Did We Really Overreact to 9/11?
Fareed Zakaria has written a very strange piece for Newsweek, asserting, amongst other things, that the United States overreacted to the 9/11 attacks. Zakaria’s usually way off — read his views on Iran — but these new and particularly bizarre claims deserve a response. His article begins:
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
Notice the sleight of hand. Zakaria whitewashes radical Islam and its international network spawn, and reduces al-Qaeda to a few hundred cave-hoppers bowing around Waziristan. The reality is more multifaceted: “al-Qaeda” is the head of the jihadi snake, the epicenter of the global Islamist insurrection. It has offshoots in Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines –– and perhaps forty other countries. And that’s just “al-Qaeda.” There are many terror groups.
No attacks in Europe? The Madrid attacks and London bombings immediately come to mind. In the United States, there was the Long Island convert who tried to blow up Penn Station. An al-Qaedist in Arkansas attacked a military recruitment center in Little Rock, killing an American soldier. An Islamist in Illinois tried to take down a federal building in Springfield. A jihadi from Chicago set his sights on a Danish newspaper and assisted the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks. An Afghan national targeted Manhattan landmarks. A Jordanian national tried to topple a Dallas skyscraper. There was the massacre at Fort Hood. And this was just last year.
The “troubled young man” that tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day was trained in an al-Qaeda camp in Yemen. He would have killed nearly 300 people had it not been for passenger heroics. In May, a Pakistani-trained al-Qaedist tried to set off a bomb in Times Square, the most densely packed area in Manhattan. He failed, but had he succeeded the carnage would have trumped the Oklahoma City bombing. I was in Times Square that afternoon. Had the detonation gone off properly, giant shards of glass from the surrounding buildings — dozens and dozens of stories worth — would have plummeted to the streets, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands.
And around the world? Last week alone, there were more than 300 casualties in Lahore, Pakistan; there were more than 200 in Quetta. In Sudan, al-Qaeda-linked Islamists murdered 74 people. Sixteen people were killed in Baghdad, four in Mosul, three in Yemen, two in Tajikistan, and one apiece in Thailand and Azerbaijan. Next week beckons.
Zakaria would retort that not all of these attacks were the work of “al-Qaeda.” But then what is he trying to say? Is he suggesting we shouldn’t consider Salafist-inspired terrorism to be part and parcel of the same struggle? Is he implying Osama bin Laden himself hasn’t successfully sat down and mapped out a specific attack — and therefore al Qaeda’s “simply not that deadly a threat”?
Zakaria goes on:
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
First of all, the claim that the United States routinely exaggerates the strength of its enemies couldn’t be further from the truth. Did the United States “exaggerate” al-Qaeda’s capabilities during the 1990s? Our embassies, our warships, our hotels, our allies, even the World Trade Center itself — al-Qaeda launched attacks on all of these targets throughout the 1990s, and what did we do? We drafted letters of indictment. As the 9/11 Commission Report explains, they were at war with us; we weren’t at war with them. On national security issue after issue, the United States — particularly our intelligence community — has a long history of being behind the ball. We did not foresee or anticipate the rise of al-Qaeda, the Iranian Revolution, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the Pakistani/Indian nuclear tests, or the Libyan, North Korean, and A.Q. Khan nuclear programs.
I’m really not sure whatever happened to Fareed Zakaria. Once upon a time, he wrote fairly sensibly. I’m not saying I agreed with him always (I can’t say that about anyone, really), but I did get insights from him. For example, his book The Future of Freedom was excellent, and gave great perspective on the state of democracy in America and abroad.
These days, he’s fallen apart. One of the last straws for me was the article in which he seemingly endorsed candidate Obama largely on the grounds that he had a foreign name, and therefore Zakaria could point to him as a sign to his own son that he, too, could grow up to be president.
Casting your vote as a vanity project on what makes you feel good about yourself? That explains a whole lot of our problems these days.
I’m wondering which he considers the largest/hurtful event…the twin towers deaths or the burning of a few koran books. If I were close i’d join in…I may burn my own, if I had one.
what a joke. We need to quit being afraid of these people and call a spade a spade. They grow stronger as we back up and up and up….
Abi,
You could buy a Koran, Quaran, whatever and then burn it (Think ‘Piss Jesus’ art for comfort, Think atheist proseltysers, it will make you feel better). Hmmm, Maybe everyone should buy and burn, but not sure that is a great idea. Certainly we and the world need to stand up to the 10% of Muslims (let’s see thats about 150,000,000 people who are nut jobs) or is it 3% (maybe only 1% that would be 15,000,000. Oh and how many born agains are blowing up stuff, I don’t know), I can never remember those Islamist numbers cause they are so big and scary and stupid wackos or was that Waco. Don’t know.
The article by Zakaria was over the top. I will NEVER again read anything he writes and in the past I have on a regular basis (he joins Paul Krugman on my no read list as I have nothing to learn from either now, they are fools). This showed with gusto how little intelligence and insight he has. What a fool and I do not suffer fools lightly. Isn’t that what the elites say. I think so.
Thanks.
There’s not much mystery about him. Since Progressivism is, at bottom, generated by a loathing for everything that sustains human life, few can keep up a pretense of calm reasonableness for a long period. They tend naturally to degrade to open Luddites, eco-radicals, anti-science/anti-Western medicine loons, etc.
It’s the nature of the beast because theirs is a bestial philosophy.
His mask slips….
Nice article.
Whoever bought Newsweek for $1 obviously over-paid.
Totally agree
It was $1 plus the debt–and THAT was the overpayment. Too bad the debtors didn’t take a bath!
Fareed Zakaria continues to whitewash the evil of jihadism. Taking apart his position with such careful and thorough writing is actually more than his position deserves.
Someone who thinks jail is too much for a murderer who has vowed to keep on killing is not worth the time of day, let alone whatever the MSM pays Zakaria.
Question is why does he whitewash it? It appears that Muslim-Americans concerned about being excluded from the US and from the media elites have seized on Obama as a kind of stick with which to beat the primitive masses. Yet conservative sites such as this have deeper articles and far superior talkbacks (depth, ideas, logic) than the liberal sites. Well, that’s the other part of Fareed’s Frenzy – subterranean awareness that Obama-ism and the Democratic Party are both in deep, potentially terminal political trouble.
I think that circulation is so bad at far-left publications that they have to say some really strange and dumb things just to get people to pay attention to them. Pity, because all they do is give our enemies more propaganda to use against us in the Muslim world. Now radical Islamists can go back to their friends and say, “See, even writers in a mainstream American publication thinks that America is overreacting to al Qaeda and the jihadist threat.” Then, after they stop laughing, they’ll go back to their terrorist activities.
Bunk. Americans have not only answered in an appropriate and level-headed way, but in some ways we’ve been our own enemies in the War on Terror. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, many Japanese-American citizens were actually rounded up in this country and placed in relocation camps (some would say “concentration” camps, although they were nothing like the ones found in Europe). That didn’t happen after 9/11. Nothing, not even any major hate-crime attacks against Muslim Americans, which shows you that Americans in general are a decent and just people who can separate the average Muslim from the Islamic terrorist.
If anything, the far-left in this country are the ones who overreacted to the events following 9/11. They made huge stinks over “warrentless wiretaps,” tracking the bank accounts of terrorists, and our treatment of terrorists who had been captured after 9/11. Let me repeat that, they were angry over our treatment of known and admitted killers after they were captured after 9/11. As far as I can tell, no innocent person has ever been waterboarded and I believe that out of the hundreds of terrorists captured after 9/11, only one man was held by accident and then released. He was also paid a major settlement because he was held for about two weeks. That’s not a bad track record for all of the arrests made in almost nine years after the attack.
As for the “warrentless wiretaps” and checking of bank records, I really have no problems with checking the personal information of people who are NOT citizens living either in this country or overseas. You still need a court order to get information on an AMERICAN citizen, as well you should, and if you don’t have that court order you can’t use any information obtained illegally in a trial. So the FBI knows that, if they want a case to stick against an American citizen, they need to follow the law. And, contrary to what the far left says, you still cannot hold an American citizen indefinitely without officially charging him or her. How long before they actually come to trial is a different matter, but if you are an American citizen you’re either charged with a crime or released. All of the people at Guantanamo Bay are NOT American Citizens.
