Sultan Knish
(The following is an adaptation of a talk that I recently gave.)
Every
act of violence has two sides. The side of those who carry it and the
side of those who let it happen.
When a burglar breaks into a home and kills two people, we don't just
discuss what made him do it, but why it was allowed to happen.
That's a conversation we rarely have about terrorism. The left wants us
to talk about terrorism as a reaction to something that we as a society
or a nation did. It doesn't want to talk about how it smoothes the way
for terrorists to do what they do.
The left has a long history of being soft on crime and empowering
criminals because it rejects the idea that society is good and criminals
are bad. Instead it flips the equation around. Criminals are good
because society is bad.
The man with a house full of stuff is bad for keeping it from the burglar who just wants to have some of the good life.
Now America is bad. It's bad for wanting to have the good life. It's bad
for wanting to protect its own people. It's privileged. And to the
left, privileged is the dirtiest word it can think of. The left will put
on NEA sponsored plays full of every possible obscenity, but privilege
is what it considers a really dirty word.
The left doesn't accept the basic parameters of our society. It doesn't
accept that if you buy a house, it's yours. It doesn't accept that if
you work 100 hours for 10 dollars an hour that you're entitled to a
thousand dollars. It doesn't believe that you built anything.
And so it doesn't accept the idea that stealing or killing is wrong.
The left doesn't accept that the United States has a right to safe and
secure borders. It doesn't accept that when it comes to immigration
policy or to terrorism.
The left doesn't accept that the United States has a right to exist.
This is where the left finds common ground with Islamic terrorists.
Islamic terrorists and the left both agree that the United States is an
immoral society. They agree that the United States must be fundamentally
transformed.
They just disagree on what it needs to be transformed into.
The left does not believe that violence is an illegitimate means of
political change. If it did, you wouldn't see those Che shirts and the
Haymarket bombers wouldn't have their own memorial in Chicago.
The left believes that there are two kinds of political violence; legitimate and illegitimate.
The difference between the two isn't about soldiers and civilians or
about the scale. The Soviet Union killed huge amounts of innocent
people. Bill Ayers was thinking in terms of killing millions.
It's about the ideology.
The left divides political violence into the illegitimate violence of
the oppressors and the legitimate violence of the oppressed.
The violence of the oppressors is the violence of people who have homes
that they want to keep. The violence of the oppressed is the violence of
the burglars.
The left will ruthlessly suppress what it calls the violence of the
oppressors, but it will make excuses for and even collaborate in the
violence of the oppressed.
When it comes to the violence of the oppressors, the left will say that
we need to use every possible means to stamp it out and destroy the
mindset that makes it possible. We need to open reeducation camps, drag
people out of their homes in the middle of the night and lock them up
for believing the wrong thing.
But when it comes to the violence of the oppressed, the left will make
excuses. It will say this young fellow had a bad life. He had some
setbacks. He couldn't succeed as a boxer. He picked up some PTSD at his
job. He was angry at American foreign policy.
He was one of the oppressed. And the left lies about and makes excuses
for the oppressed.
To the left, Islamic terrorism is the violence of the oppressed. It's
not the evil violence of the homeowner shooting a burglar, but the moral
violence of the burglar who just wants to redistribute some wealth.
Even moderate liberals don't want to deal with the reality of Muslim
violence because it ruins their multicultural paradise.
Muslim violence is the snake in their multicultural garden of eden. If
they admit that Muslim immigration is endangering the country, then they
have to rethink immigration. If they admit that there is something
wrong with at least some forms of Islam, then they have to question
their belief that all cultures are good... except Western culture.
And so the left picks up the encyclopedia of Muslim violence and puts it
on a very familiar shelf. It's the same shelf that they began putting
crime on in the 60s and 70s.
Don't fight crime. Fight the root causes of crime. Fight poverty. Fight
neglect. Fight inequality. Spend billions to fight poverty in the Muslim
world. Fight Islamophobia in America. Do all the other soft on crime
stuff that nearly destroyed most American cities.
And most of all... deny that there is a problem.
Liberals or leftists don't see Islam for what it is. They see it for what they want it to be.
