Abominable Apologies

By Alan Caruba

I will leave it to the historians to pinpoint when President Obama began to lose the 2012 election, but I think it occurred on June 4, 2009 when he gave a speech at Cairo University as part of his now-famed “apology tour” of the Middle East.

At the time he said, “We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world—tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate…More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

Apparently, to Obama, those tensions had nothing to do with a dastardly attack on September 11, 2001 that killed nearly three thousand non-combatant civilians and those working at their desks in the Pentagon. It had nothing to do with the earlier attack on the Twin Towers, the attack on U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, or, going back to 1983, the suicide bomb attack on Marine barracks in Beirut. And that’s just the short list.

To Obama the “tensions” were the result of “colonialism” despite the fact that most Arab nations in World War II sided with the Nazi regime or that they have always been ruled by a succession of despots, several of whom were deposed in 2011. According to Obama, “the Cold War” with the then-Soviet Union that began shortly after World War II and subsequently aided its downfall was another reason why Muslims hate America.

In Cairo that day, Obama thrice referred to the “holy Koran” while referring to “civilization’s debt to Islam”, saying “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

Those “stereotypes” were reinforced in Afghanistan after riots broke out after the perfectly reasonable destruction of Korans that that been damaged, a practice common to Islam. This was followed by rioting in the streets of Kabul, the shooting of an American colonel and major inside the Afghan Ministry of Interior and, as the Feb 27 edition of The Wall Street Journal noted, “Ten of the 58 U.S.-led coalition soldiers who died this year have been killed by their Afghan comrades in arms.”

In June 2009, Obama said, “In Ankara (Turkey), I made clear that America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.” This clueless president who claimed to be “a student of history” is deliberately ignorant of the fact that Islam, since its inception, has been at war with all other nations and religions. When it swept through the Middle East in its earliest years, it all but destroyed Christianity there and, when it conquered Jerusalem, it built a mosque over one of the most sacred places of Judaism, the Temple Mount.

He promised to “invest $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to partner with Pakistan to build schools and hospitals, roads and businesses…that’s why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend on.”

In that Cairo speech he said, “I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.” His administration wanted to afford the man who planned 9/11 a civil trial in the heart of Manhattan, replete with all the protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution. He did not close Gitmo and the trial was not held after its prospect evoked widespread protest.

Obama said, “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other” and, in 2011 the citizens of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen rose up to overthrown their own governments—dictatorships—while the citizens of Syria are doing that today. When Iranians filled the streets of Tehran in 2009 to protest their own dictatorship, he said that the United States “should not meddle” in their affairs, depriving them of even a word of encouragement.

Three years ago, Obama was convinced that America’s reputation had been harmed by its vigorous response to 9/11 in Afghanistan and the decision to depose Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein.

His apology to the government of Afghanistan is an abomination.

The fact is that Islam, particularly in the Middle East, is the enemy of democracy in the West and everywhere else it exists. It is tyranny personified. It is the reason why the Middle East has lagged so far behind the rest of the world. It is the reason why military forces are massed around an Iran that threatens to set off a cataclysm when it acquires nuclear weapons.

The U.S. and NATO forces will leave Afghanistan and it will return to its barbaric, seventh century roots. The U.S. and coalition forces have left Iraq and it will return to its ancient schism and conflict between Sunni and Shiite populations everywhere. We tried to drag these nations into the twenty-first century and we failed, but at least we tried.

We are standing aside while Syria’s dictator slaughters his own people. We will likely see the Jordanian king overthrown and we have witnessed 64 years of unrelenting assaults by the so-called Palestinians on Israel, our only true ally in the Middle East.

This President, however, knows nothing of history and has signaled in many ways his partiality to the “religion of peace” that has attacked America and is filling the streets of Muslim-majority nations with the blood of innocent victims.

He will be rejected by Americans in November 2012 just as he has been rejected by the leaders of most of the free world, the leaders of the Soviet Union and China, virtually all of the members of the United Nations, and all the nations of the Muslim world.

America does not need his apologies. America needs to regain the leadership it has earned by opposing despotism throughout its history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Lessons of 9/11

By Alan Caruba

October 29, 1929 is the day the stock market crashed and is generally regarded as the day the Great Depression began.

In the earliest days of that decade-long economic disaster, excavation for the building of the Empire State Building was begun on January 21, 1930. The building’s drawings and blueprint has been produced in two weeks by architect William F. Lamb who used earlier designs for another tower. On May 1, 1931, the iconic skyscraper was opened for occupancy.

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by Islamic terrorists sent by al Qaeda, almost all of whom were Saudis. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth was brought down in Pennsylvania when passengers fought the hijackers. Presumably it was headed for either the White House or the Capitol Building.

Not counting the hijackers, there were 2,977 victims.

In an exhaustive article by Andrew Rice, “The Saving of Ground Zero”, the story of the long, anguished struggle to build a new skyscraper to replace the Twin Towers was told in the August 8-14 edition of Business Week. Unlike the Empire State Building, the Freedom Tower is still under construction a decade passed the destruction that killed three thousand innocent Americans who did not know Islam was at war with America in particular and the West in general.

The triumphalism of Islam was expressed in the intent of some Muslims to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero. It evoked a national uproar, but both President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg said that freedom of religion meant that it could be built. Islam is not about freedom of religion.

