Sultan Knish
2 out of 3 governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about
having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're
ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any
conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically
advocate as soon as the carnage is over.
"Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address.
But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that in
response to the terrorism, Bostonians won't spend the rest of their
lives locked in their homes, at least not until the next time there's a
terrorist on the loose. But then again neither are Rwandans or Sudanese.
This isn't so much an inspirational message as a pat on the back from a
government that once again failed in its duty to keep Americans from
being terrorized.
If America had refused to be terrorized, the Tsarnaevs would not have
been admitted to this country or would have been shown the door once
they started adding terrorist videos to their playlist. Instead Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was free to slap around his girlfriend while his brother
Dzhokhar was adding classic hits to his YouTube playlist like "We Will Dedicate Our Lives to the Jihad."
That ditty, from the hit-master behind “Hey, Shahid”, “The Holy Jihad
(Rise Muslim)” and “Insallah, We are Waiting for Paradise” contains
lyrics like "Paradise’s rivers softly chime/The 72 virgins lovingly
whisper" and "Infidels rule the earth/for the faithful life is torture".
But while infidels might still rule the United States, though there are
serious questions to be raised about who is ruling Michigan or New
Jersey, life was hardly torture for the Tsarnaevs who drove luxury cars,
attended good schools and got good media coverage. The good media
coverage continued even after their bout of mass murder as the New York
Times feature story on them was headlined, "Far From War-Torn Homeland,
Trying to Fit In." And who can blame them for trying to fit by
practicing some of their native customs of mass murder.
At some point refusing to be terrorized looks a lot like refusing to pay
attention to what terrorism is. After September 11 the government
encouraged everyone to get back out there and shop. The message now is
take in an interfaith service and then visit your local mosque for a
sanitized tour that explains how peaceful Islam really is. There's a lot
of talk about finishing the marathon and MoveOn.orging on our way past
the unpleasantness.
But there are two standards on being terrorized. When a mentally ill man
shoots up a school, then everyone is obligated to be terrorized all the
time. Children can be seized for chewing a pop tart the wrong way and
the leading leaders tow around selected parents of victims to demand
that the pesky Bill of Rights take a back seat to a special moral
superiority vote from a former Democratic member of congress whose great
achievement in life was getting shot in the head by another mental
patient.
The next Adam Lanza is just around the corner. But the next Tamerlan
Tsarnaev isn't worth bothering with. Gun control is an urgent issue, but
mass immigration from terrorist countries isn't.
Talk of refusing to be terrorized smacks of governments handing out
coping mechanisms for preventable acts of terror. And once we start
going down that road, it's worth remembering that the timeless coping
mechanism for that sort of thing is Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed the old
Stockholm cure is popular in the media which is already beginning to
disgorge explanations of alienation that will show that Tamerlan
Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn't kill on their own, we made them
killers by not showing them enough love.
It's not the role of governments to tell people how to get over a
terrorist attack. Nor is it the role of government to violate the Bill
of Rights using the act of a lone madman as a pretext. But it is the
role of government to stop an international campaign of terror by a
fanatical ideology from reaching these shores using the blunt tool of
immigration.
Refusing to be terrorized is as simple as refusing to accept more
immigrants from Muslim countries. It's not the least repressive measure
ever, but it beats interfering with the civil rights of hundreds of
millions of Americans who are not members of terrorist groups.
The difference between refusing to accept terrorism and refusing to feel
bad about terrorism is the difference between refusing to be terrorized
and refusing to pay attention to terrorism.
There is no need for Obama to play Therapist-in-Chief. It's not his job,
even if he is better at it than he is at his real job. His job isn't to
praise the attitudes of the people his administration put in danger by
refusing to give Tamerlan the boot even after warnings had come in that
he was involved with Islamic terrorism. It's to refuse to accept the
presence of terrorists in this country.
Obama obviously won't do that job. But neither did Bush. Unlike empty
paeans to courage by politicians with none of their own, that topic is
not even on the table. The terrorists will keep on coming and after each
new act of terror, the politicians who keep the door wide open for them
will praise the indomitable spirit of whichever city got targeted this
time around.
Americans don't need to be told that they have courage. It's a nice
topic for a speech, but an even better topic for a speech is, "How I
Spent My Summer Vacation Deporting Amateur Jihadists Who Claim Life
Under Infidel Rule is Torture." One is an empty compliment. The other is
a practical task.
A refusal to be terrorized should not be the task of the civilian
population. It only becomes the task of the civilian population when the
government is unwilling or unable to keep them safe. And then come the
speeches that say, but don't say, "The bad news is you're going to be
blown up, but the good news is you're going to be a good soldier about
it."
Muslim terrorism doesn't just happen. It's not random. It's not
inevitable. It's a known entity and it has a vector. When bird flu
breaks out, flights from affected countries are suspended, but when
Islamism breaks out in a country, then the planes keep flying and the
refugees get resettled and the infection spreads.
America will refuse to be terrorized when it refuses to admit terrorists
or potential terrorists into the country and when it begins
aggressively deporting terrorist sympathizers from its cities. Americans
will refuse to be terrorized when they demand a government that closes
the door to terrorists, instead of praising everyone for their courage
once the acts of terror happen.
Terrorism is a function of immigration. Terrorists do not come to this
country on parachutes or sneak in by boat. For the most part they arrive
here legally. They come through a door that our government opened and
keeps open as widely as it can because its allied institutions profit
from the traffic. It is more important for the government to keep
colleges in the Middle East student business and to keep Democrats in
the new minorities business than it is to refuse to allow this country
to be terrorized.
We
refused to be terrorized after September 11. We went shopping. We got
back in the stock market. We fought two wars whose prime purposes was to
get two Muslim countries to be able to vote for their leaders. And here
we are again facing the same thing all over again. Except this time we
get to trade Iraq for Syria and Boston for New York.
While we refuse to be terrorized, those who insist on terrorizing us
continue swarming into this country. A hundred Muslim nations have sent
their progeny to live their tortured lives here, until they grow tired
of infidel rule and decide to do what they do back home. Kill. And then
we once again can refuse to be terrorized at an interfaith service in
which the clergy of the murderers stand side by side with the clergy of
the murdered.
The day may come when we finally refuse to be terrorized. They will not
do it by going back to do their part for the next shopping season, the
next interfaith service and the next healing speech. They will refuse to
be terrorized by closing the door on terrorism for good.
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