So, to the best of my knowledge, the only people who overreacted to 9/11 was the far-left, like Mr. Zakaria. As for the rest of us, we know who the enemy is and we know how to deal with them.
According to Reynolds V. US, 1878, the act of promoting Sharia Law for the United States is illegal.
Neat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._United_States
…thanks for that link….but I didn’t see anything on that web page about Sharia…what I read there was the anti-bigamy decision of 1878 involving a Mormon in Utah….unless you mean to extend the “bigamy” concept to include the multi-wives of Muslim/Islamic adherents. America in 1878 surely didn’t have an Islamic problem…did it?
I’d welcome corrections to my reading of this…..I’m ever alert to see the hypocrisy of Islam/Muslim thinking exposed; moreover, I wish here to see more mention and discussion of that slippery Muslim/Islamic concept of Taqiyya/Kitman…we Americans need to be alerted to this Arabic/Asian way of thinking…it’s so very alien to this American, at any rate.
True, there has not been another spectacular 9/11-style attack. Who knows if that is because of Al Qaeda’s ineptitude, US anti-terror efforts or dumb luck? Certainly it’s not for lack of trying on the part of Al Qaeda.
Zakaria is correct that we should be concerned about Al Qaeda’s intentions, but he is mistaken in dismissing their capability, because this could change overnight should they aquire the high-tech weapons they seek. And as we’ve seen, even low-tech weapons (box cutters) in the hands of determined fanatics can be devastating.
And of course, sometimes American journalists will do the work of terrorists. In Afghanistan, the Taliban wanted to take out Gen Stanley McChrystal, but they didn’t have to. Rolling Stone Magazine did it for them just as effectively as any suicide bomber or IED.
Did We Really Overreact to 9/11?
The answer is a resounding “Yes!”
We began with the overreaction of calling Islam a religion of peace knowing full well that it is not.
Right after 911 we overreacted by screwing around for over one year trying to appease the gutless liberals and United Nations when we should have instantly responded against all of the terrorist harboring countries with devastating force.
We are still overreacting now by trying to chit-chat with a bunch of crazies that are completely obsessed with destroying America, wiping Israel off the map and dominating the world.
The most insane overreaction is pausing to ask ourselves if we overreacted. That kind of thinking has no place in the minds nor strategies of anyone that seriously intends to stop radical Islamic terrorism.
Americans need to pull their heads out of their rear ends before they sit down and break their fool necks.
Amen, GS, once again we allowed our misplaced sensitivity and self-doubt, even in the wake of a unforgivable attack on US civilians, to occlude our path of rightful action. We worried and fretted and went about wringing our hands for the whole world to see while we begged and asked and persuaded for the permission to take care of business. And now we publicly debate the minimal course we did take, endlessly making films and writing essays criticizing our “overreaction.”
We need a great deal more of the Roman, and a great deal less of the self-loathing Christian.
Is Christianity a religion of peace?
Past – and current – misdeeds committed by Christians do not make for moral equivalence. Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and Christians are not chopping off heads and flying airliners into skyscrapers. The real criminals and mass murderers were Communists and Nazis.
Beneath every whiny, crybaby leftist, whose demented moral compass compels him to lie down and be run over in the name of tolerance or equality, is a grab-bag of Christian moralists and Jewish socialists. A Roman would find our entire moral outlook utterly bizarre and entirely unthinkable. Christians used to put their religion in the closet to get things done in the big, bad world, but an ugly strain of Christian self-mutilation has affixed itself to the body politic and now wants to express itself by committing public suicide. You want some names? John Sloane Coffin, JS Spong, Rowan Williams, Daniel Berrigan, and Michael Lerner and the entire cast of sissies associated with his magazine, Tikkun, off the top of my head.
I know, that as a leftist troll, you probably find these crybabies among the high-priests of the modern religious elite; the truth is, their lunacy will get us all killed.
Islam calls itself the religion of peace because the tradition is to mercilessly torment non-muslims until they finally convert. Then — and only then — are they allowed to live in peace. That’s why they call themselves the religion of peace.
Ask a Zoroastrian. Or look at photos of “traditional” Zoroastrian houses in Iran: they look like dark heavy forts because they ARE forts for self-defense against those who will not let them live in peace.
They also call themselves The Religion of Dominance, and I’m sure you can guess why.
I could cite you over 100 passages in the Koran that counsel violence or deceit against “the unbeliever.” There are even more such in the Sunnah and the ahadith. You find me one statement from Jesus of Nazareth that counsels violence or deceit against anyone. Then we can talk.
I stopped shot of calling the Catholic church the whore of Revelation. I leave that to Hagee and his chum Beck. But you don’t care about such . . . inconsistencies. By your method of indicting Islam, you must share a similar view of the Jews. Why do you hate the Jews?
I asked a simple question – Is Christianity a religion of peace? While no one could muster the intestinal fortitude to answer, the tenor of the responses provides ample proof that Christians are not peaceful. And since people are more important than institutions, well . . . you know.
If Jesus were to plop right down here in his pajamas, he would side with the me and rebuke you. True. Sorry, but, hey, I understand the man. He’s inclusive. You’re exclusive. He’s forgiving. You’re vengeful. He’s compassionate. You’re judgmental. Don’t take it personally. Truth is an acquired taste.
Betty has posted numerous long diatribes here and there which are exclusively cut&pastes of Democratic / liberal talking points. Without exception s/he has been hooted off the page, pointed at, and snickered about.
So the new tactic is to post a short enigmatic question which is, evidently, supposed to be thought-provoking. I have noticed before that this question-in-place-of-a-comment is a favorite tactic of Arabs. It’s a good way of trying to put a spoke in the wheel without demonstrating one’s own personal ignorance.
Therefore and thusly, my latest Official Scientific Theory is that Betty is an Arab plant, as well as a fervent but uninformed Obamaniac. S/he may even be on the staff of which-ever Sand Prince donated (illegal) millions of dollars via the internet to help B. Hussein buy his Presidency.
It’s not really a new tactic. The inane off topic question tactic is a favorite of his. Betty is a troll who has used many names on PJM. He/she – just say he and be done with that – is a rather stupid piece of work and an inveterate liar. He’s banned by most PJM authors, more all the time. He changes his posting name once he is getting ignored on the threads he can post in to get people to again respond to his nonsense. Since I expect banning is done by IP, changing the name doesn’t overcome that and he appears in fewer and fewer threads over time.
Think about what sort of pitiable life someone like that must lead when getting the sort of derisive attention he gets here keeps drawing him back.
What’s telling is not the question itself but your inability to answer it.
No. You’re focus challenged as well as identity challenged. What’s telling is the fact that you think you made any sort of point other than what the other responders picked up on immediately without yet connecting you to your past history and style. That it was an inane question and you are an utter jack&$$ for asking it in this thread given the point and subject of the article. However, I don’t think you can help yourself from projecting that image and probably always will.
But it’s attention that you crave, and you got a little bit. You’ll take it, derisive though it is, because it’s something anyway.
Pitiable as I said.
I must be mistaken. I did not think Christianity was the subject of this thread.
Very lame try at moral equivalency — I would suggest going back to the drawing board. Your angle of attack here is not only weak, but fairly moth eaten and thus ineffective.
Well said.
The cravenly cowardly psychopathologically-hesperophobic Islamanzis’ atrocities of September 11 2001 warranted an immediate massive nuclear response, targeted on the center of the scull of Osama bin Laden. And, given the birth places of most of the mass murderers? Mecca should also have been converted into a glass reflecting pool.
Tom Hanks:
“This Could work” and then he built a raft with a tin sail (or was it plastic). Sail away, Sail away.
Brian, you are correct. It will come to this. I predict the first NUKE will not be fired by the West. I predict the retaliation will be hell for everyone. I am NOT advocating this in anyway, but predicting that Human Nature will prevail and nobody is going to stop it. Get a grip World. We haven’t changed. Look at history and you will know. Thanks.