Islam is not a religion of peace and not a religion of tolerance. The strangest outcome of 9/11 is the way too many Americans have steadfastly resisted the fact that Islam poses both an existential and actual threat to the nation and to Western civilization.

Since 9/11/2001, there have been 23,000 terror attacks worldwide and, once again, New York and Washington, D.C. are on alert for possible car bomb terrorist attacks.

Attacks on Americans have not ceased since 9/11, from Fort Hood to Times Square.

The 16 acres of the destroyed Twin Towers was hallowed by the murder of Americans who weren’t at war with anyone, but it was also extremely valuable real estate. As Rice wrote, “To the degree that it’s possible for a 102-story building to take a city by surprise, One World Trade Center snuck up on the New York skyline.”

“For years the project, conceived in the throes of tragedy, has been debated, negotiated, renamed, redrawn, hailed as a beacon, and maligned as a boondoggle. It wasn’t until recently, though, that it presented itself as an immutable fact, beginning to replace the void above Ground Zero with steel and reflective glass.”

Consider the contrast between 1930 New York City and 2011. It took just over a year to build the Empire State Building, employing 3,400 workers. It has taken a decade for the replacement of the Twin Towers that were owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the original developer, Larry Silverstein, has independently built three other office buildings to replace those destroyed on 9/11.

During the past decade, under the administrations of Bush and Obama, the U.S. has remained stuck in the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq. A third war, the effort to rid Libya of its dictator, has had U.S. involvement “leading from the rear”, and the whole of northern Africa’s Maghreb and Middle East is embroiled to some degree in conflict.

No one can say how the turmoil in these Muslim nations and others will turn out, but the odds are the Islamists, the jihadists, will end up in charge and their war on the West will continue.

There are lessons to be drawn from this decade and those that preceded it. Chief among them is that Islam remains at the heart of all the killing, the despotism, and instability of the Middle East and the threat to Western civilization, determined as ever to drag us back to the seventh century.

Skyscrapers can be built in a decade or less, but it takes centuries to create a civilization and to defend it against its enemies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Our National Day of Prayer

By Alan Caruba

Thursday, May 5, is our National Day of Prayer. Among my many friends few regularly attend a house of prayer, nor even believe in a greater power.

I have heard it said that “Courage is fear that has said a prayer” and every time I get a request to say a prayer for someone who is ill, has passed away, is facing some adversity, I pause to do so. My favorite and most constant prayer is “Thank you” for my health, my family, my friends, my life.

The greater power to whom I address my prayers has no face, nor form, but one cannot see the beauty or experience the power of the planet we share without being impressed by an unseen intelligence and the physics and the poetry that it reflects it.

In 1952, President Harry Truman proposed that one day a year should be designated a National Day of Prayer. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan designated the first Thursday in May as the National Day of Prayer.

On June 28, 2006, Barack Obama said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation—at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers.” In 2002, however, 82% of all Americans were Christians while other faiths constituted about 1% each.

Obama is wrong. America was and is a Christian nation, formed as much by its values as by natural law and the precedents of English law. The Founding Fathers all believed that a democracy could succeed and survive only if led by men of virtue.

In March 2009, CNN reported that ”America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.”

“Seventy-five percent of Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was 86 percent.”

On May 6, 2009, The Washington Times reported that, ”President Obama is distancing himself from the National Day of Prayer by nixing a formal early morning service and not attending a large Catholic prayer breakfast the next morning.

On April 29th, Obama signed an obligatory Presidential Proclamation—National Day of Prayer, in a statement that said “The Congress, by Public Law 100-307, as amended, has called on the President to issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a “National Day of Prayer.”

Americans have always expected their elected leader to possess some measure of religious commitment and, beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy, the long resistance to having a Catholic in office ended. Jimmy Carter was known to have taught Sunday school classes and was a “born again” Christian. Ronald Reagan did not wear his faith on his sleeve, but there was never any doubt that he possessed it. George W. Bush was proud to be a “born again” Christian.

So what faith does Barack Obama profess? After twenty years attending a Black Liberation church in Chicago and having been married by its pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he was required to denounce him during the 2008 campaign for having said “God damn America.”

He professes to be a Christian, but from his first day in office, Obama has demonstrated a strong “tilt” toward Muslim nations and, as time went on, an unseemly and dangerous animus toward the Jewish homeland, Israel.

In a nation that is still predominantly Christian, but also the gracious and tolerant home to believers of the world’s other religions, signing a proclamation declaring the National Day of Prayer is an official act, part of the duty of any President.

For the first time since he became President, Obama will be in New York to lay a wreath at Ground Zero on Thursday, but it has already been announced that he will not release the photos of bin Laden’s death. He has thus thwarted the desire of all Americans and many others for true closure.

Many believe that America these days is in great need of prayer. It is good to know that the nation has set aside a day to remind us of the power of prayer.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Liberals Attack America's Security

By Alan Caruba

“Exactly thirty years after Bolshevism consumed St. Petersburg and Moscow, it created a firestorm in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In October 1947 the U.S. Congress held dramatic hearings on the subject of Communist infiltration in Hollywood.”