They see it as the burglar trying to break into Uncle Sam's house. They
don't want to talk about how to stop the burglar. They want to talk
about how to make the burglar feel better about himself.
And so they tell NASA that its prime directive is to make burglars feel better about themselves.
And the thing that makes burglars feel bad is to be associated with
crime. Instead the word goes out to emphasize that only a very tiny
minority of burglar extremists is associated with breaking into houses.
The rest just practice some form of moderate breaking and entering.
We have to recognize that all the breaking and entering comes from
legitimate grievances, not criminal intent. Deal with the grievances and
there will be no more burglaries so long as we don't make the burglars
feel like criminals.
If we don't believe they're burglars, they won't be burglars, the ostrich says.
If we don't recognize terrorism, then terrorism won't recognize us, the left says.
The left operates on this strange kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle. It believes that if we don't recognize that Islamic terrorism
exists, then Muslims will stop being terrorists.
If we stop calling Islamic terrorism, Islamic, then Muslims will stop
seeing Al Qaeda as Islamic. This is the actual argument that gets made
by liberal experts on terrorism over and over again.
If we stick our heads in the sand, the Muslim world will do it too.
That doesn't work. The Muslim world will not put on a blindfold just
because we put one on. Instead the blindfold makes it impossible for us
to recognize Islam as the connecting principle of the War on Terror.
What links a Major Nidal Hasan to a Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the next guy
plotting a terrorist attack? If you take Islam out of the equation then
there is no link. There is no motive. Just random acts of workplace
violence by failed boxers and army doctors.
Terrorism denial takes motive out of the equation. There is no longer a
motive. Just senseless violence. And without motive, you can't profile
or predict. Without motive, narrowing down suspects becomes very
difficult.
If the Boston bombers hadn't struck at a public event in an age where
everyone totes their own smartphones, how much time would law
enforcement have spent chasing the Tea Party tax protesters that the
establishment wanted them to find?v
Would the terrorists have been able to buy enough time to make it to New
York City and carry out the next phase of their plan while law
enforcement was knocking on the doors of people who are angry about
paying too many taxes to subsidize the likes of Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
Why was Tamerlan Tsarnaev given a pass despite his history of violence and interest in Jihad?
Because there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism. Just anger over
foreign policy. As a Chechen, it was assumed that Tamerlan was angry
about Russian foreign policy. And this isn't Russia. So there was no
problem.
Islam was the missing link. Without Islam, there was no reason for
Tamerlan Tsarnaev to carry out an attack in Boston rather than Moscow.
With Islam there was every reason for him to fight on the front that he
was most familiar with.
There is a reason the burglar got in the house, killed 4 people and
wounded many more. It's because we refused to recognize what motivates
him.
A Chechen Muslim Jihadist, like a Mali Muslim Jihadist and a Syrian
Muslim Jihadist and a Taliban Jihadist fights locally, but thinks
globally.
We didn't deal with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in time because we thought
it was a local problem. What do the Taliban have to do with New York or
Washington?
What does Chechnya have to do with Boston?
There is no such thing as purely local Islamic terrorism. Islam is transnational.
An Islamic terrorist anywhere is a potential threat everywhere. Bring
him to America, let him into the country and he is a threat right here,
the same way that a Communist was a threat to any country he ended up
in.
Understanding that is the key to fighting Islamic terrorism. But the media and the political
establishment insist that we go deeper into denial after every terrorist
attack. Stick our heads deeper in the sand and maybe whatever is trying
to eat us will stop being angry and go away.
Terrorism denial is the biggest threat to America. The terrorists alone
can't destroy us. Not even if they detonate a weapon of mass destruction
on American soil. But pretending that they don't exist, can give them
the time to get big enough.
It takes two parties to break into a home. The burglar and a society that accepts crime as normal or misunderstood.
When it comes to terrorism, most Western countries have taken the
attitude that terrorists are misunderstood. And that's true. Terrorists
are misunderstood and they are the ones who refuse to understand them.
Muslim terrorists are not suffering from too many blows to the head or
some sort of secondhand PTSD. They have a purpose. Terrorism denial
ignores that purposes and makes it easier for them to carry out their
crimes and win.
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