thedrifter
07-11-05, 05:55 AM
The London Bombings
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 11, 2005
Of course everyone will take from the bombings in London the “lessons” they’re already seeking. The left claims that the bombings show the war in Iraq is producing the terror instead of fighting it, as though attacks on Muslims (so their logic goes) are of concern to the terrorists. Saddam and the terrorists have killed a hundred times more Muslims than American forces. Moreover, American forces have saved millions of Muslim lives in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. This is not a war about America’s treatment of Muslims and never was.
The left never understood the Iraq war in the first place, so it can’t really be expected to understand the war in Europe now. The Islamic jihad against the West, for which Iraq is but one very important battlefield, did not begin in 2003 with the toppling of Saddam. It is rooted in a radical movement that arose in Egypt in the 1920s – the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose "little red book" was the Koran, as interpreted by by Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and eventually the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the leader of the first revolutionary Islamic state.
The Islamic jihad against the West began in earnest in November, 1979 with the Islamic revolution in Iran, which climaxed with the taking of American hostages and a million fanatics in the streets of Teheran chanting “Death to America.” One of the takers of those hostages and leaders of those chants is the newly elected “president” of revolutionary Iran. (This week they were chanting "Death to America" again.) The Iranian revolution created Hizbollah, the terrorist organization that blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, in many ways the first terrorist attack of the modern war on us.
One can concede the left’s point that the American-supported war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation was another proving ground for the Islamic jihad. As it happens, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was launched the following month in December 1979 and, as leftists like to point out, it was the training war for Osama bin Laden and many of the Palestinians who went on to create al-Qaeda, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.
Of course, the left isn’t interested in history, except to pluck out isolated facts it can twist to stick in America’s eye. Thus the left uses its Osama “fact” to claim that America created bin Laden and that we are responsible for the attacks on our homeland. (This is exactly what the terrorists claim too.) Inevitably, whatever facts it is interpreting, the left ends up demonstrating that it is at war with America. On the other hand, watch it scream “foul” when anyone points out this obvious truth. (Are you questioning my patriotism???!)
The left’s Afghanistan twist is several lies in one, but there is no need to disentangle them here. The left that makes this argument is uninterested in the history of our proxy war against the Soviet invaders because it basically supported the invading force. Just as radicals today like to think of themselves as “anti-anti-Saddam” so then they were anti-anti-Communist. In practice this meant they were the mainstay in the West for the Soviet empire and its expansion into vulnerable nations on its periphery like Afghanistan.
The United States provided training and arms for the Muslim mujahideen in Afghanistan because its conscience was roused by the Soviet invaders whose scorched earth policies killed a million defenseless Afghan civilians before the resistance, with America’s help, was able to stop them.
In making its argument, the left also ignores the momentous historical fact that the victory of the mujahideen, made possible by America's gift of missiles, not only defeated the Red Army, but triggered the chain of events which led to the fall of the Marxist empire. In other words, U.S. support for the mujahideen eventually liberated a billion people whom the Soviet comrades of American and European leftists had enslaved for fifty and seventy years.
In other words, America’s support for the Palestinian, Egyptian and Saudi terrorists (Osama among them) who flocked to the cause was a somewhat bad deed in the service of a very great good one. It was not as bad a deed for example as saving and arming their friend Joe Stalin and his Marxist butchers in order to defeat Hitler, but it was an equally good one. Consequently those Americans who are able to actually remember history are proud of what we did in Afghanistan and have no regrets.
When the left blames London on Iraq, as though Islamic jihad has been caused by Iraq, it ignores not only the rhetoric of the jihadists (America is the enemy, Zarqawi proclaimed in a fatwa last year, “as the bearer of the cross”) but all the attacks on us that preceded Iraq: Mogadishu, the World Trade Center 1993, the barracks in Saudi Arabia, the US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, the World Trade Center 2001, and all the failed strikes, from those planned on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels to the millennium plot designed to kill hundreds of thousands. The left’s argument about Iraq also contradicts itself, since the case before London was that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. Obviously the London terrorists don’t think so.