Now, decades after repeated attacks on U.S. embassies, U.S. Marines in Beirut, the USS Cole, and, of course, nearly a decade since 9/11, Rep. Peter King is holding hearings on Islamic radicalization in America, the kind that led to the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood and which The Wall Street Journal identified as “more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil.”

The similarities between the 1947 House Committee on Un-American Activities and Rep. King’s hearings are remarkable and, in both cases, the mainstream media played an extraordinary role in depicting them as a witch hunt. That metaphor was used by playwright Arthur Miller when he wrote “The Crucible” and Miller’s application to join the Communist Party of United States of America was one of the items the Committee made public.

Along with revelations that many Hollywood scriptwriters were CPUSA members, sworn to obey Russia and their Soviet masters and that a number of Hollywood stars had been duped by Communists to lend their names to anti-American activities has long been subsumed by a relentless campaign to depict the Committee as Un-American, not those working to undermine America. At the heart of that campaign, then and now, was the mainstream media and those in academia.

Liberals will always embrace totalitarian governments and movements. From Jane Fonda to former President Jimmy Carter, liberals have always seen America as the enemy and worked to further the aims of our enemies.

The opening quote to this commentary came from “Dupes”, a book by historian Dr. Paul Kengor that reveals not only the names and activities of Communist dupes in America from the years just following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the present day.

That history has been largely re-written by the many liberals in the nation’s media and in its colleges and universities. Among the most famous advocates of the Soviet Union were leading academics and, today, the revolutionaries of the 1960s, including some who bombed U.S. facilities, are found on America’s campuses, indoctrinating new generations.

To give you an idea of how great the threat to America truly is, Rep. King and his family have been protected, according to the Associated Press, by “round-the-clock security” provided by the New York Police Department and the Nassau County, N.Y. police.” Capitol police secured the congressional hearing room and surrounding areas, as well as his office.”

And, then, true to the media agenda to undermine and disparage the current and past hearings, the Associated Press report noted that “Critics have likened them to the McCarthy-era hearings investigating communism.” Bingo!

You would have to have read the March 10 Wall Street Journal editorial to learn that, among the efforts by jihadists to attack America being investigated, there were “plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline.”

“Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan’s November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.”

And the White House response in all these cases was, “Do not jump to conclusions.” The Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, led by Janet Napolitano and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, have choked on the words “Muslim terrorist” or even the word “terrorism.”

If you want to see how the purpose of these hearings will be twisted, you need only pay heed to the top ranking Democrat on the committee, Bernie Thompson of Mississippi, who said he believes the hearings could be used to “inspire terrorists.”

Only terrorists don’t need to be inspired by a U.S. Congressional Committee. They are already inspired by the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Hating Infidels 24/7

By Alan Caruba

The Holocaust of the last century is remembered for the mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population, an estimated six million who perished. In total, an estimated eleven to seventeen million Europeans, Jews and Christians, died in the Nazi concentration and death camps or were murdered outright in their homelands.

Records were lost or didn’t list religion, but the lesser known story of the Holocaust was the death of millions of Christians, three million of whom were Poles, predominantly Catholics, killed by the Nazis for being Poles. They have a special place in Jewish history because many Poles, risking immediate execution if caught, were among the “righteous Gentiles” who were rescuers of Jews.

I cite this because there is a new Holocaust abroad in the world and it is directed at Christians, particularly in the Middle East and throughout Africa, wherever Islam is the dominant religion. Nor is this is a new phenomenon; Christians were widely persecuted under the Ottomans (Turks) when their empire encompassed much of the Middle East.

It is clearly manifesting itself again and to far too little notice.

Let it be said, too, that Islam is an equal opportunity enemy of all other faiths as was seen in the 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, that included India’s tiny Bene Israel Jewish community. The conflict between Islam and India’s Hindus goes back centuries and resulted in the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state when India gained its independence.

Why has there been so little consistent coverage of the on-going attack on Christians? This is especially curious insofar as it is estimated that there are more than two billion Christians worldwide, about a third of the global population. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they are the victims, not the perpetrators of this horror.

Today thousands of Iraqi Christians are fleeing to the comparative safety of the Kurdish area and other countries. Indeed, many Americans are unaware that much of the U.S. Arab population is, in fact, Christian, not Muslim.

In mid-December, The Telegraph, a London daily, reported that “some 1,000 families, roughly 6,000 people, have arrived in the northern Kurdish areas from Baghdad, Mosul, and Nineveh” according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “Several thousand have crossed into Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.”

Egypt is home to some twelve million Copts, otherwise known as the Coptic Orthodox Church. They have been in Egypt since 54 A.D. when St. Mark, a North African Jew, one of seventy apostles of the early church brought Christianity to that ancient land. The invasion of Muslims in 643 A.D created the inevitable adversity. On New Year’s Eve, there was a terrorist attack on the Coptic Church in Alexandria that killed 21 parishioners.

Copts have been routinely targeted for all manner of abuses and, unsurprisingly, Egypt is the epicenter for anti-Semitism in the Middle East. Officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, it has been ruled by President Hosni Mubarack since 1981. By contrast, the U.S. has had six presidents since then.

