BY FRANK SALVATO – “…on a day when others tried to divide us, we can regain the sense of common purpose that stirred in our hearts 10 years ago. As a nation, we face difficult challenges, and as citizens in a democratic society we engage in vigorous debates about the future. But as we do, let’s never forget the lesson we learned anew 10 years ago — that our differences pale beside what unites us and that when we choose to move forward together, as one American family, the United States doesn’t just endure, we can emerge from our tests and trials stronger than before. That’s the America we were on 9/11 and in the days that followed. That’s the America we can and must always be.”
– Pres. Barack Obama, USA Today, Sept. 8, 2011
Ten year have passed since the Islamist attacks on the United States of America; attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA. Since that time we have routed the Taliban from their haven in Afghanistan, dispatched Osama bin Laden to the icy deep and lopped off many of the heads of the Islamist terror hydra. We have grown as a people to better understand the dysfunctional relationship that the Islamic theo-political dogma has with Western Culture. And we have done our best to attain closure, for ourselves, for our society and for our country.
But closure can be hard to attain when there are no bodies to bury and no pointed victory over a vanquished foe. And when closure alludes because of unresolved issues we must always re-examine the event; the moment; the realities.
At the ten year mark, an American president is foolishly stopping short of succeeding in a generational conflict with fundamentalist Islamists…or radical Islamists…or jihadists, you pick the politically correct term the Progressive-Left elitists are sanctioning as appropriate this week. To me, they are the enemy; bloodthirsty ideologues who are committed to ideological conquest by the sword in their quest to establish a global Caliphate existing under the exclusive stricture of Sharia Law. But then, that’s just me…educated on the subject and painfully realistic in my examination. You see, I dispensed with the self-imposed mental handicap of political correctness years ago…and I feel a lot better for having done so. I also see things a lot clearer without the fog of stupidity clouding every issue.
At the ten year mark, a secularist New York Mayor – along with the Progressive elites of his ilk – is advocating for the construction of a victory mosque within the footprint of the fallen World Trade Center. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, about as self-righteous as they come, is so certain that a “kumbaya” inclusionist approach to fundamentalist Islam will heal the rift between cultures that he refuses to examine the Islamic traditions of conquest; traditions that include building great mosques over conquered lands and, in particular, conquered religious properties. One need only understand that mosques now stand over holy places meaningful to religions that existed long before Muhammad or the theo-political creed that is Islam, established in 610 A.D., to validate this reality.
Ten years on we witness an American Administration that not only sullies the relationship between the United States and its greatest Middle Eastern ally, Israel, but acts transparently in its deference to the Palestinian Movement; a movement of predominantly intolerant, and in many cases violent, Islamists who stake claim to an area that, historically, never existed. It should be noted that these Palestinian Islamists are the same people who danced in the streets of Gaza in celebration of the slaughter that took place on American soil September 11, 2001.
Ten years on we observe an American Administration completely ignoring the sanctity of free speech – a freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution – in its advocacy of a move by the Islamic and global communities (via the United Nations) to “combat” so-called Islamophobia.
Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center on Religious Freedom and a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, writes:
“An unprecedented collaboration between the Obama administration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to combat ‘Islamophobia’ may lead to the de-legitimization of freedom of expression as a human right.
“The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to ‘implement’ a UN resolution against religious ‘stereotyping,’ specifically as applied to Islam.
“To be sure, the administration argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms.
“Many OIC states police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws that the Saudi-based OIC has long worked to see applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.”
It would seem that those who want to honestly examine and debate the grotesque contradictions presented by Muslims of a fundamentalist Islamic bent in their alleged symbiotic relationship with the West face the challenge of censorship should they dare to confront issues such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, gender equality, rights for homosexuals in the Islamic culture, freedom of religion in Islamic nations, etc.
Ten years on from the mass slaughter of September 11, 2001, and reports continuously surface about the encroachment of jihadist terror organizations into the Western Hemisphere. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera, reports that Hezbollah is setting up operations just 90 miles south of Key West, Florida, in Cuba. Reports of Hezbollah, Hamas and even al Qaeda activity in the tri-border area of South America and in Venezuela have been verified. And reports increase with each passing day of Hezbollah corroboration with Mexican drug cartels operating on the Southern border of the United States.
Ten years later and the West looks on as a so-called “Arab Spring” takes hold across the Middle East and Northern Africa. As Progressives, the uninformed and the know-nothing cheerleaders for the Obama Administration cheer the “advancement of democracy” in these lands, they ignore the inevitability that democracy in the Middle East is always subject to the organized forces that be; that the best organized factions within each “sovereign” locale will ultimately win power and, therefore legitimacy on the world stage. The gigantic problem with this all-to-soon-to-become-reality scenario is that fundamentalist Islamists are the best organized in each and every one of these locales.
In Egypt, even though many of us exclaimed the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mainstream media, along with the Obama Administration and the Progressive Movement, celebrated democracy in the aftermath of Mubarak. Today we witness the Muslim Brotherhood threatening the Egyptian military not to interfere in the crafting of a new constitution.
In Lybia, even though many of us warned that Libyan rebels had extensive ties to jihadists groups including al Qaeda and offshoots that waged war against US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration, along with the presiding governments in Britain and France, advocated for NATO operations to support the terrorist affiliated groups over the clown prince Qaddafi. Today, these rebels not only have Qaddafi’s money, they have his SA-24 heat-seeking missiles and, some fear, his stockpile of chemical weapons.
Ten years on…
In 2006, I wrote of Jonathan Briley. Mr. Briley is better known in his death as “The Falling Man” of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. I wrote then:
“The mainstream media in the United States has taken the images of September 11th, 2001 off the television and out of the newspapers. They say that the images are too disturbing, that they incite a want for revenge rather than allow closure. But they are wrong to do this.
“The United States should not and cannot simply forgive and forget just because the host country of the Taliban and al Qaeda – Afghanistan – has been liberated and transformed. Facts demonstrate that al Qaeda, the Taliban and radical Islam have been planning and preparing to implement their global campaign of terrorism – their declared war against the Western World – since before 1993, well before September 11th. Their central location for training may have been eliminated but they had prepared for that, splintering like roaches to the four corners of the world, preparing, planning and implementing their battle plans made decades before.
“Make no mistake, they are a cunning adversary. They understood that the US would come after them. They planned for this event.
“This war cannot be about ‘tolerance’ or forgiving, or about understanding the ‘reasons why’ someone would want to murder innocents whether it be with an airplane, a car bomb, a suicide vest or a saif. This battle has to be about freedom and the right of innocents to live their lives in liberty, free of fear from an unholy sect of genocidal totalitarians who offer only oppression, dominance and terror as their bounty…”
With all of the appeasement the West has offered the radical, fundamentalist Islamist community, with all of the advances made by jihadists around the world, with Islamists pressuring governments around the world, from Britain to the Netherlands, Spain to Germany and the United States, to coddle their barbarity; to provide inclusion for their totalitarian theocratic ideology, can we truly say that Jonathan Briley has received any semblance of justice, that his family has attained any modicum of closure? Only the radically dense would answer yes.
So, as we watch the secular commemorations of the ten year passing of the attacks on our country by radical Islamists, fundamentalist Muslims, jihadis, or, if you have dispensed with political correctness as I have, the scum of the Earth, ask yourself: do you feel safer today than Jon Briley did at fifteen seconds after 9:41am, on September 11, 2001? I know I don’t.