garbage For years, contemptuous relatives and liberal thinkers who, seemingly, have always controlled the higher ground (mainly by adamantly refusing to debate), have regarded my dislike for radical Islam as if it were a sign they could rely on to identify me. “That’s all he talks about,” they’d say. “He’s a single issue guy,” they’d accuse, despite not wanting to hear the complex discussion I was and have long been willing to arrange.
Indeed, those who choose to dismiss my thoughts and concerns as they might any matter unworthy and lacking merit, have never answered questions that have become more and more difficult to ignore. Yet those questions, not just ones I have been asking, are being raised by thinkers from all sides.
Among them are these: in Muslim majority countries where Islamic rioters attack Christians and burn their churches, who answers to and apologizes for those crimes? The imams? The government? The rioters themselves?
When innocent foreigners are attacked in those same countries, when women there are clearly subjugated, who claims responsibilty? Who neglects those issues with impunity despite controlling those governments?
And who decides what’s fair? The ones who aren’t committing atrocious acts yet are not stopping or preventing them? In a recent incident involving the destruction of Korans supposedly used or abused (since they were defaced by Muslims who wrote in them) by terrorists, our American Army general apologized for burning those texts. Rather than an apology, perhaps an explanation was in order.
What Muslim general has ever made a similar apology? Why haven’t we demanded such for crimes of omission as well as commission?
There is a reason, a reason that is crucial to understanding America’s dilemma. Borders are of little concern to devout Muslims. Instead, they are committed to Allah, to the ummah, to the caliphate to come. Muslim leaders may be labelled as Turkish or Pakistani or Egyptian, but they all maintain a higher allegiance to their religion (as opposed to their country), to their Islam that they want to dominate the world.
When they act as if they are aloof and unresponsible for deadly terrorist acts or that they have nothing to do with vile and reprehensible jihadist villainy, we are at a loss to assign blame. Who do we lambast? Although they would demean our country and weary our leaders with claims that they have been mistreated, misunderstood or abused if we retaliated, we are left asking, “If it’s not you, then who is it?” Then we beg them to please tell or explain away the destructive act of some Islamic miscreant. Indeed, we are left to aim drones at elusive followers of bin Laden and others like him. We dare not take aim at Islamic fundamentalists, leaders who play hide and seek with us from the thrones of their Muslim states.
Is it frustration with being dumbfounded that causes our State Department and our President to strike out at Israel instead? Do we hope to prove how fair we are to Islamic leaders by imprisoning brave men like Jonathan Pollard and 1st Lt. Michael Behenna?
It doesn’t work. We are being played like fools who deny grizzly history and the many shredded lives pictured almost daily that provide current proof of murderous Muslim wrongdoing. Instead, WE apologize to the likes of CAIR and other groups with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood if we mete out justice, or, like the NYPD, try to learn how to defend ourselves.
This excerpt from a New York Times op ed, Uncle Sam Is No Imam, 2/20/12 by Samuel J. Rascoff, associate professor of law at NYU, clearly expresses our dilemma:
The relationship between the national security imperative and a great religious civilization [my emphasis] is inevitably fraught. Reconciling the two won’t be achieved by allowing officials to become more active in espousing theological alternatives to radical Islam — or in training law-enforcement and intelligence professionals with hateful caricatures of Islam. [my empasis] The government’s efforts ought to be guided instead by the wisdom of the First Amendment and the values that it enshrines.
Rascoff obviously assumes that Islam is a “great religious civilization” as if there were no proof to the contrary. Compared to modern democracies, theocratic Islam remains brutally medieval. Its brutality, openly practiced in the name of Allah (please see the koranic surah 9: 111) encourages pathological behavior that is suicidal yet considered praiseworthy and martyr making by even Islam’s moderate believers. One of the obviously uninformed, Rascoff invites Muslims to claim that any of us who oppose Rascoff are being unjust.
“It’s not us!” they insist. But it is. Not admitting it is their tactic, their taqqiyah, their way of keeping our leaders so confused that they don’t know how to avoid disaster.
After 9/11, my greatest concern is not just the likes of Rascoff, but those who have never answered this question, “What will it take for them to understand?”
B. Koplen 2/21/12
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