Boutros Boutros-Ghalli, a Copt and former secretary-general of the U.N., is president of the National Council of Human Rights in Cairo. In a Jan 21 article in the Wall Street Journal he cited Egypt as “a model of religious tolerance in the region” and noted that “thousands of Muslims gathered around churches across the country (on Jan 6, the eve of the Coptic Christmas) to act as human shields, protecting their Christian neighbors during their Mass.”

The exodus of Christians from the Middle East and incidents in African nations where an estimated 40% of the population are Christians speaks to the persecution that has spread everywhere before and since the rise of the Islamic Revolution, sparked by events in Iran in 1979. This has since led to the creation of Hezbollah and Hamas, two Iranian proxies. Al Qaeda, created to expel the Russians from Afghanistan, has been the tip of the Islamist sword, perpetrating 9/11 and other attacks worldwide.

The persecution historically directed against Judaism is now commonplace in its more lethal manifestations against Christians. Since the Old Testament is part of the Christian liturgy, an attack on Jews is an attack on Christians and vice-versa.

The post-war rise of secularism in Europe, along with demographic shifts in which large numbers of Muslims have taken up residence in European nations is having its affect on both Christian and Jewish communities there.

In America, the denigration of Christianity it is less visible and is not by definition persecution. A majority Christian nation, America has been experiencing a rise in efforts to diminish the acknowledgement of Christianity’s role in the nation’s history and by efforts to limit Christian symbols, prayers, and even the celebration of Christmas in public institutions and places.

Slowly, American, European and Christians worldwide are beginning to realize that they are locked in a religious war. It is a war that Christianity must engage. The silence of church leaders is no longer an option. It is a war between the 7th century and the 21st century.

It is a misnomer to call it a “war on terror.” Terror is a tactic, but this is a war against Islam because Islam has been at war with all other faiths since its inception.

In New York City, when Muslims seek to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero, they are simply exalting the atrocity of 9/11. It begs the question why its confessed perpetrator, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has not, ten years later, been brought to trial.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

This is Ground Zero 2010

This open pit represents a level of incompetance that defies the imagination. It has been nine years since the Twin Towers were destroyed.

Never Forget, Never Forgive

The Lessons of 9/11

They Destroyed My Towers!

By Alan Caruba

Whenever I drove into New York via the Lincoln Tunnel, I would join the other cars on the long, graceful curve leading to its entrance and, looking to my left, I could see across the Hudson River. At the tip of Manhattan, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood as symbols of our economic power.

On occasion, I had dined in Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower and marveled at the panorama of New Jersey on one side, the outer boroughs on the other, and the dazzling view of Manhattan.

Whenever I think about September 11, 2001, I have only one emotion and that is a deep, unrelenting anger that a group of murderous, suicidal Islamists destroyed “my towers.”

They killed some 3,000 people when you factor in the attack on the Pentagon along with the passengers of the four commercial airliners used to perpetrate the destruction.

It is a wonder to me that Americans then and since exercised such restraint, such tolerance that the nation’s small population of Muslims not only did not suffer attacks, but today continue to build mosques for worship.

The effort to build one so close to Ground Zero demonstrates how obtuse and out of touch the political leadership is with mainstream Americans. The odious behavior of New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is beyond comprehension. The President tipped his hand at a White House dinner held to celebrate Ramadan, backing away slightly the following day enough to deflect criticism.

Those proposing the Ground Zero mosque demonstrate the arrogance and contempt for Americans and for all “unbelievers” that lies at the core of Islam, but American leaders of varying religions have fallen over one another to excuse this exercise in triumphalism.

The Crusades from 1095 to 1291 were an effort to recapture the Judeo-Christian holy land from Muslim conquest. Having invaded Spain in 711, Muslims would rule for seven centuries until driven out of their last stronghold, Grenada, in 1492. In 1683, Muslims were decisively defeated near Vienna. How different Europe would have otherwise been.

Islam is a religion of the sword despite its widespread acceptance. Its barbarity is on display on a daily basis whether killing Christian missionaries in Afghanistan or Israeli civilians, a pregnant mother, her husband and their two children a week ago.

A sane society would have cleared away the rubble of 9/11 and rebuilt the Twin Towers, but Ground Zero, in terms of new structures nine years after the attack, remains barely begun

Al Qaeda and all those who subscribe to its intent to destroy the West, the civilization developed in the West, and the freedoms championed by the West, remain to be defeated, while they continue to threaten India and even Europe once again.

The further we get from 9/11, the dimmer the embers of anger become for those with short memories or no grasp of history.

The irony is that 9/11 reflects the long memories of many Islamists whose religion demands that all lands formerly conquered in the name of Islam be regained and that all people who follow a faith other than Islam be reduced to dhimmi, second-class citizens ruled by Muslims.

The World Trade Center belonged to the world. They were my towers and your towers. They represented a world bound together in trade, a world that set a value on all manner of goods and commodities, a world in which jobs and wealth were being created.

The World Trade Center represented a rational world.

Today, nine years later, the dispatches from the Middle East, from Afghanistan, the Palestinian enclaves, from Pakistan, from Yemen, and from an Iran bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, are filled with news of an irrational, dysfunctional society; an Islamist rat’s nest, still seeking to destroy Israel, and still testing our borders and defenses in order to destroy America.