The Islamic jihad is not a response to the war in Iraq; it is a religious war whose armies began forming in 1979 in Iran and Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza. Because the jihad is not about Iraq, its agendas -- which the left that never bothers itself about -- will not be satisfied by an American withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan, or an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Instead it will be incited by them. Just as Arafat and the al-Aqsa murderers brigade were incited by the weakness shown by Clinton and Barak in offering concessions to people who want it all. When your enemy is determined to destroy you, an olive branch is seen as weakness, something we should have learned once at for all at Munich, but never have.
The radical Islamist jihad is at war with the democracies of the West in Europe and the Middle East and America, and there is no way out of the war but to win it.
The bombings in London show the folly of well-meaning liberals who think that tolerance of an enemy that lives within one’s country will persuade the enemy to change his mind and will produce beneficent results. The Islamic community in London produced more than one Mosque of hate preaching war against Britain. The haters were tolerated. The tolerance led to disaster.
The war in Iraq is an excuse for radicalism, not its cause; just as the war in Vietnam was an excuse for American radicals to conduct a war against America they already had in their hearts to fight. The radicals' war not only continues but has morphed into a massive effort to support the campaign of jihadists who want to kill us. An expert on suicide bombings analyzed 71 terrorist attacks between 1995 and 2004 and concluded from the pattern (in an article called, “Al-Qaeda’s Smart Bombs”) that the immediate military goal of the jihadists was “to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian peninsula and other Muslim countries.”
This is precisely what the left is demanding. It has opened a political front behind our lines. Note: This surrender is not what the Iraqis are demanding; it is not what the people of Afghanistan are demanding; it is not what the Saudis or the Lebanese are demanding. It is what the terrorists are demanding, and it is what the American left is demanding, and the British and European left as well.
The left preaches surrender in the war against the Islamists on all fronts: retreat from Iraq; retreat from Afghanistan; retreat (without a peace) from the territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In the name of ending the violence. But even one such retreat will produce infinitely more bloodshed at home and abroad than we are facing now. Why? Because we are tolerant and the enemy is ruthless; because we are compassionate and the enemy is savage; because we are merciful and the enemy is not. America’s defeat, Britain’s defeat, Israel’s defeat would produce slaughters to make 9/11 look tame.
continued.......
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 11, 2005
Of course everyone will take from the bombings in London the “lessons” they’re already seeking. The left claims that the bombings show the war in Iraq is producing the terror instead of fighting it, as though attacks on Muslims (so their logic goes) are of concern to the terrorists. Saddam and the terrorists have killed a hundred times more Muslims than American forces. Moreover, American forces have saved millions of Muslim lives in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. This is not a war about America’s treatment of Muslims and never was.
The left never understood the Iraq war in the first place, so it can’t really be expected to understand the war in Europe now. The Islamic jihad against the West, for which Iraq is but one very important battlefield, did not begin in 2003 with the toppling of Saddam. It is rooted in a radical movement that arose in Egypt in the 1920s – the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose "little red book" was the Koran, as interpreted by by Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and eventually the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the leader of the first revolutionary Islamic state.
The Islamic jihad against the West began in earnest in November, 1979 with the Islamic revolution in Iran, which climaxed with the taking of American hostages and a million fanatics in the streets of Teheran chanting “Death to America.” One of the takers of those hostages and leaders of those chants is the newly elected “president” of revolutionary Iran. (This week they were chanting "Death to America" again.) The Iranian revolution created Hizbollah, the terrorist organization that blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, in many ways the first terrorist attack of the modern war on us.
One can concede the left’s point that the American-supported war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation was another proving ground for the Islamic jihad. As it happens, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was launched the following month in December 1979 and, as leftists like to point out, it was the training war for Osama bin Laden and many of the Palestinians who went on to create al-Qaeda, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.
Of course, the left isn’t interested in history, except to pluck out isolated facts it can twist to stick in America’s eye. Thus the left uses its Osama “fact” to claim that America created bin Laden and that we are responsible for the attacks on our homeland. (This is exactly what the terrorists claim too.) Inevitably, whatever facts it is interpreting, the left ends up demonstrating that it is at war with America. On the other hand, watch it scream “foul” when anyone points out this obvious truth. (Are you questioning my patriotism???!)
