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Contributors
David Horowitz - Columnist
David
Horowitz is a noted author, commentator and columnist. His
is the founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture
and his opinions can be found at Front
Page Magazine. [go
to Horowitz index]
 The
London Bombings
The "lessons"...
[David Horowitz] 7/13/05
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.
The lesson
of London, then, is to take seriously what your enemies say.
For years
Britain has tolerated Imams in its midst who are
calling for war. Not because they don’t like this particular
Tony Blair policy or that one, but because they hate the secular
and Christian and Jewish West which in their fanatical imaginations
belongs to the realm of Dar al-Harb, the realm of the unbelievers,
the realm of the infidel and the damned. Dar al-Harb: in Arabic,
it means the realm of WAR. Leftists obviously don’t understand
this, don’t understand the mentality of the religious fanatics
whose work they are doing. If the West surrenders, the left will
undoubtedly be the first to be killed. (Has any leftist asked
themselves why the terrorists would pick liberal, multicultural
New York to attack?)
For years
Britain has tolerated Imams who have preached hatred of Britain
right
in their midst. For years Britain has tolerated
Imams who have celebrated the violence that Britain’s enemies
promise and the violence Britain’s enemies deliver. And
now they have paid the price for their tolerance. Or a price.
Because the war in Europe is only beginning.
The lesson of London is that tolerance can kill you.
It is time
for the West to begin to set limits to the suicidal softness
it considers
its soul. We can no longer afford to tolerate
hate directed against us, particularly hate that emanates from
religious pulpits and supports murder in God's name. We can no
longer tolerate hate that is directed at us because we think
we are powerful and the hate can’t hurt us.
The lesson of London is that it can.
The Imams of hate and their followers and their secular defenders
in the West are self-declared enemies who need to be watched
closely by all of us from now on. They need to be watched in
their Mosques, and in their civil liberties fronts to defend
their captured, and in the political groups that have declared
we are the enemy and they are the victims. When these domestics
step over the line, they need to be prosecuted. If they are aliens
who hate us, they need to be deported.
A lesson
of London for the British themselves is that they need a British
Patriot
Act. Their frontline protectors are as hamstrung
as ours were before 9/11. The Patriot Act criminalizes not only
terror but “material support for terror.” It allows
the FBI to surveil not only groups that have committed a crime
against us, but groups that have demonstrated the passion and
the will to commit crimes against us. The Patriot Act allows
law enforcement to surveil the threats that come from our enemies
within. That is why the left is up in arms against the Patriot
Act: They want to strike down the provisions that allow us to
keep an eye on them.
The stakes are high. These homemade London bombs, apparently
not the work of professionals, killed more than fifty people
and injured more than seven hundred. A dirty nuclear bomb in
an American city is not something we will be able to just take
in stride.
Our internal
problem from those who hate us is as big as Britain’s,
perhaps even bigger. I am growing weary of watching American
apologists for Islamic terror and opponents of our self-defenses
treated as “liberals” and as though the most important
thing for the rest of us to do, is avert our eyes from the malice
in their hearts and pretend that it's American politics as usual.
We are trained in complacency by the genius of our democratic
political system. Though passions run high, the stakes in our
elections are remarkably low. One side loses an election. No
one dies. No one goes to jail. In America politics can seem like
a game.
Friday night
I was watching my friend Alan Colmes, who is a decent liberal
but
doesn’t like the war. The guest on Hannity & Colmes
was Kevin
Danaher, husband of Medea
Benjamin and a leader of
the indecent
left that unlike Alan wants us to lose the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel to the enemy force. Danaher
and his wife who are leaders of Global Exchange and Code Pink
and Iraq Occupation Watch, the campaign to dissuade American
youngsters from serving in our country, are at work day and night
to cripple our lines of homeland defense, from the protections
afforded by the Patriot Act to the military forces who are keeping
our enemies at bay in the field.
The discussion
on Hannity & Colmes was about the violence
of the anarcho-marxists who were raining rocks on the G8 meeting
in Scotland which the terrorist bombs were designed to disrupt.
In other words, they were conducting violence to parallel ends.
The rocks they were throwing were large enough to kill a man.
Danaher, who is a leader of the global anti-capitalist left that
staged the attacks would not condemn the rock throwers but was
smart enough to disapprove violence in the abstract – or
the violence of “both sides” – which he knew
meant nothing. It was his people who were attacking. To condemn
those defending themselves in the same breath is to propose that
they become defenseless, which is exactly his plan.
Colmes was
frustrated because he understood that Danaher’s
position, as he was arguing it, was suspect but since Danaher
was against the war Alan wanted to coach him to do better. “Look,” Colmes
began, “I agree with your agendas, but…”
No he doesn’t agree with Danaher's true agendas. Alan
Colmes doesn’t have the foggiest notion of who Kevin Danaher
is or what his malicious and deadly intentions really are. Liberals
like Alan Colmes have up to now protected the anti-American left
by pretending that it is all a game. People who denounce the
President as Adolf Hitler and America as Hitler’s Germany
are "foolish" and don’t really mean it. Well
actually some are not so foolish and do.
This is the
lesson of London: Take the hostile force within your country
and within
your political coalition seriously. It’s
not a game anymore.
This is something
I learned in my years on the left. All too often, people mean
what they say. Make no mistake, those who
talk revolution and war against our country are quite capable
of acting on their talk – of aiding and abetting those
who are already at war and want to kill us. When the day comes
that they step over the line and translate their words into action,
they will do it with the best of intentions: to make the world
a better place. That is the reason they are so dangerous. Like
Mohammed Atta who did it for Allah, they will do it for a noble
cause.
Understand this, and you will understand that people who use
the language of war need to be isolated and regarded with care.
Understand this, and you will understand that those who describe
America as Hitler's Germany can be dangerous, and need to be
watched.
I myself
understand that this is a disturbing thought to any American.
It is disturbing
to me. But in the aftermath of London
it would be foolish to deny that such a precaution is also a
necessary one. The infamous Ward Churchill began by describing
ordinary Americans as “little Eichmanns.” He has
already moved on to inciting military personnel to kill their
officers. And to inciting college students to applaud military
personnel who do. As a matter of progressive duty, mind you.
Can anyone be confident that there are no Ward Churchill disciples
listening to his words who might take them seriously and put
them into practice? Anyone remember John Walker Lindh?
Nazi Germany
is a symbol of evil. There is not a man or woman who calls
himself “progressive” who
does not also think of themselves as a person who would destroy
evil if given
the chance. The purpose of identifying America with Nazi Germany
is to hate America. To hate us. The purpose of this hatred is
to engage in the task of destroying the evil. In this case, that
means us.
Yes, we have rights in this country that guarantee to radicals
who want to destroy us the privilege to telegraph their homicidal
agendas. But this does not deprive the rest of us of the right
to defend ourselves as well.
The beginning of this defense is to take
their words seriously,
remember London, and understand that this is no longer a game. tOR
This
opinion piece first appeared at FrontPageMagazine.com reprinted
by permission of David Horowitz. Copyright 2005
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