It is a good day to get angry once more, to resolve that we and the West shall not be defeated.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Why are Liberals Blind to the Evil in the World?

By Alan Caruba

Why do so many Jews, located primarily in New York City, Los Angeles, and in Florida, mindlessly vote the Democrat Party line and thus support the Democrat destruction of the nation remains a mystery to me, but the same can be also said of Afro-Americans. Perhaps it is because both share a history of persecution and both are drawn to any message of hope and change.

Despite being a tiny minority, 0.2 of the world’s population, the Jews have produced some of the greatest minds of the modern era. They dominate the Nobel Prizes in science, medicine and physics. They have played a major role in American culture on Broadway, Hollywood, radio and television.

Politically, however, too many Jews who are seen as shapers of public opinion often appear to be blind to evil in the world. They cannot seem to recognize those who would kill them and their fellow countrymen. Unfairly, we expect Jews to be more moral, more just, more resistant to evil, but they are just like the rest of us, easily seduced by power, fearful of rejection.

Nine years after 9/11, less than a year since a Muslim major shot thirteen soldiers to death in Fort Hood, eight months past the failed Christmas bomber, and barely weeks after a failed attempt in Times Square to kill more innocent Americans, the former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, writing in the Huffington Post, lauds Mayor Mike Bloomberg for taking up “the fight to protect the legitimate rights of American Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero.”

Koch cites George Washington’s letter in 1790 to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island. It is a virtual poem to tolerance and a condemnation of bigotry, but the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero is not bigotry. It is the common, ancient recognition that some places are hallowed by the deaths of soldiers or by the innocent victims of evil.

The field at Gettysburg is hallowed ground. The former Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, is hallowed ground. In Sudan’s Darfur region today where genocide against Christians and animists continues will be hallowed ground.

So eager is Mayor Koch to defend the obscenity of a mosque rising where Muslims killed 2,700 people in the name of Allah, he writes, “We Jews also have our share of thieves, predators, child molesters, Ponzi-schemers, traitors and profiteers. Muslims have their share of great world accomplishments…”

This is so pathetic words cannot describe his surrender of any sense of moral outrage or the pretense of moral equivalency.

At least Mayor Koch was able to acknowledge that Muslims “also have their share of crazies, tyrants, homophobes, those holding hostile and irrational attitudes toward women, vilification of Jews, Christians, Hindus and other so-called infidels.”

It was not Jews who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl for the crime of being a Jew. The Jews do not murder Christian missionaries providing medical services as Afghan Taliban did a week ago.

Violations of the most fundamental human rights are simply not in the Jewish DNA. Having been slaves in Egypt, they celebrate freedom on Passover every year. Having reclaimed a synagogue from the Assyrians, they celebrate Hanukah every year. They
celebrate Purim to remember how Queen Esther saved her fellow Jews.

Koch mimics the Muslims who slander Israelis with being Nazis when they defend themselves against suicide bombers and thousands of rockets from Gaza. If the Muslims do bad things, Koch believes he must cite Jews as capable of the same, but self-defense is understood worldwide as a duty.

It is the Israelis who have protected the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, built over one of the most sacred sites of Judaism, the Temple Mount. Christian Arabs and Bahai adherents from Iran found sanctuary in Israel, having had to flee Middle Eastern nations as their Jewish neighbors did.

There is no moral equivalency with Muslim acts of terror. They are part of a campaign to impose Islam on the world. In that quest, Muslims have murdered Muslims as well as unbelievers.

It is a familiar liberal failing to refuse to recognize evil, to name it, and to denounce it.

Americans are right to condemn the insult and the arrogance of claiming to build a mosque dedicated to brotherhood when Islam does not recognize any other religion as valid or of having a right to exist.

And yet, any yet, Mayor Koch ended his convoluted, meandering comments on the prospect of a Ground Zero mosque saying, “I believe we are locked in battle with fanatical Islam and will be for the foreseeable future.” He’s right, but you don’t have to be a fanatic to believe what Muslims believe. You need only read the Koran.

The history of Islam is a history of conquest and a resurgent Islam is on the march everywhere again.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Find Someplace Else to Pray

The Price of Submission

Saying No! to a Ground Zero Mosque

By Alan Caruba

In the August 3rd edition of The Wall Street Journal, in the Greater New York section, the lead article was “9/11 Memorial Pledged as Part of Mosque Plan.”

There already is a 9/11 memorial. It is called Ground Zero and will be incorporated into whatever structure that eventually gets built on the site.

If one continued to read the story, however, you had to jump to page A21 where side-by-side with the mosque story was one titled, “Verdict in JFK Bomb Plot”, subtitled “Jury Finds Two Guilty in Conspiracy Charges for Plan to Ignite Fuel Tanks.”

The two men found guilty were Abdul Kadir and Russell Defreitas. A third defendant, Kareem Ibrahim, was ill and didn’t go to trial with them and a fourth, Abdel Nur, took a plea deal and faces up to 15 years in prison. At no time in the body of the article is there any mention that these men are Muslims though that fact was critical to their plot.

It was noted that “the men tried to get help from al Qaeda operative Adnan Shukrijumah who was recently indicted in federal court in a plot to attack the New York City subway system with suicide bombers.”

How many Muslim plots to kill thousands of New Yorkers does it take before the plotters are identified as Muslims?