Al-Qai’da is weak, but its hand is strengthened because of the divided will the West has about all of this. Our leftists, who control the schools and media, insist that it’s all our fault, while the rest of us think they are out to rule us. These two opinions lead to two opposed strategies. If you believe it’s all our fault, then you try to show them that you aren’t an enemy. You hug them. If you think they are trying to rule us, then the last thing you want to do is hug them. As a result of the dominance of the left in our culture, we can’t have racial profiling on our planes. We can’t simply go to the Middle East and fight the way we think is effective, because our media will organize huge demonstrations. And we can’t prevent a mosque from being built near the site of 9/11.
I look back on our country after Pearl Harbor and marvel at how unified it all seemed, though maybe that is just ignorance of history on my part.
We were similarly unified after 9/11 – for about a week.
We did not overreact. Maybe we should have gone in earlier and not told ‘em we were coming!! Covert wins every time. But not us. Heck, we’re going in next tuesday at 3 pm and leaving next friday at 7 pm..
I don’t think we overreacted, I do think we did not act like we could have in order to win.
Covert, again…Revenge is a dish best served ice cold..
America has been made weak.
We think everyone has to play nice and according to the rules we bring to the playground..you know, walk in formation, wait ’til the other guy shoots you dead, etc. Now play nice boys and girls, no kicking!!, I’m gonna report you for hiding!!!
There are no rules in the middle east, we need to quit acting like we’re dominate and accept the fact that they’re beating the hell out of our men because of the armchair quarterbacks we have directing things. This is not a game of chess.
One month after we leave there, it will be business as usual..a head will roll here, one there, 1500 over there etc.. I do not believe we have made a difference, except in our loses.
Fareed Zakaria is a Muslim. Sooner or later all Muslims support only Muslim positions. Fareed may be an American by citizenship but that does not mean anything. His first loyalty is to Islam and to Muslims and as such he will never support attacking any Muslim nation on this planet. Once we understand this, all his 20/20 hindsight’s holier than thou pronouncements can be explained. He can’t move away from the gravitational pull of Islam!!
BINGO the exact correct idea expresseed by Jaladi
I have often dialoged with so called moderate MUSLIMS and I always say if you scratch them, under the skin you will see they are SAME as radicals in the thinking–
I fully expected the small crazy group of Christians fringe group would be publicized worldwide- of course they get blame for MUSLIMS attacks and reactions but really MEDIA is responsible for giving the BIG STAGE to them-and no one says the TRUTH- MUSLIMS are responsible for their ACTIONS taken-
The same people who keep telling you not to paint all MUSLIMS as terrorists will be happy to SMEAR a large majority of citizens as bigots racists fundy evil bad bad stupid Amreicans — cabbie in NY? quickly buried- times sq bomber? same HAssan whitewashed- dead JEWS to prevent PEACE- NOTHING!! these stories di not fit their pre-written narrative- the mytht hey recite over and over like good like Goebbels
Zakaria may wish, or even hope, that these inhumane acts of terrorism can be toned down so that it eventually fades from our memories or even becomes just the sort of incidents that most folks just submit to as a necessary part of our existence,but he is wishing for something that cannot be here in the US.
My guess is that he does not understand Americans all that well.His plea falls on deaf ears as far as I am concerned. Those Americans who died and those who are still dying mean something to me.
Atta and the others who premeditate mass murders of non-combatant/innocent people (engaged in going to work and in saving and protecting those innocent lives )are the antithesis of natural love for our fellow man.They are mindless bots totally and irreversibly disconnected from humanity.
I don’t care how many beings are actually capable of such disassociation and mass murder but every means for rooting them out and stopping them needs to apply and continue to do so.
Okay so Zakaria is an Islamic jihadist apologist. Big woop. We knew that already. That Newsweek is anti-American is also not new news.
Other than that it was an informative commentary. And I appreciated your last sentence more than anything else you wrote.
Well, I would like an opportunity to say that I don’t give a damn what Fareed Zakaria has to say about the United States of America.
I’m sure he feels the same about you, as do I.
A very pertinent observation Tokyo Rose.
Actually I think Betty is Mulsim Molly…or Morty..got that head scarf on too tight babycakes!!
Zacharia got it all upside down. We didn’t react strong enough. No mosques that serve as breeding ground for jihadis have been closed, the immigration from the Muslim countries has continued unabated, and moderate Islamists like Imam Rauf are treated as genuine bridge-builders. In short, we still ignore the root causes of the problems we’re facing and refuse to accept the stark reality of the jihad declared against the West.
Declaration of Jihad is correct. I would specifically describe it as a renewed, intensified Jihad whose main operational base is Saudi Arabia. Meaning no respect to the maniacs running Iran, but it remains the Saudis who ‘educate’ their young people in Wahhabism, encourage gov’t ministers to instruct those young men to wage suicide bombing warfare in Iraq, export those young men to all sorts of Islamic-non-believer flashpoints and finance ideological Jihad through support and control of mosques and dawa on campuses and prisons throughout the West.
Thus the citizens of the West, through their avid devotion to a materialistic lifestyle and their inability or disinterest in forcing their politicians to solve the energy ‘crisis’ that is a byproduct of insistence on maintaining this lifestyle, dig their own graves.
You’re right that the headquarters of the Jihad are in Saudi Arabia and you’re also right about Iran. The Sunni Jihadis have widespread support and sympathy in Saudi Arabia while the Saudi establishment is doing its best to buy them off in order to save their own hides. The Iranian people, otoh, don’t seem to be too crazy about the Jihadi ideas and Jihad is fueled there by the Iranian establishment. That means we should use different tactics dealing with them. You’re also right that the best, easiest, and quickest way to defeat the Jihadis is to overcome our energy dependence on them. Thanks to the rigid Islamic culture, they’re incapable of sustained economical development and w/out petrodollars, they’ll go back to their god-forsaken deserts to fight with cobras and scorpions for the place in the shade.
The SUV and the F150 and similar vehicles are the jihadists’ greatest inanimate friends on the roads of Dar al-Harb. Each one is like a tiny point of light, or darkness, enabling the ‘spiritual’ power of Mecca. Full stop.
I like that, ‘Meaning no respect to the maniacs running Iran’. This whole question is simply bizarre, did we over react? Hardly, unless you count the whole ‘religion of peace’ thing and moderate Muslim meme that has been running out of our ‘leaders” mouths like water from a broken jug.
Thanks. I truly mean no respect to them nor to any Muslim political leader I can think of, save perhaps the late Sadat and the late King Hussein of Jordan. ‘Peaceful Islam’ exists because of the ‘requirements’ of gaining and/or retaining large amounts of wealth for Western leaders, and, for some of them, because of a concomitant and utterly arrogant presumption to be leaders of a ‘one world gov’t’ into which the Muslim financial powers are to be folded, like green pancake batter.
If anything, one could argue more plausibly that it was our under-reaction to Muslim provocations over thirty years that resulted in 9/11. Indeed, after assisting Afghan Muslims in their “jihad” against Russian colonialism, the pan Islamic ingrates decided to take the jihad to the “great Satan’s” home shores. Looks like a deterrent failure to me–the perception by Muslims that Americans are week, spoiled, decadent, and, being good “bottom line” Yankee traders, would not go crazy and over react, tit for tat, to 9/11. Indeed, managing Muslims means denying them stability and unity of purpose in their neighborhoods–like Americans did during their first foreign Barbary Wars, raiding the shores of Tripoli, marauding the Muslim pirate states with military reprisals that lasted, on and off, for thirty years. As I see it, some 18th century American barbarity in response to a 7th century Muslim mind set would go a long way to achieving some positive behavior modifications, reinforced with some corrosive ’60s style hippie hedonism, courtesy of the Peace Corp. I can just see all those moderate Muslims now, singing “Give peace a chance!”
Of course let’s all keep in mind that there are about 241 people in the world who actually READ this pitiful excuse for a weekly magazine. Bashing America is a favorite pastime of leftists everywhere…….especially by leftist imbeciles like the ones at Newsweek. At this late date is anybody really surprised by this kind of article?!!
Zacharia is a jihadi journalist working for The Muslim Brotherhood. And a disciple for Sharia. Just another liar in the masses that will probably make it to the top level of the Democrat Party.
