Obama, all the time is not the answer. It is the problem.