The reason why there should be no mosque built where the debris and dust of the Twin Towers showered down on the very spot is obvious to any American. It would be an obscenity.

It is obscene to wish to build a mosque within sight of where 2,700 people lost their lives in an act of Islamic terrorism, an act of war, a jihad.

How this simple fact escapes the notice of Mayor Mike Bloomberg defies understanding, but this same Mayor originally thought the failed Times Square bomb could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”

No, it could not be “anything”! Of the many plots hatched since 9/11, it is likely that 99.9% have been by Muslims, whether native born or immigrants.



This is not about tolerance. In New York, every Friday in several locations through the city where there are mosques that cannot accommodate all who wish to enter for prayers, the overflow fills the surrounding streets between 2 PM and 4 PM. They block traffic in ways no other group of religionists would ever be permitted. It is surreal.

There is something especially abhorrent about Mayor Bloomberg’s dazzling ignorance because as a Jew he seems to have not absorbed the lessons of history and, in particular, the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and five million Christians; nuns and priests, Lutherans, gypsies, and others swept up by the Nazi death machine.

Hannah Arendt attended the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi charged with rounding up and killing Europe’s Jews. Her book, “Eichmann and the Holocaust”, was published in 1963 and enshrined the phrase, “the banality of evil” in our modern lexicon.

For Arendt, Eichmann was a “new type of criminal, who commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong.” Not so new because the crimes of Islam against all who are not Islamic (and some who are thanks to the Shiite-Sunni schism) are very old and fill the headlines of today’s newspapers.

The Muslims who flew commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did not think they were doing wrong. They were doing what the Koran and almost every imam with the breath to preach told them to do; they were killing infidels.

This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, too ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Islamic War for the Future of the World

By Alan Caruba

Muslims do not take kindly to criticism of any kind. Their solution, as often as not, is to kill anyone who criticizes them. Indeed, the Koran’s punishment for converting to another religion is death.

Islam’s primary weapon in recent decades has been terror. There are literally thousands of terrorist acts occurring throughout the world these days. 9/11 was the quintessential Muslim act of intimidation, but it was preceded and has been followed by many others.

In an act of political correctness and national suicide, Americans elected Barack Hussein Obama President in 2008. He has made no secret of his Muslim roots and beliefs. His very first television interview as President was with Al Arabia and, most recently, one of his appointees, Charles Bolton, the director of NASA claimed that he had been instructed to redirect that agency’s objectives to include a mission to the Muslim world.

Consider this, in 1952, President Truman established a National Day of Prayer and, in 1988, President Reagan designated the first Thursday in May each year as such. In June 2007 President Obama declared that the United States was not a Christian nation and this year he cancelled the 21st National Day of Prayer ceremony.

On September 25, 2009, there was a National Day of Prayer for Muslims that was held on Capitol Hill near the White House. There were more than 50,000 Muslims in attendance and as this is being written, Muslims are attempting to build a huge mosque within a block of Ground Zero in New York.

My friend, Amil Imani, born in Iran, an American citizen, has been courageously outspoken on the topic of Islam. Recently he published a book, “Obama Meets Ahmadinejad” that uses satire to reveal some fundamental truths about these two men. Ahmadinejad, of course, is the president of Iran and so hated there that crowds filled the streets of Tehran to protest. Iran is the classic Islamic nation that uses brutality and oppression against its own people.

Imani’s book has already been hailed by some of the leading voices warning against the Islamic threat to freedom and liberty. They include Robert Spencer, the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades; Dr. Wafa Sultan, author of “A God Who Hates”; and Dr. Ali Sina, the author of “Understanding Muhammad and founder of FaithFreedom.org. Let me add my recommendation that you get a copy for yourself.

In his most recent commentary, posted July 14, “Islam Must Be Stopped in America”, Imani makes a powerful case for the ways Muslims are using America’s traditional tolerance to make inroads that would impose Islam on the nation. He ruthlessly exposes the lies that Islam is a “religion of peace” or that Muslims believe there is “no compulsion” to convert.

“The Muslims,” Imani wrote, “and their apologists quickly run out of their few cards, and the rest of the Islamic deck is all about intolerance, hatred and violence toward the infidels, toward all others who are not true Muslims, and even toward those who consider themselves Muslims. Shiites, for instance, judge the Sunnis as traitors to Islam, and Sunnis condemn the Shiites as heretics. Each side deems the other worthy of death.”

Infidels, all those who are not Muslim, can see the truth with their own eyes as they observe “the savage Shiite-Sunni bloodletting in Iraq; the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region; the Somali killings; the Iranian mullah’s murder of their own people, and the support of mischief abroad; and the incessant terrorist acts of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad on Israel.” There are so many other examples that only fools would cling to the belief that Islam does not pose a threat to the world.

From the beginning of the Obama administration to the present, every effort was made to avoid identifying the enemy; most egregiously expunging any reference to “terrorism” from the language of its top officials including the Attorney General, the Director of the Department of Homeland Security, and a top national security advisor to the President, John Brennan, who has asserted that jihad does not mean war on the infidels. Tell that to 1.2 billion Muslims!

