The Nation Freaks Out

The president summoned top administration officials today to make a big show of concern about airport security:

President Obama rebuked the U.S. intelligence community Tuesday for a "potentially disastrous" failure to detect an airline bombing plot, saying it ignored various "red flags" and failed to pull together pieces of information it already had. He called the intelligence breakdown intolerable and vowed that "we will do better" in the future....

Obama's statement came after he summoned 20 of his top national security aides for a White House meeting Tuesday afternoon. The changes to the government's terrorist watch-list system were part of a series of steps to improve airline safety following the bombing attempt, which was thwarted when the explosives failed to detonate and passengers subdued the suspect.

Let me get this straight. Some nutcase sets his underwear on fire, and the entire country reacts by taking its own underwear off, wrapping it around its neck, and attempting to strangle itself out of shock, disbelief, and craven, pathetic fear. After which, it runs to its government daddy, crying and wondering why anyone would want to do something like this.

Americans need to have something hammered into their heads. The United States has chosen a policy of pissing off every Muslim on the planet, by invading and occupying Muslim lands, torturing, imprisoning and killing innocent Muslims without trial, unconditionally supporting and arming Israel and other repressive regimes as they terrorize the Middle East, and blatantly stealing Muslim oil.

Apparently, quite a few people in this country have no problem with these policies. Those people need to shut the fuck up, and quit freaking out when an aggrieved party tries to blow up a plane, or a building, or, God forbid, something worse. What do they expect?

How is this kind of behavior a surprise? When you think about it, it's a pretty minimal reaction to all the murder and mayhem we commit. Get used to it. We obviously have no intention of changing these policies. Why should we think that continuing to do the same thing will bring us different results?

Maybe enraging a billion or so people is worth doing. Maybe living with increasing numbers of attacks by increasing numbers of increasingly radicalized Islamists is a small price to pay for cheap oil and SUV's, the privilege of forcing democracy down the throats of people who don't want it, and the undying, contemptuous gratitude we get from Israel. Maybe being a moral nation isn't so important after all.

Fine. Just quit with the surprise and righteous indignation already. It's pathetic.

Crying Terrorist

The new definition of terrorism is, apparently, any violence committed by Muslims against anyone else.

Joe Leiberman, quoted in the WSJ today, said:

"We don't know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," Mr. Lieberman added.

In other words, any and all violence committed by a Muslim with radical views (i.e., different from Lieberman's) are acts of terror. The obverse of that argument, of course, is that violence committed by non-Muslims is never terrorism.

So terrorism is something that only Muslims do, by definition.

If you think this is pushing it a little far, look at what some of the nutbags over at Atlas Shrugs posted:

Islamic Terror Attacks on American Soil

We recently got taken to the mat by a polite, young Muslim living in the U.K. who took issue with our oft-repeated statement that no Muslim-American lost their life to vigilante violence following 9/11. She provided us a list of six or seven candidates and, after whittling out the ones where the killer was unknown or in cases with mitigating circumstances such as “victim was sleeping with killer’s ex-girlfriend” (and we’re not making that up), we reached a shocking conclusion:

We were wrong.

There is one seemingly unambiguous case that occurred in Dallas, Texas where Waqar Hasan, a Muslim convenience storeowner, was gunned down by Mark Anthony Stroman four days after the 9/11 attacks. Stroman claimed to have been motivated by anger from watching the towers fall. He is not exactly your average American, however, even apart from the shooting. For one thing, he is a white supremacist who carried a felony criminal record at the time of the attack. He also went on to shoot two more people in the weeks that followed.

Thankfully, an American jury sentenced Mark Stroman to death. The same cannot be said of many Muslim terrorists such as Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, who not only have sanctuary in Muslim countries, but are often treated as heroes by devout followers of Muhammad.

Nevertheless, we acknowledge that our friend is correct and that there was at least one Muslim killed in an anti-Arab hate crime in the U.S. following the anti-American hate crime on 9/11. For anyone keeping score:

People killed by radical Muslims on 9/11: 2,996
Muslim-Americans killed "in revenge": 1

One.

One Muslim-American.

One Muslim-American has died since 9/11, in revenge for that terrible act, and so the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans is glossed over. It's as though it didn't even happen.

The breathtaking stupidity of that statement almost needs to be savored for moment, and chewed over a few times before being vomited out as the vile piece of propaganda that it is.

The fact is that terrorism is not a useful term. There is war, and there is immoral war. There is violence, and there is immoral violence.

If a US Special Forces commando was to infiltrate an Al Qaeda cell, pull out a couple pistols and shoot everyone in sight while yelling "God Bless the USA", would Joe Lieberman call him a terrorist?

Of course not. He would be hailed as a hero, and Lieberman would fall all over himself to place him in the pantheon of noble Americans.

Here's the ugly truth. When America spends more on its war machine ($663 Billion next year!) than the entire gross domestic product of 174 of the world's 191 countries, the only way to fight back is to do whatever you can.

Terrorism is literally the only way most of the world's people have of effecting political change with the United States. It doesn't make it right, but it's impossible to argue that it's somehow morally worse than the Shock and Awe campaign in Baghdad, or dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the fire-bombing of Dresden. In fact, the collateral damage of terrorism is far less than that of full-scale conventional war.

Roughly 3000 Americans were killed in the attacks on 9/11. Since then, it is estimated that we have killed between 100,000 and 1,000,000 million Iraqis. Many of these were civlians.

So what, really, is the difference between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq?

Both were unjustified. Both killed innocent civilians. (Far more in Iraq)

Is it because the 9/11 attackers were religious?

So was George Bush, who believed, as a born-again Christian, that the coming rapture required a war in the Middle East.

Is it because the 9/11 attackers wanted to effect political change?

So did the United States; one of its stated objectives was the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Is it because it used fear and terror as a method of achieving that goal?

What, exactly, do you think Shock and Awe was supposed to do?

No, it's not any of these things.

Is it because the 9/11 attackers were Muslims?

Bingo