Zakaria benefits from the fact that he looks and sounds smart, unlike the majority of us – you know – the unwashed American masses that don’t have foreign accents. Once reasonably sensible, he’s now no more than a shill for progressive causes, just like Paul Krugman. He’s not writing for the masses, he’s writing to and for the base, to help them justify their hypocritical and indefensible views. The only reason I read him these days is to see what’s on the mind of the crazed left.
Great. Another apologist.
Who here supports the burning of the koran? Is that overreacting?
Come on, don’t be sheepish (any more). Stand up and be counted. Don’t wait for your opinions to be tweeted by Palin. Speak your own mind. You won’t have long, because the Florida Vicar will soon be bribed to repent of his idea, showing that the right is willing to step back from an offensive intention, unlike the left and their Ground Zero Mosque. The fix is in, but don’t let that dissuade you from . . . whatever it is you people rely on instead of principles.
You should know that I plan to be in Florida for this auspicious event, and I will be tossing Bibles into the blaze at the same time, You’re cool with that though, right? Good.
Betty Crows: “..and I will be tossing Bibles into the blaze at the same time, You’re cool with that though, right? Good.”
I don’t believe I have read anything here that even hints that the Rev. and his mighty church of about 50 members (not counting, as is the Muslim practice, the women and small children) are doing the right thing by burning Curans. If I’m wrong, forgive me, oh gentle peace-maker of the intolerably nutty left.
I don’t have a problem with burning a Koran, or Mein Kamph, or the Bible, or anything that happens to get you off, including flags, draft cards, and bras. I do have a problem when the State, secular or theocratic, organizes the cross burning or subsidizes the Pisschrist with my tax dollars, and then makes my participation in the art of better living mandatory. However, I do think aborting a fetus because it doesn’t jive with your planned life style is a little over-reaction.
Burn whatever you want; I’m not in the least concerned if someone wants to burn bibles. The problem is, burning bibles is easy, I can see that boring faux-spectacle here in San Francisco on any given Sunday. Nothing ever comes from it. The Christians shrug and the ashes make a mess.
But try burning a Koran in public, go ahead, I dare you. The minute the Muslims find out, it’s going to be a very dangerous thing to do. Go ahead with you plan, shadow-boxing Betty. You’ve run around like every other pussy leftist pretending the Christian right is such a danger and you are so transgressive in your valiant fight against them (oh, brave little Betty atop the barricades), that you’ve lost all contact with reality. Have a big lefty bonfire in New York or Detroit or Washington DC and announce you will be burning all the religious books, including the Koran, in an act of enlightenment versus superstition and see what comes of it. We both know you will find one excuse after another not to do this. Why? Because I’ve got $100 that the Muslims figure out where all the ringleaders live, and make their displeasure known. I give the Muslim scum credit, they understand what needs to be done to get the leftist sissies off their back. Against constrained authority, lefties are really brave, but against a guy who has no tether against sawing your head off, well, you better stay away from them.
So Betty – you, like most leftist trolls jump right into the moral relativist bandwagon. You profess outrage at this political stunt by this Florida Church and then IN THE SAME BREATH publically, smugly and indignantly announce that you intend to do the same thing – just out of spite. Keep flapping your gums – you make the case against infantile little leftists than I ever could.
I do. In spades.
If anything, it’s an under-reaction, and long overdue.
I find it remarkable that you can even spell principles. You certainly don’t know what they are.
I expect the Christians on hand will pray for you. As long as you use your own Bibles, that is.
Francis “Spade” Palenta . . .
Yes, you’re overreacting. But hey, it’s obvious you support burning The Constitution too, since you know nothing about its intent. Burn away.
Actually, I fully support burning 1/2 of the Koran, and I would expect every so-called moderate Muslim to concur. Every Muslim theologian for over 1400 years has consistently supported the abrogation of all the live-and-let-live Mecca portions of the Koran by the barbaric aggressive Medina suras. However, it is those latter that moderates always blithely (without any theological basis) ignore, and therefore it is precisely those portions that should be burned, destroyed, and eradicated forever in order to bring Islam into the modern world.
Since moderate Muslims have so far been unwilling or unable to admit that at least half of their religion is an abomination, it therefore falls on the rest of us to do it for them. Burning the appropriate half of the Koran would be a logical first step in this process. Meanwhile, we must recognize the demopaths in our midst like Fareed and Betty, who so far have done their best to control the debate such that any truly useful distinctions between moderate Muslims and all the rest amount to no more than vague generalities that undermine the foundations of our society.
Personally, I’m totally good with the eye-for-an-eye, tit for tat solution. Every time some Arab burns an American flag, we should get together across America and burn a few Korans for the camera. Every time some cartoonist is impaled, burn a few Korans for the camera’s. We’ll let them have their mosque on Ground Zero, as long as they don’t object to a daily nooni-ish Koran burning across the street from its doors. Sounds absolutely fair (and very Islamic) to me.
I think we can strike a deal here. Tey get the mosque; you get to burn korans across the street. . . . and then . . . You get whine about people who say Happy Holidays, and we get to burn all the manger scenes.
Doner.
So Betty,
Can we strike a deal here. So when New York gets NUKED by your friends of the mosque and they blow everybody up and a bunch of Korans too boot, will you be on vacation in the mideast or at home whereever it is that is fartherest from New York. Please burn a bible and a copy of Richard Dawkins latest and why not the Torah, Upanishads, and whatever else is handy. I doubt you will get much of a rise out any of them, but certainly a nod and a shake to your ignorance.
Thanks.
Say, “all knowing Mary”, can you tell me if it is okay for Moslems to destroy Korans when they blow up people coming from worship at a Mosque?
At least the “Koran’s” don’t have to jump from the upper levels of the World Trade Center in
order to spare themselves from the pain of burning.
I remember the video the media doesn’t want to show anymore, the video of the poor souls deciding whether to jump or burn to death, and I conclude that there is no possibility of overreacting. These terrorists and their defenders and apologists are all outside the bounds of civilization.
The Germans are correct to make promotion of National Socialism a crime. The official doctrine of Islam is subjugation of all non-believers by force. That makes it as acceptable as the KKK. I don’t want to hear about moderate Muslims. Most of the people in the KKK didn’t actually lynch any blacks. They enabled or supported lynching, or allowed it to be done in their name.
Liberals sometimes remind me of people with alzheimers. They have the most selective memories..And they seem so much to live in the NOW that they cannot see the ramifications of their thoughts or how they got here.
But Zakaria is making a useful point………
Look – the question is – does AQ present an existential threat to the peoples, societies and governments of the Western developed nations? I would argue it does not….
that is not to say that individual acts of terorism are acceptable, or that they should not be met with robust response – up to an including full scale invasion to destroy their capacity to attack us. But are we going to “fall apart” because of these bozos? I think not. Indeed – most of the problems we face as a people going about our daily routine is down to the actions WE have taken in response – airline security, limits on fluids, bag checks at stadia and all the rest of it.
Your post reminds me a bit of an Indian-American travel agent I met last year. I was about to purchase a ticket to Israel from him, but changed my mind after he let it be known that Islam was not a threat because ‘Christianity had done the same thing’ and that Arafat was a great guy (he had met the Jihadist while working in Kuwait). I was not surprised by his ‘assessment’ that Israelis and Palestinians were ‘equally to blame.’ I did, however, walk out when he told me that the failure of the Indian military in preventing the then-recent Mumbai Jihad slaughter-fest placed full blame for the event on the Indian security forces. The actual murderers, rapists and torturers who carried out the event were not to blame, he explained. I am not saying you share the full extent of his views, but that’s the direction you’re headed with this explanation of things. True, the implementation of security could be far more effective at airports, but it is partly or mostly because of political correctness and the refusal to ‘profile’ likely killers.
It was true in the past, and it may be true in the present,
but it is certain to be false in the future; Technology has
already enabled Tom Clancy’s various scenarios, and sooner
or later, will enable Frank Herbert’s in ‘The White Plague’,
where one ‘Mad Scientist’ comes this close || to ending
human life on earth.
Most muslims come from centuries of inbreeding which to to this day still goes on (first cousins being married off via force). Pajamas media had an article on this very subject a couple of days ago that got pulled (I guess the “PC” police have no infiltrated PJM—YAY).