Americans have just over 900 more days of the Obama administration and the fate of the nation literally hangs in the balance until it is replaced.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Weekend Cartoon Roundup

Al Qaeda Sends a Christmas Message

By Alan Caruba

If there is an American remaining who does not understand that the Islamic revolution is at war with our nation and the West, then they are in serious denial.

For general purposes, it began with the Iranian revolution that overthrew a U.S. ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1979 and then took our diplomats hostage, holding them for 444 days. Only recently have we learned that Iran has been providing sanctuary to the family of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11 and an earlier attempt to destroy the Twin Towers.

This raises serious questions about the Obama administration’s first year in which considerable effort was made to open diplomatic communications with Iran, the primary source of all the conflicts in the Middle East as the guide and funding source for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and the provider of weapons against our troops in Iraq.

No Middle Eastern nation is safe from Iran, least of all its obsession, Israel. Its quest for nuclear weapons is not merely just another nation seeking to join the Nuclear Club.

On Christmas day, Abdul Farouk Abdul-Mutallab, aka Umar Farouk Abdul Madallad, a 23-year-old Nigerian and former engineering student at University College in London, attempted to set off an explosive device over the U.S. as Delta-Northwest Flight 253 was soon to land in Detroit.

Eight years ago this past week, Richard Reed, aka Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja, tried to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami. There is an important message to be understood from these two incidents and it is the contempt for both Christianity and Judaism that Islam has always displayed. It’s worth remembering that Israel was attacked in 1973 on Yom Kippur, one of its holiest days.

The other message is that al Qaeda’s war on the West and its quest for the establishment of a new caliphate to rule the world is far from over.

The fact that the vast intelligence gathering machinery of the United States, in cooperation with that of many other nations, have not been able to find and kill Osama bin Laden and his colleagues has been a major failure.

In 2007, Strategic Forecasting released a report saying, “All signs indicate this group is no longer functional and cannot be replicated. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is still alive, al Qaeda as it once was is dead.”

There are ample signs of life from al Qaeda and events in Somalia and Yemen suggest that some elements of it are still very much alive. One of Osama bin Laden’s earliest goals was to replace the Saudi Arabian monarchy.

It does not help that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has, during the first year of the Obama administration and its Secretary, Janet Napolitano, refused to even use the word “terrorism” throughout 2009. It does not help that President Obama has gone out of his way to display his sympathies for Islam.

What I have found interesting is the way the perpetrators of acts of terrorism against the West frequently involve well educated Muslims willing to die for Islam, but not before killing large numbers of innocent infidels, “unbelievers”, in places like U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, against the citizens of Madrid, London, and, of course, New York.

After attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan following 9/11 and then ridding Iraq of its dictator, Saddam Hussein, I am beginning to believe that former President Bush had a better understanding of the threat of militant Islam than anyone has ever given him credit for. As war-weary as Americans may be at this point, the fact is we have a fairly substantial military engagement precisely where it needs to be in the heart of the Middle East.

Reducing our troop levels now or even in the near future is very likely a very bad idea.

Something is very wrong in the Obama administration’s decision to give Khalid Sheikh Muhammad a civil trial in New York. It defies the obvious fact that he is an enemy combatant who should be subject to a military tribunal, not the full rights of an American citizen. The decision goes beyond just being stupid. It makes New York City “ground zero” for another spectacular attack in 2010.

In large and small ways, the Obama administration betrays sympathies for al Qaeda’s larger mission and the election of a President who spent several years of his youth in a Muslim nation as the step-son of a Muslim father, and whose very first message as President was an interview with Al Jezeera, the popular television channel that serves the Middle East, does not bode well for our national security.

Al Qaeda has sent America a Christmas message. Are we paying sufficient attention to the one the White House is sending?

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

The Disgrace of Ground Zero

By Alan Caruba

9/11/2009 took a large psychic toll on Americans.

I am no exception. By early evening, I found myself profoundly angry watching the Mayor of New York explain why Ground Zero is still essentially a hole in the ground eight years after the destruction of the Twin Towers.

This nation fought and won World War Two in four years’ time and in two separate theatres of war in the Pacific and in Europe. By the time it was over, the major cities of Germany and Japan were rubble and both armies and civilians were among the dead because the only way to convince an enemy to stop waging war is to destroy their will to continue.

History tells us this over and over again. It is the reason the Romans laid siege to Masada.

We have been in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. What we’ve been doing there is more a police action than a war.

That’s why the Korean War is officially called a United Nations police action, not a war. We settled for a stalemate.

When there were riots in Los Angeles and Newark that was a police action using the military. What we are asking our troops to do these days in far off, dangerous places is not a war.

We have reached a point where the present administration will not even call it a war. It doesn’t get more pathetic than that.

So, as I looked at that hole in the ground in lower Manhattan, I wondered why, if the owner of that vast property, the developer, had been able to completely rebuild other structures and rent them out, why the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had been unable or unwilling to rebuild the Twin Towers?

They have the blueprints!

What better way to tell America’s enemies, the fanatical al Qaeda—the spear point of the Islamic Jihad—that they could not and would not defeat us?

In World War Two we knew who the enemy was. We named them and we created a great war machine to utterly destroy them.

More than a half century later, our government will not say “terrorists”, cannot say “Islamists,” and all the while, the center of the Islamic Revolution, Iran, relentlessly works to acquire its own nuclear weapons.