The left’s Afghanistan twist is several lies in one, but there is no need to disentangle them here. The left that makes this argument is uninterested in the history of our proxy war against the Soviet invaders because it basically supported the invading force. Just as radicals today like to think of themselves as “anti-anti-Saddam” so then they were anti-anti-Communist. In practice this meant they were the mainstay in the West for the Soviet empire and its expansion into vulnerable nations on its periphery like Afghanistan.
The United States provided training and arms for the Muslim mujahideen in Afghanistan because its conscience was roused by the Soviet invaders whose scorched earth policies killed a million defenseless Afghan civilians before the resistance, with America’s help, was able to stop them.
In making its argument, the left also ignores the momentous historical fact that the victory of the mujahideen, made possible by America's gift of missiles, not only defeated the Red Army, but triggered the chain of events which led to the fall of the Marxist empire. In other words, U.S. support for the mujahideen eventually liberated a billion people whom the Soviet comrades of American and European leftists had enslaved for fifty and seventy years.
In other words, America’s support for the Palestinian, Egyptian and Saudi terrorists (Osama among them) who flocked to the cause was a somewhat bad deed in the service of a very great good one. It was not as bad a deed for example as saving and arming their friend Joe Stalin and his Marxist butchers in order to defeat Hitler, but it was an equally good one. Consequently those Americans who are able to actually remember history are proud of what we did in Afghanistan and have no regrets.
When the left blames London on Iraq, as though Islamic jihad has been caused by Iraq, it ignores not only the rhetoric of the jihadists (America is the enemy, Zarqawi proclaimed in a fatwa last year, “as the bearer of the cross”) but all the attacks on us that preceded Iraq: Mogadishu, the World Trade Center 1993, the barracks in Saudi Arabia, the US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, the World Trade Center 2001, and all the failed strikes, from those planned on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels to the millennium plot designed to kill hundreds of thousands. The left’s argument about Iraq also contradicts itself, since the case before London was that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. Obviously the London terrorists don’t think so.
The Islamic jihad is not a response to the war in Iraq; it is a religious war whose armies began forming in 1979 in Iran and Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza. Because the jihad is not about Iraq, its agendas -- which the left that never bothers itself about -- will not be satisfied by an American withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan, or an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Instead it will be incited by them. Just as Arafat and the al-Aqsa murderers brigade were incited by the weakness shown by Clinton and Barak in offering concessions to people who want it all. When your enemy is determined to destroy you, an olive branch is seen as weakness, something we should have learned once at for all at Munich, but never have.
The radical Islamist jihad is at war with the democracies of the West in Europe and the Middle East and America, and there is no way out of the war but to win it.
The bombings in London show the folly of well-meaning liberals who think that tolerance of an enemy that lives within one’s country will persuade the enemy to change his mind and will produce beneficent results. The Islamic community in London produced more than one Mosque of hate preaching war against Britain. The haters were tolerated. The tolerance led to disaster.
The war in Iraq is an excuse for radicalism, not its cause; just as the war in Vietnam was an excuse for American radicals to conduct a war against America they already had in their hearts to fight. The radicals' war not only continues but has morphed into a massive effort to support the campaign of jihadists who want to kill us. An expert on suicide bombings analyzed 71 terrorist attacks between 1995 and 2004 and concluded from the pattern (in an article called, “Al-Qaeda’s Smart Bombs”) that the immediate military goal of the jihadists was “to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian peninsula and other Muslim countries.”
This is precisely what the left is demanding. It has opened a political front behind our lines. Note: This surrender is not what the Iraqis are demanding; it is not what the people of Afghanistan are demanding; it is not what the Saudis or the Lebanese are demanding. It is what the terrorists are demanding, and it is what the American left is demanding, and the British and European left as well.
The left preaches surrender in the war against the Islamists on all fronts: retreat from Iraq; retreat from Afghanistan; retreat (without a peace) from the territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In the name of ending the violence. But even one such retreat will produce infinitely more bloodshed at home and abroad than we are facing now. Why? Because we are tolerant and the enemy is ruthless; because we are compassionate and the enemy is savage; because we are merciful and the enemy is not. America’s defeat, Britain’s defeat, Israel’s defeat would produce slaughters to make 9/11 look tame.
continued.......