What we are dealing with (regarding muslims) is a very primitive, inbred, low-iq, backwards ‘culture’ of people who have little to no inkling about anything outside of a very narrow, Islamic-slanted way of life.
9/11 brought the third world to us. Now they want to breed and inbreed within our own borders and build their victory mosques and infiltrate our country to the point where we are constantly riddled with court cases of Sharia law vs. Constitutional law. Our country can’t afford this.
We need to rid our country of muslims like a dog needs a flea collar.
Morlocks/Muslims? Where is H.G. Wells to weigh in on this?
I support burning the flag, burning the bible, burning bras and burning the Koran but I refuse to burn live puppies and kittens. Sorry. Just-can’t-go-there.
Please! I’m getting tired of standing on my head in order to understand my own country.
There is some validity to ask the question about the lack of high profile terrorism since 9/11. There are just too many possibilities that would be trivial to carry off and nearly impossible to defend (I won’t give examples – not wanting to plant any ideas where they don’t exist already).
But you can imagine that – to the extent that this world network of potential terrorists can act rationally and in unison – that they would realize that another major attack would do way more harm than good to their cause. Why (once again) awaken the sleeping giant? They already have their “stirring” win for the early 20th century. Now they are letting it work and taking the more steady and subtle path to the spread of Islam and the toppling of the western cultures.
The best thing we can do for ourselves is to avoid the strangling growth of our own government that institutionalizes political correctness over common sense, the creeping socialism that is tailor made for hijacking by a movement like Islam and the resulting economic weakness that will eventually prevent us from doing anything about it. You can see this already happening in many European countries.
I meant to say “21st” century
Is someone paying Fareed Zakaria ?
How many individuals, how many newsrooms, how many newspapers, how many chairs of Islamic studies at US universities, having their views bent by enomous sums from dubious sources ?
Either way, Fareed, Mayor Bloomberg, Time magazine, CAIR, ISNA…and all the other propagandists and agendists…
We Really Don’t Care Anymore
Roast a nice suckling pig over those smoldering Qorans; Throw in a bible for some nice rich smoky flavor.
And for an International garnish, add diced flags of all muslim nations. [I'd advise not mincing a Constitution, because then Obama will want to attend.]
And when everyone’s ready to eat, recite the National Anthem, and salute the American Flag.
God bless us all! He’s about all we have left.
Here is a very well reasoned and written little piece on why we were not just attacked by Al-Quaeda 0n 9/11, but we were attacked by Islam (http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/27439).
We did overreact to September Eleven: we did in fact get scared and we elected a crypto-muslim and truly marxist president called Barak Hussein Obama.
Such reaction to an horrible act of violence is known as Stockholm Syndrome.
Of course here the “we” means: the democrats, the media, the universities.
It’s not clear if they will heal or if they will try to transform America into a shari’a state.
For now they are busy helping to build mosques at Ground Zero, so I would say that they are still pretty scared.
“And then to end it, Zakaria quotes James Madison to give us the contemporary libertarian view of needless Big Brother.”
Yeah, right. An Obama supporter complaining that government is too big.
I about died laughing reading his article.
Zakaria is a big fat hypocrite and a total idiot in the bargain.
“On national security issue after issue, the United States — particularly our intelligence community — has a long history of being behind the ball.”
So true. And there’s more.
Mark Riebling (author of “Wedge”) highlights several more in this review of a book about the CIA.
“…the Pentagon’s judgments about the world have generally proved sounder than the CIA’s. In the 1960s, the CIA said that the Soviets wouldn’t put missiles in Cuba; in the 1970s, that their missiles weren’t accurate; in the 1980s, that the missile budget wouldn’t bankrupt Moscow; and in the 1990s, that Russia’s democratic reforms were irreversible. In each case, the Pentagon argued the opposite case, and turned out to be right. Similarly, in the 1980s, the CIA said that the Soviets weren’t sponsoring terrorism, and then, in the 1990s, that Sunni and Shiite terrorists wouldn’t cooperate. In each case, again, the Pentagon rightly claimed otherwise.”
Litany of Blunders
Tim Weiner’s CIA history lifts the cover on a half century of intrigue.
Mark Riebling
5 October 2007
http://www.city-journal.org/html/rev2007-10-05mr.html
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities.
Right there Zakaria’s essay falls apart.
Any good intelligence analyst will tell you that, given a choice, knowing intentions is key. That knowing where or when or to what purpose an enemy is going to strike allows time for scenarios, preparation and pre-emption. That capabilities can be
constituted (or re-constituted) to match those intentions. It would be foolish in the extreme to assume otherwise, especially in this era of asymmetrical warfare. At least until, the saying goes, the last jihadi is strangled with the entrails of the last last Salafist preacher.
We know what al Quaeda plans are for unbelievers and apostates — we’ve seen the gruesome post-9/11 carnage in Madrid, Beslan, Bali and Samarra, to name a few. We know that we face an enemy so committed that they will murder their own at prayer. We know that they are “testing the fences” even now. We can only hope that policy-makers will ignore the accomodationist rhetoric of such
as Zakaria and keep up our guard.
The stories on this site always starts with good intentions and then get’s lost in partisan politics.
We did not overreact to 9/11, in fact we did not do anything of substance to actually address the problem. If the USA was serious about root causes of 9/11;
1) stop treating the House of Saud like our masters
The House of Saud (Ruling family of Saudi Arabia) has been funding Wahhabi schools that teach Islamic fundamentalism and hatred of America for over a hundred years. Everyone in the world knows this, especially Muslims. Yet our presidents hold their hands and bow to them at each meeting, its sickening. We may as well send US presidents in tutus and tights, curtsy to them in public. This goes back to president Nixon, so its both GOP and DEMO presidents kissing their butt.
Most of 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, but we invade Iraq..?? seriously. Give the House of Saud a well deserved wake up call
2) Stop allowing the CIA to run amok in the world and come up with cohesive plan that eliminates Taliban and Al Queda and every other terrorist organization in 5 years. It will require involvement of Russian and Chinese intelligence and special forces agencies, and it is in everyones best interest to do so. We require quick overwhelming strikes, if the Host nations do not want these strikes on their lands do not harbor terrorists.
3) Enforce strict rules at the onset; what evidence is required to warrant the death penalty, and then enforce it. If terrorist does not receive the death penalty, Send them to a Devils Island type incarceration. Not Gitmo, not anything remotely pleasant. They would be required to feed themselves, grow their own food, hunt whatever is on the Island. Or just drop them into the middle of Amazon forest, or the Sahara. Be done with it.
4) invest in human intelligence systems. Spy satellite and technology do not work with terrorists that don’t use technology.
5) stop playing politics with terrorists. We are paying Taliban CASH to allow food to be loaded and off loaded on Pakistan airports and docks, and have been for years. its ridiculous. If they dont want the food, fine, hungry citizens are angry citizens. Let Pakistanis decide which side they want to be on. We got French Fries.
6) Secure the friggin borders already. If i owe a long distance carrier money they will hunt me down like an animal, maybe we should give each illegal alien a phone with roaming charges, Let Verizon find them.
7) End the war on drugs, legalize individual use and end the farce already. Prohibition made fortunes for organized crime, and created massive criminal enterprise. Drugs are doing the same again, we are creating a massive criminal enterprise in Mexico, Italy, Columbia, etc, etc. We can use the money to catch terrorist, not potheads.
That was heroism, not heroics, on the part of the passengers. But otherwise a terrific column.
Zakaria was always trotted out as a responsible, moderate Muslim, a symbol of all the good, reasonable Muslims living in peace and harmony with western liberal democracy. But you always had to look wide and far for a guy like Zakaria, and I always suspected the case was oversold; the Muslims were not assimilating into western liberalism, but were simply putting up a good show of it for the leftist media (whose only purpose is to give normal, American culture a good kick in the teeth at every opportunity). Has the last moderate finally begun to drop the mask a little? Can we finally get on with the business of identifying who intends our Republic harm without carefully adjusting our language into knots trying not to offend or to generalize–even when the evidence all but begs is to do so as rational men? I’m finally sensing that Americans aren’t going to buy the attempt to sell Islam as a peaceful religion, happily coexisting with other beliefs.