There is a proper place for several “ground zeros” and they are the known sites where Iran is refining the fissionable material for nuclear weapons and building missiles.

Meanwhile, why must I watch interviews in front of a hole in the ground that is eight years old?

Ground Zero is an American disgrace.

Surrender is Not an Option

By Alan Caruba

As one drove into New York from New Jersey in the years before 9/11, there was an ellipse of roadway that gently curved into the waiting entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel. From there you could see the Twin Towers in the distance, across the river, dominating the lower end of Manhattan.

It bespoke the nation’s economic strength, its international outreach, its capacity to build two such impressive skyscrapers, made more so by their architectural simplicity. They gleamed in the rays of the Sun. They mirrored the silver Moon.

I had occasion to dine in Windows on the World restaurant several times, high atop one of the towers. A wall of windows ringed the restaurant and one could look at New Jersey on one side and Brooklyn on the other. A walk around that restaurant took in all the boroughs from that great height and there, down in the vast harbor, one could see the Statue of Liberty. So high up were you that it seemed a small thing from that distance.

If I wanted to strike at America’s confidence, America’s bravado, America’s dominance, I would have destroyed the Twin Towers and, of course, that is exactly what Osama bin Laden did.

Our response at the time was to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan and, in the process, try to kill bin Laden. Neither objective has been achieved. That is because the Middle East is an ancient place enthralled by an ancient religion that roots all present actions in the Arab culture of the seventh century A.D. when it was invented by Mohammed.

They have made little progress in modernizing thought or action. They were and they are the barbarians at the gates.

The Twin Towers were all about modernity and the future. Islam is all about the past and about the demand that it be imposed on the present and the future. These are people who journey to Mecca in order to circle a structure housing a stone!

Every year when September 11th comes around, we must remind ourselves of the triumph of our Constitution, our dedication to freedom and liberty, and our capacity to defeat the enemies of these inalienable rights.

Our grandparents defeated the Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. Then they and our parents held steadfast against the Soviets for nearly five decades. We fought in Korea and we fought in Vietnam. The current generation’s bravest and best have been fighting our enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We must draw on the reservoir of courage they bequeathed us and, for my part, we must never let lose of the anger we felt eight years ago when a handful of evil men attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, with yet another intended target.

Al Qaeda? Hunt them! Find them! Kill them!

Do not listen to the appeasers, the Blame America crowd. Surrender is not an option.

9/11 Eight Years Later and No Safer

By Alan Caruba

Has it been eight years?

What I learned from 9/11 was that a lot of Americans have concluded that it was America’s fault we were attacked. That may sound screwy to people who correctly believe that al Qaeda planned, funded and provided the men who carried out the attacks, but why deal with the facts when conspiracies are so much more fun? Why not just blame the victims?

9/11 was not the first attack on the Twin Towers. For those with any attention span, the first attack came in 1993 and was treated as a criminal act by a “gang who couldn’t shoot straight” Muslims, one of whom actually returned to the rental agency to get his money back because the truck used in the attack was destroyed.

Here’s where we are eight years later. As far as the government is concerned, it has learned NOTHING from the event and the subsequent efforts to kill the Taliban and al Qaeda lunatics who were operating in Afghanistan and badlands of Pakistan.

Not only are we still in Afghanistan, not only have we blandished billions on “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well on Pakistan, but the Obama Justice Department thinks the CIA interrogators are the bad guys and wants to extend Miranda rights, the full protection of the U.S. Constitution, to terrorists.

Astonishingly, your government has returned to pre-9/11 status wherein the FBI is now responsible for preventing terrorist attacks and the CIA is largely irrelevant, if not suspect.

Recall that, at the time of 9/11, the CIA was forbidden to provide information about terrorism to the FBI and vice-versa. Welcome to the bad old days!

And Obama is still intent on closing Guantanamo although he gave zero thought as to what we should do with the terrorists detained there. Those that were returned to their homelands promptly headed for new battlefields against American forces.

Eight years on, Osama bin Laden is presumably still alive. How is it that a nation with our enormous resources, spy satellites, drones to over-fly where we believe he is hiding, special operations military personnel, and yet this very tall Arab eludes us?

Here, too, is something worth considering. Al Qaeda waited eight years after the February 26, 1993 Twin Towers attack to strike again on September 11, 2001. And 2009 is eight years since the last attack. These people are patient. The next attack has been planned that will greatly exceed the casualties of 9/11.

Had the machinery that the Bush administration put in place and which kept the nation safe been respected and augmented, I would feel more confident, but who can feel confident with Janet Napolitano heading the Department of Homeland Security?

Napolitano cannot even bring herself to say the word “terrorist” and the Obama administration has not only expunged the phrase “war on terrorism”, but the Postal Service has issued of a stamp to commemorate Eid, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan!

It was the weak response of the Clinton administration that spurred al Qaeda to stage 9/11 and the same conditions are in place again today.

In addition, in an absolutely bizarre change of focus, instead of capturing or killing terrorists, it is the former Vice President, Dick Cheney, and dedicated CIA operatives that the Obama administration would like to drag before the dock and prosecute!

It is eight years later and I do not feel one bit safer. Do you?