President Bush gave one of the most important speeches of his career yesterday. He finally addressed head-on the real issues regarding the War on Terror. One of the problems I've had with the War on Terror is the suppression of the facts surrounding terrorists for the sake of political correctness. Specifically, any connections to Islam have gone largely unmentioned in briefings and the press seems reluctant to bring it up, too. This is a mistake that has led to a great public misunderstanding about the nature of the threat. I want to focus on two parts of the speech. The first is the President finally pointed out the stated goals of the radical Islamic terrorists:
The militants believe that controlling one country [Iraq] will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.
This "stated agenda" is something I've been reading about for years now. From Mecca to London to Detroit, many Muslim leaders and are preaching world control by an Islamic theocracy. To read it for yourself you only need to perform a Google search; it's incredible what radical Muslims are willing to publish for the world to see. I would argue that after 9/11, there is no excuse for not taking these threats and promises seriously. It may seem impossible to fathom that there are people in the world who seriously think they can take over the world. We are so desensitized to such ideas that world-power hungry villains in movies are portrayed as crazy and cartoon evil. Like the villains of James Bond, the Islamic terrorists have told everybody what their plans are but we aren't listening because we think that it's just the rhetoric of a few wild-eyed nuts. In reality, this is no movie and they kill people to prove to the world they are serious.
The next part of Bush's speech I thought was most important was his description of the culture of Islamic terrorism.
Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others. The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution. They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and women, recruiting them through radical mosques as the pawns of terror.
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Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers — and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.
This is a cultural problem for Western society and is the very reason the terrorists are able to do so much damage. They are using Western sympathy against us and their own misery to recruit the miserable. Anybody can say anything in front of a camera. Anybody can put up a Web site with a twisted history. Here is the problem, it is up to an aware and thinking culture to separate fact from fiction and not buy into lies and blame when it comes to people who would rather kill school teachers than contribute to a new constitution. Yet there are those in Western culture who blame Western countries for perpetrating the violence. In many cases, these Westerners have heard "We are doing this because of the foreign policies of the United States" so many times they think it must be true. It's sickening to hear these terrorists compared to the Minute Men of the American Revolution. The American Minute Men never gunned down fleeing school children as happened in Bezlan.
The sad part of this is that terrorism is working. Terrorist-sponsoring countries sit in key positions in the United Nations and nobody protests. Israel retaliates after Palestinian terrorists attack and the UN rebukes Israel. Muslims in African countries can burn Christian churches and murder Christians without consequence. The Spanish government reverses its support for the United States in Iraq after terrorists bomb a train station. How many terrorists has Israel released to try and appease Palestinians? The point is that there is so much given to the terrorists to keep them from killing and they want more. With each capitulation comes another demand; the cycle never ends.
Just like violence, the terrorists have also figured out how to threaten with lawsuits and public outrage as a means to have radio show hosts fired, reporters discredited, and political fallout generated. They have connections to political correctness groups like CAIR, who is more concerned with publicizing outrage over what should be free speech than actually condemning real terrorism to combat negative Islamic stereotypes. The terrorists also produce propaganda videos with injured children and distribute those videos over the Internet. They have also made connections with reporters and photographers to ensure their messages are seen and heard. None of these tactics would work against a united people.
President Bush has done more than any previous President to attack terrorism. However, much more needs to be done in terms of public awareness. I think the media has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to covering Islamic radicals in the holiest of Muslim places. They certainly are unbalanced when it comes to their horror and outrage over the supposed Koran in the toilet in Guantanamo while there is nothing about the burning churches in Africa or more recently the desecration of the Synagogs in Gaza after the Israelis pulled out. The D.C. sniper, John Mohammad, was never presented as a Muslim and no investigative piece was published about his connection to Islam in the U.S. The point is the media must take responsibility for accurate reporting and actually conducting research rather than just reformatting AP wire stories.
Western culture can be manipulated and the sooner we see that, the sooner we can actually combat the terrorists with a much more effective strategy.
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Long Way From Home by The Heavy