It’s time to burn the Koran and let the chips fall where they may; if that’s all it takes to get whole cities full of Muslims to burn and shoot in the streets, howling for blood, what difference does it make if we fight them now or later, we’re going to fight them.
Overreaction? To my eternal shame, I remember calling the planners of the 1993 attack on the WTC “idiots”…”Ha, ha, ha, they actually thought they could knock down the WTC!” …or something like that. Unfortunately, when the jihadis say they want to do something, you’d better take it seriously. That is my personal takeaway, anyway.
What a stupid question. I expect the next idiot to ask if we overreacted to Pearl Harbor. The slaying of Davy Crockett and 188 at the Alamo. The Bataan Death March. Did the Jews overreact to the Holocaust.
Yeah, numb nuts, we overreacted to 9/11.
Just like the World Trade Center jumpers overreacted to the heat generated by the Muslim savages whose families should be whacked.
Hey, maybe that’s a real example of overreaction. Maybe the Muslims who tried to kill the Danes who ran the Muhammad cartoons should be whacked, too. Maybe somebody should punch Fareed Zakaria in the nose because of idiot articles he writes. Overreaction. How about nuking Iran.
Why are we wasting time on a publication, along with its columnists, that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on?
In answer to the title, I would say “I don’t believe we reacted enough”. There are multiple reasons for this, most of which have already been addressed (or exemplified).
To think that al Queda or any jihadist group does not still pose an existential threat is very foolish and dangerous.
Fareed Zakaria has already failed at both ABC and PBS. PBS: where even Bill Moyers made a fortune hawking his brand of socialism and liberal myopia.
I haven’t subscribed to NEWSPEAK since they spiked the story about a hick from Arkansas who stained a blue dress in the oval office, and made Matt Drudge the Horatio Alger of modern media. How can you trust what NEWSPEAK prints when you know they won’t print anything that might hurt the political agenda they support?
Just yesterday, I looked at the most recent issue of NEWSPEAK at the checkout counter. I’ve seen term papers that had more pages. And, its cover price was more than the husband of Rep. Jane Harmon (D) paid for the whole company!
So now, with viewers disappearing faster than mice from a sinking ship, CNN offers FZ to their football-impaired viewers on Sunday afternoons.
Anybody still have questions about CNN’s political agenda?
Conservatives overreact to EV.RY.THING.
WE ESPECIALLY FE.AR ALL CAPS AN.D BIZARRE PUNC.TU.ATION, right oh wise Betty Nose?
Minute increases in the concentration of a trace gas in the atmosphere are going to melt the planet and kill us all!!!!!!!!! Take all my money and freedom, divinity school-drop-out Al Gore — make a sacrifice to Gaia on my behalf!
Stupid, stupid conservatives and their alarmism.
You know who else is a divinity school dropout? Sean Hannity.
Zakaria tells us that President Bush has been missing the boat in the war on terror because he hasn’t focused on what victory in the war would really mean. After a lot of hemming and hawing, Fareed tells us what he means by victory: (1) being able to prevent the worst terrorist attacks (i.e., preventing a 9/11, but not a 7/07); and (2) improving our response capabilities to terrorist attacks after they occur (a favorite campaign plank of John Kerry’s, by the way). Thus Zakaria wants us not only to accept domestic suicide bombings as a regular, unavoidable fact of existence, but to see their regular occurence (in the absence of a 9/11 scale attack) as a sign that we have “won” the war on terror. Meanwhile, naturally, he suggests doing absolutely nothing about the vast Muslim populations within the West and the ongoing mass immigration of Muslims into the West. In fact, in an article for Newsweek following the rejection of the EU constitution by France and Netherlands, he urged an increase of Muslim immigration into Europe, plus the accession of the entire population of Turkey:
[W]hat Europe desperately needs is more of all the trends that are producing populist paranoia. It needs … more young immigrants to sustain its social market and a more strategic relationship with the Muslim world, which would be dramatically enhanced by Turkish membership in the EU.
Of course, Europe already has a disastrously close strategic relationship with the Muslim world, involving, on the European side, total European support for the Palestinian cause, unstinting European hostility to Israel, and the redefinition of European identity as equal parts European and Islamic, an arrangement Bat Ye’or has called “Eurabia,” and Zakaria wants this “strategic relationship,” which in fact represents the dhimmitude of the entire European continent, to get even stronger than it now is.
In sum, Fareed Zakaria, once a member of the neocon camp and now a star of the liberal mainstream media, is an apologist for Islam and for Muslim extremists (assuming there is any difference between the two), as well as an advocate for the demographic and cultural Islamization of Europe. These things should never be forgotten.
Look people, the “Anointed One” makes his chess move’s and us babbling humans need to realize that the unbelieving conspiracy “heathen” understate the issues when they say that Obama is a radical. Alas, they know not the secrets we are all going to witness. The “Anointed One” is amazing, he takes the people at the highly efficient Post Office and sends them right over to the Student Loan Program. The “Anointed One” knows all. Twitter messages were machine-gunned to cell phones at mach speed. Facebook and MySpace groups spread across the Internet like digital fire. YouTube videos featuring celebrities ricocheted across the globe and into college students’ in-boxes with devastating regularity. All the while, the Obama mega-money-raising engine whirred on at high speed, until the result became inevitable: an unthinking mass of young voters marched forward to elect the “Anointed One.”
I am not surprised to hear these stinking lies about our “Anointed One,” it should be apparent to anyone that this was coming down the pike. I do have a couple questions about future process steps concerning these developments? When the “Annointed One” decides to start bar-coding everyone, will we get to decide if the mark is on our hand or forehead? Allot of people will prefer the hand, (especially women of course), unless your a porn actress or something along those lines. Also, my girlfriend was wondering if the Administration will be getting fashion advice from Hollyweird or the New York City crowd? We are both agree that the Administration “Maoies” as the “Anointed One ” so lovingly calls them,will be getting uniforms similar to the SS uniforms in Germany in WW2. With big letters abreviating “Barack’s Socialists.” So shall we start calling them the BS?
We should have stuck with “You are either with us or against us,” after 9/11.
History shows Islam cannot be negotiated with.
First of all, they have no center of leadership. They never had one for Islam as a whole. No seat of religion or government that could be dealt with. The Ottoman Empire was the closest they ever came to any semblance of a center of government, and consider how they have carried on their battle against all other societies on the planet, that do not submit to them, since this time. Even when, at their pinnacle, when they spanned the entire continents of Europe and Asia, there was no central seat. Today there is Al Qaeda (The Base); But find it on a map.
Second, coming to some kind of peaceful agreement with any faction of Islam, means that faction has turned against allah, and Quranic tenets, and is treated as an internal enemy and traitor against all other factions.
You can whack one faction into submission, but the other factions go about their daily lives in their mosques, deliberately intent on finding weaknesses in the conquerers, and live to engage the conquerers in battle, until the end of days.
Today there is no Muhammad to bring to a bargaining table, who can speak for his ‘nation’, and accept any peace agreement of any kind.
The closest thing they have is a caliph, and no one can agree on who the caliph should be.
[See link:
http://wsu.edu/~dee/ISLAM/CALIPH.HTM
Even if there were a caliph and caliphate, it would not represent all factions of Islam.
The pendulum is swinging in the favor of Islam, at this time. But as time creates more power and freedom for the muslims, societies come to understand that they have to be dealt with in severity in order to bring their savage paganism to an acceptable level.
The mosque is where they can be brought to the realization that Western societies will not tolerate their barbarism.
Their mosque is like their pentagon. It has to be considered fair game, and severely limited to impress upon them that we will not accept their obstinacy.
It is the only method to successfully deal with the ‘us or them’ attitude that is spread through their DNA.
Burn baby burn.
Please, do not take Freak Zarkaria so seriously. He had his moment in the sun and it is gone. Now, he trying to somehow get it back with frankly absurd arguments like this that makes sense only to the loony left.
“Conservatives overreact to EV.RY.THING”
Ah.
I suppose in response to your pithy post, I should note, “Liberals can’t SPELL.”
