Although many or most are atheists or agnostics, the leaders of the Democratic Party—not to mention their candidates—must be saying at least a dozen “Hail Marys” and a whole bunch of “Our Fathers” that there won’t be any major terror attacks between now and November. Anything of significance and Donald Trump could waltz into the White House by acclamation. (A Fox News poll shows voters prefer Trump over Clinton 50-42 on terrorism.)
It may have happened already. If the EgyptAir 804 crash is shown to be an act of terrorism (unclear, though highly possible, at this point), a lot of people will be having second thoughts about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Hillary has tied herself to Obama’s botched (to put it mildly) foreign policy and Bernie thinks the real terrorists are in Prada suits at Goldman Sachs.
Terrorism obviously can’t be blamed exclusively on the Democrats, but the bizarre behavior of our president from refusing to call Islamic terrorism Islamic or even radical Islamic or fundamentalist Islamic or anything remotely Islamic to lecturing Christians on the Crusades when ISIS is beheading Christians on a beach now bespeaks a man who is psychologically threatened with the situation in ways he has not even begun to face.
Donald Trump has no such problem. He is, if anything, too quick to blame terrorism, although, running for office, it’s hardly surprising he immediately tweeted “Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!”
And no wonder Josh Earnest rushed to remind the press corps of the administration’s “great success” against ISIS, or ISIL, as they invariably call the terror state, a preference of interest only to those like Ben “Mind Meld” Rhodes who live in the insular world of the president. Never mind that ISIS is currently “tearing Iraq apart.”
But this isn’t finally about ISIS or al Qaeda or any of the groups that are fungible in a matter of minutes, literally, but of the religious ideology that spawns them all, the very ideology Obama (and Hillary, pathetically and slavishly) will not name or admit.
Nevertheless, we have have been at war with Islamic supremacism since 9/11 (actually before) and likely to be in that war, I regret to say, as long as most or all of us are alive. (Interestingly, former defense secretary Robert Gates was quick to criticize Trump for his tweet when it was Gates, et al., who ultimately failed to confront this enemy. Admittedly, Gates has been better than Obama or Hillary.)
But speaking of spawning, in the endless cable news thumb-sucking regarding EgyptAir 804, one of the more interesting suggestions of a culprit came from Jim Hanson of the Center for Security Policy who mentioned the possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood. The MB, as will be recalled, was for a short time, in the person of Obama’s good buddy the Islamist fanatic Mohammed Morsi, in control of Egypt. The MB is also the transnational Sunni organization founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna that revived the fundamentalism that gave us al-Qaeda and later ISIS. The MB is their immediate ancestor. Finally, the Muslim Brotherhood connects back to Hillary Clinton via Huma Abedin’s mother.
This is all a vicious cycle for us to think about as we wait in the endless airport security lines this summer, staring through the terminal windows at the mechanics and grips working on the planes, wondering who they are and where they came from, whether they really have been vetted.
I will be in one of those lines in August with my daughter as she heads off to college for the first time. She has never known a time when you could just walk on a plane, when flying was a pleasant, even exciting, experience. Neither have any of her friends. A whole generation doesn’t know. They don’t know what it’s like to go to a museum without having your bags inspected either or to enter freely into a concert or ballgame. So much of our waking lives is now in response to the nightmare of the jihad. It’s become the new normal. We have to change it. The first way to start is at the polls.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His next book—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already—will be published by Encounter Books on June 14, 2016. You can read an excerpt here and pre-order it here.
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