By refusing to even accurately name who the enemy is, this administration (and to a certain extent the Bush administration as well) is showing that it is not really serious about winning the war. Instead, both administrations do verbal gymnastics in describing our enemies as “a small group of extremists” which is utter nonsense. Islamofascism counts hundreds of millions of sympathizers throughout the world and platitudes such as “Islam is a great religion which a few extremists are trying to hijack” is a falsehood. All the presidential visits to Mosques are not going to win us any friends or make us any safer.
by Charles Krauthammer
The Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber, the Times Square attacker. On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:
Rep. Lamar Smith (R.,Texas): Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?
Attorney General Eric Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. . . .
–
Smith: Okay, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people—
Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.
Potentially, mind you. This went on until the questioner gave up in exasperation.
A similar question arose last week in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad: “One has to understand where I’m coming from. . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.”
Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as “SoA”: Soldier of Allah.
[…]
Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.
The Pentagon report on the Fort Hood shooter runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan’s Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor.”
Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers were of various national origin, occupation, age, social class, native tongue, and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.
[…]
Churchill famously mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. But his greatness lay not just in eloquence but in his appeal to the moral core of a decent people to rise against an ideology the nature of which Churchill never hesitated to define and describe — and to pronounce (“Nahhhhzzzzi”) in an accent dripping with loathing and contempt.
No one is asking Obama or Holder to match Churchill’s rhetoric — just Shahzad’s candor.
Read the rest: Terror – and Candor
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