Overreacted? Was Mecca a smoking, glowing ruin the next day? Was Tehran? Baghdad? Zakaria is either a complete fool or practicing taqqyia. Or both.
Betty:
Christianity does not bill itself as a religion of peace. Nor does it have injunctions to slaughter non-believers in its scripture. Its past has been far from perfect–I’ll grant you–but its goals are substantially different from those of Islam. I’d suggest you read the Koran and see for yourself, but you guys don’t really care about reality, do you?
If it had been up to me, you would have received a far better education, but it’s too late now.
I’ve read and studied all the major religious texts. Have you? Tell me, do you believe that everyone who disagrees with you ignorant? Because if you do . . . well, that’s ignorant. It’s all right there in the Bible . . . St. Bart’s Letter to the Keynesians 9:11.
“I’ve read and studied all the major religious texts.”
No, you haven’t.
Lefties don’t “read” and they certainly don’t “study”. If you did, you wouldn’t still blindly cling to an ideology that has brought more death and misery to humanity than Islam could ever hope to.
I don’t intend to step on anyone’s toes here. But unlike the columnist, I too felt at times that New Yorkers are, let’s say it in a nice way, too sensitive. Now, I’m not cheapening what happened. The casualty was immense, the tragedy too great that words can’t describe it. I too walked around dazed for days. The only difference is that, for three years prior, I’ve read about suicide attacks on a weekly at times daily basis. Where? In Israel. Only the casualty numbers of any single attack do not compare. But the cruelty and barbarism are horrid at times. Yes, people do mourn, suffer, and live with traumas for the rest of their lives. Yet, the Jews are a people accustomed to suffering. It’s in their psyche. And therefore, wouldn’t it be for their leaders would, if given the chance, aliminate their enemies once and for all. During the 06 war with Lebanon, I prayed that Israel would stop listening to the US, the world and finish the job with Hizbullah once and for all. Yet amidst all the suffering, kindness is shown to those that humanly speaking should be hated. The discourse from Jew to Arab is very different in Israel than from Arab to Jew in the rest of the Middle East. Wounded enemy combatants are treated with the same compassion and kindness as any IDF soldier or citizen would be treated based on the severity of their wounds. A Jew in an Arab hospital would be thrown out from the fifth floor while everyone cries “Allahu Akbar.” Yet, Israelis live their every day lives and are not cowed down by fear. That’s why, years after 9/11, it makes me wonder about American determination and chutzpah in the face of evil when I hear New Yorkers cry. Again, not to dishonor the loss of loved ones. It is the stemina that I’m afraid that we lack. What else can you expect from the above writer. People like Joseph Farah, a Christian Arab and chief editor of World Net Daily, Walid Shoebat, former terrorist turned Christian and a lover of Israel as well as Kamil Saleem all no this and they would never dream of making the same observations as the writer of this column does.
“Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat?”–Zakaria
Nah, of course not. We’re dealing with people who snuck into America, took a bunch of American children prisoner and then executed EVERY LAST CHILD they had captured by literally tearing them limb from limb (killing thousands of other innocent people along the way).
No big deal. Nothing to worry about.
We are? Did Steve Doocy tell you that?
Don’t worry about the “we” business. You aren’t part of “we”.
Exactly, I am not part of your we. I reject everything about your we. Your we is small and wrinkled and limp. Your we is narrow and repressed. Your we is perfectly suited to a big 4 wheel drive or maybe a Corvette.
“Your we is small and wrinkled”
Big enough to cruise round the world and beat the snot out of your Al Qaida and Baathist friends, troll.
And, there ain’t zip you can do about it.
So…choke on it.
The author said, “Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe.”
There have been multiple attacks, only the terrorists did not kill the large numbers they counted on. Low numbers do not make an attack any less despicable.
As for the ‘value’ of a target…. if YOU are included in the death toll, it was a high value target!
That our government & all around the world took action to limit the ability of bin Laden & his cadre of murderous thugs, seems to validate the very real fact he is dangerous. That he has been unable speaks well of our law enforcement efforts and of the magnificent efforts of our military to keep that cadre busy running from bullets & bombs.
My objection to the ‘logic’ the author implies, is that he & many others seem to think we should cower in fear, submit to examination to uncover our evilness, & allow ourselves to be slaughtered because its terrible to defend oneself.
You attack someone, you must expect they will respond. Come w/a knife, self defense justifies bringing a gun. Come w/a gun, self defense justifies bringing an F-16 &/or Cruise missile. We are under no obligation to submissively lay down & accept the judgment of murders & thugs pushing a cultish radical perverted form of a religion. Give up to terrorists while they insist America made their lives miserable. All along those same terrorists ignore the rulers of their own nations who build massive & numerous palaces & ultra fat bank account balances, and also trek to Europe & other destinations in the west to live the despicable high life of the west they refuse to allow their own citizens to enjoy.
These people are hypocrites & those who make excuses for them are abetting their terrorism. If “you” want to bow down on bended knee & take on some form of penance for imaginary &/or exaggerated wrongs, join Obama in his apology tours & prepare yourself for slavery. Me, I’ll fight & I suspect most Americans will once they realize we are the good guys who have been duped into thinking our way is wrong. Their way is wrong & the innocent dead prove it! We killed in self defense & I will always believe in it as a rational human response.
Now this guy, if there’s any doubt about the peaceful nature of Christianity, especially when it’s tied to good old American style patriotism, well, he’ll sure enough straighten you out and make it clear that his god and his gun are on the righteous side of life:
“An Arizona court has ruled that an order of protection against Minuteman co-founder Chris Simcox sought by his estranged wife as part of a messy divorce case be continued “in full force,” saying evidence shows that he committed an act of violence.
The petition, sought by Alena Simcox, alleges that Mr. Simcox threatened her and their children with a loaded handgun, saying he would kill them and any police officers who came to their aid. The order initially was signed April 16 and continued after a hearing Thursday in Superior Court in Phoenix.” (C&L)
Hallelujah, brother!
Betty Nose her butt from a hole in the ground. Barely.
Some may puzzle about the peaceful nature of those who claim Jesus as their Savior, but none need puzzle about th paaceful nature of those who claim Mohammad as their leader. Flags, Bibles, and Images are burned or stepped upon all over the world and most people who claim Jesus as their Savior do not threaten, riot, commit suicide, and murder over these stories, or even the hint of a rumor. And then we have the good soldiers of Mohammad beating and murdering for…well…who needs a reason…really!
Say Cheese!!!
http://www.emirates247.com/news/region/saudi-divorces-wife-over-cheese-sambosa-2010-09-09-1.289162
To market, to market!
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/95364/russian-caucasian-city-rocked-suicide.html
Happy Ramadan!!!
http://ibnlive.in.com/generalnewsfeed/news/21-killed-over-40-injured-in-suicide-attack-in-pak/300711.html
Go Mo! We got lefties rooting for ya!!!!!
So what would be the standard of measure we could use to see whether we didn’t overreact to 9/11? What level of terrorist attacks perpetrated on U.S. soil would indicate that our response (and, by extension, said hypothetical attacks) were “just right?”
A glint of tolerance:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-08/get-over-the-quran-burning/
I read the story and think she could only speak of it here in the United States where her speech is protected. If she were back in her home country the law would not be on her side. I also found it interesting that although she intimated about the brutality of Islam toward women, she hinted that it was better than before. It makes you wonder about the voices in their head making excuses for Mohammad the “final prophet”. She must not be able to think about the fact that Mohammad’s first wife was a wealthy businesswoman, or that there were wise women respected in the tribes who Mohammad saw fit to murder so they would not cause the people to question him.
This uncovering of the truth is a painful thing.
In my opinion, the only acceptable, successful response to 9/11 would have been a complete purging of Islam from our society…alas
We under-reacted. We will have to fight this war again and again, unless we are willing to totally destroy the enemy once and for all. There is no national consensus for such a war of annihilation, so the cycle will continue.
9/11 was just one more incident in Islam’s history of barbarism; 1400 years of barbarism.
Over-react? No way… we acted with civilized restraint, called them “peaceful” and searched for the needles in the haystacks, the elusive moderates. Now we know that these moderates do not exist, or are so infinitesimal as to be inconsequential.
Kill them all, destroy all the mosques, pulverize the minarets, and Yes, burn the Korans… in other words, a Holocaust of Biblical proportions. To take a page from their playbook; in 50 years time, we can deny that this Holocaust ever happened.
Well, I called it (post #20) . . . “the Florida Vicar will soon be bribed to repent of his idea, showing that the right is willing to step back from an offensive intention, unlike the left and their Ground Zero Mosque.”
Right on cue, we hear from Newt “Over the Desk” Gingrich that Rauf should “have the same courage and the same commitment to America” as Quran-burning pastor and take “an equally big step back”
Let me guess, that was just a lucky shot on my part. No one possesses the kind of political insight and character analysis required to predict such rhetoric. And yet . . . when it comes to filtering the miasma of conservative principles and Foxian spin, I am an undisputed master. Perhaps I should tweet that.
Meanwhile, being the Drudge acolytes you all are, you know by now that more good Christian churches are planning Koran burnings – good god-fearing people in the hallowed flyover states of Tennessee, Kansas, and Wyoming all set to grab their 15 minutes of fame by torching their own dignity and our American principles along with the holy book of more than a billion people.
So much for the “lone nutjob” excuse. Congratulations. You done graduated from tea baggers to full blown Nazis. And all it took was the opportunity to be on the TeeVee. (With any luck, right after the rerun of Walker Texas Ranger, you know the one where he karate chops the bad guys? You remember that episode? I think it was called, “Bad Guys Deserve My Karate Chop.”).
Also up top I asked a simple question, “Is Christianity a religion of peace?” I was a bit disappointed in your collective inability to answer that question. I was wrong about that. I shouldn’t have been disappointed.
Got a match?
“…the holy book of more than a billion people.”
Unfortunately it’s a “holy” book that is all about the demented ravings of a loon who enjoyed sexually abusing little girls…when he wasn’t otherwise engaged in acts of cold-blooded murder or enslaving folks, of course.
Betty Blo, er, I mean, Nancy Pelosi; We know it’s you, you sneaky little thing.
Speaking of the Nazis…
From the Hadith Book 041 number 6985
Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jew.
GO Mo! Ya got Liberals rootin ya on!
Gotta Match? um..yea..Liberals and Mohammad…keeping the hope alive!
Sooo!! Who do you think will bare the brunt of any muslim attack and reprisal for burning any qorans? Right; A lot of innocent civilians.
And the reprisal and violence will come from “MODERATE MUSLIMS”, of course.
Fareed Zakaria
If Fareed Zakaria could ever have been thought of as a conservative or a neoconservative (perhaps because he was once associated with the National Interest), those days are long past. His July 10th article for the leftist publication Newsweek, where he is the international editor, is must reading, a stunning example of how the mainstream media seeks to manipulate Americans into a supine posture toward Islam and Islamic terrorists.
To begin with, Zakaria excitedly claims that, unlike after the 9/11 attack, Muslims after the London attack are strongly condemning terrorism. Yet he gives virtually no quotes to back up this statement. He even says, without a single quote in support, that hard-line Muslim terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah have condemned the attack. Further, the quotes that he does provide employ the classic Muslim weasel language. For example, he says that Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi rejected the argument that this attack could be justified as an attempt to force Britain out of Iraq. This is illogical and cannot be the motive for killing innocent civilians, he said. But as anyone who didnt land on planet earth yesterday knows, innocent doesnt mean the same thing to Muslims that it means to the rest of us. When Muslims say that innocent people shouldnt be murdered, theyre speaking of people who have not offended Islam, i.e. Muslims and dhimmis and people living in countries such as France which have understandings with Islam. Second, Tantawi does not even denounce the killings of innocents. He says that forcing the British out of Iraq cannot be a justifiable motive for killing innocent civilians. The plain implication is that there are justifiable motives for murdering innocent civilians. In presenting such weasel language as though it were legitimate, Zakaria, who is no fool, becomes an accomplice in the age-old Muslim tactic of lying to outsiders.
But then, after all his re-assuring folderol about how Muslims are forthrightly condemning terrorism and how great this is, Zakaria says, There should be much, much greater condemnation from mainstream Islam. Excuse me, but if there has to be much, much greater condemnation than there now is, then obviously the amount of condemnation supposedly occurring now is not remotely sufficient, is it? So why does Fareed act as if its such a great breakthrough? Clearly this is not a truth-seeking writer but a spinmeister for Islam.
But it gets worse. Zakaria tells us that President Bush has been missing the boat in the war on terror because he hasnt focused on what victory in the war would really mean. After a lot of hemming and hawing, Fareed tells us what he means by victory: (1) being able to prevent the worst terrorist attacks (i.e., preventing a 9/11, but not a 7/07); and (2) improving our response capabilities to terrorist attacks after they occur (a favorite campaign plank of John Kerrys, by the way). Thus Zakaria wants us not only to accept domestic suicide bombings as a regular, unavoidable fact of existence, but to see their regular occurence (in the absence of a 9/11 scale attack) as a sign that we have won the war on terror. Meanwhile, naturally, he suggests doing absolutely nothing about the vast Muslim populations within the West and the ongoing mass immigration of Muslims into the West. In fact, in an article for Newsweek following the rejection of the EU constitution by France and Netherlands, he urged an increase of Muslim immigration into Europe, plus the accession of the entire population of Turkey:
[W]hat Europe desperately needs is more of all the trends that are producing populist paranoia. It needs … more young immigrants to sustain its social market and a more strategic relationship with the Muslim world, which would be dramatically enhanced by Turkish membership in the EU.
Of course, Europe already has a disastrously close strategic relationship with the Muslim world, involving, on the European side, total European support for the Palestinian cause, unstinting European hostility to Israel, and the redefinition of European identity as equal parts European and Islamic, an arrangement Bat Yeor has called Eurabia, and Zakaria wants this strategic relationship, which in fact represents the dhimmitude of the entire European continent, to get even stronger than it now is.
In sum, Fareed Zakaria, once a member of the neocon camp and now a star of the liberal mainstream media, is an apologist for Islam and for Muslim extremists (assuming there is any difference between the two), as well as an advocate for the demographic and cultural Islamization of Europe. These things should never be forgotten.
We reacted as though it was skill, but 9/11 was a fluke, Al Queda was lucky. If you think about all of the things that had to go right just to fly the planes into the WTC, not to mention the fact that they had no way of knowing the buildings would collapse, you have to conclude that it was pure luck (combined with our relaxed counter-terrorism measures). It’s like any great sports upset – play the game 100 times, the underdogs win one, it just happens that our universe contained the one. Same with 9/11. Replay that day 100 times, 99 times something goes wrong at the airport, they get caught. The hijackers just happened to get lucky the one time. And that’s why nothing’s happened since – they didn’t even mean for it to be as large a victory as it ended up being, the towers collapsing was just gravy for them. They’re incompetent cave-dwellers who happened to have the break of a lifetime. And that’s the thing about lucky breaks – they aren’t repeatable.
FARID ZAKARIA SOUNDS LIKE HE IS BEING HEAVILY BRIBED OR HEAVILY BLACKMAILED …AND PHYSICALLY FARID ZAKARIA IS STARTING TO LOOK LIKE THE LIVING VERSION OF ACHKMED THE DEAD TERRORIEEST WHO WANTS TO KEEEEEL YOUUU…..
That was my reaction on 9/11/01: the U.S. is totally overreacting to the sound of billions and billions of dollars. It’s incredible how a tiny fraction of criminals can blackmail whole nations. They are no different from Al Capone’s thugs, the Salvadorian maras, the Mexican, Russian & Colombian drug cartels, the African genocides or any organized criminal groups.
The U.S. never learned the lessons of the European terrorist bombings in the 1980′s and didn’t prepare to minimize those acts. Their guilt made them overreact.
Of course we overreacted, Iraq War anyone? A war launched to remove WMDs and close a so-called terrorist safe haven. The ideology of radical islam was anathema to Saddam’s secular regime. Apparently facts really didn’t matter, we went to war based on heavily doctored evidence of WMDs, as Britain’s Iraq inquiry proves. Now we have created new generations of terrorists an d earned the ire of the entire planet, save the war criminal Israelis. So yes, we overreacted.