Liberal self-hatred masquerading as a concern for human rights was the primary reason why it was so easy for a complicated and lethal attack to be planned and carried out without coming to the attention of American intelligence agencies. It was more important for the Clinton administration to be sensitive to the utopian concerns of the progressive elites and the one-world kleptocrats who make up the U.N. than to protect the American people.
America the brutalizer! Osama bin Laden, our blood-drenched terrorist enemy, is not exactly one of your huddled masses. He is a Saudi prince! Abdel Rahman, architect of the first World Trade Center bombing, is a sheik! Brutalization is not their problem. They are brutes! Like other radical zealots, they are driven by the fanatic conviction that God is on their side and those who do not share their faith -- in our case, Christians and Jews -- are infidels worthy of destruction.
In May 1998, three years before the destruction of the World Trade Center, bin Laden was asked by ABC News reporter John Miller why he had called upon all Muslims to kill Americans, even if they were civilians. "Allah ordered us to purify Muslim lands of all nonbelievers," answered the murderous chieftan. "We are surprised this question is coming from Americans. American history does not distinguish between civilians and military, and not even women and children. They are the ones who used the bombs against Nagasaki.. America does not have a religion that will prevent it from destroying all people. We believe that the biggest thieves in the world and the terrorists are the Americans. We are sure of Allah's victory and our victory against the Americans and the Jews as promised by the prophet, peace be upon him. We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as United States."
Is this clear enough? This holy war is not about American acts. It is about who we are. It is not a war that can be negotiated. It is them or us.
This is the hour for America to take care of itself; to take steps to defend itself. America must be hard where it has been soft, calculating where it has been sensitive, strong where it has been weak. Osama bin Laden is impressed with American weakness, the very kind of weakness urged again on America in this crisis, by appeasers like John Lahr. "We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier who is ready to wage Cold Wars and unprepared to fight long wars," bin Laden has stated. "This was proven in Beirut when Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. We are ready for all occasions. We rely on Allah."
On the day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, I appeared on a Fox TV program in San Diego and did my best to steer the discussion toward the steps America must take to defend herself, to carry the war to the enemy camp. But the host would have none of it. While thousands of Americans writhed in agony in the twisted steel of the Trade Center, she wanted to discuss the danger of American "hysteria," the "threat" that American prejudice might pose to Muslims in our midst. It did not even occur to her that if Americans were prejudiced in a way that made this issue pressing, these terrorists would never have been trained as pilots by American companies, housed in American homes or ignored by American security agents at the airports where they hijacked the airliners in order to convert them into bombs.
For years now, our classrooms have been taught by America-disparagers like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Many of us have children in schools and universities who, even in this hour of mourning, are being lectured by their teachers on America's sins and why we are reaping what we have sown. The political friends of Ayers and Dohrn have been busily at work for the last two decades seeding our educational culture with anti-American poisons that could one day destroy us.
A visit to a well-traveled Web site "for the progressive community" reveals how profoundly America has been rejected and how passionately its bloodthirsty enemies have been embraced by significant sections of our population, even as we enter a life-and-death struggle with an enemy that wants to exterminate us:
-- "Not only have we caused these events with our monstrous foreign policies but also with our complete disregard of our environment causing mortal damage to the Earth (Earth is a living being) and other species that co-exist with us." Susan Yost, Cumberland, Va.
-- "My heart went out to all the people there as I sat watching, waiting, and then sadness filled me, sadness that the foreign policy of this country has come back to haunt us; sadness that our government has been so arrogant that a lesson like this occurred; It is U.S. policies of terror in other countries that have brought this down on us." Matthew A. Peckham, Eugene, Ore.
-- "Our corporate entities not only run this country but have decimated many other small countries in ways we cannot even fathom. This is a wake-up call America. It is time to change our ways." Rich Cianflone, Colorado
--"The United States conducts itself as a terrorist organization throughout the world." Lance Del Goebel, Manhattan, Illinois
--"U.S. foreign policy has come home to roost today ... we are reaping what we have sown." Glynn Ash
America, the Great Satan.
These comments, and those from such well-known anti-American extremists as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn in recent days, could have been cribbed from bin Laden's friend, Saddam Hussein, whose response to the air terror attacks was as follows: "Notwithstanding the conflicting human feelings about what happened in America yesterday, America is reaping the thorns sown by its rulers in the world. Those thorns have not only bloodied the feet and the hearts of many, but also the eyes of people shedding tears on their dead whose souls have been reaped by America." Saddam then invoked a litany of misdeeds that could have come from a Chomsky primer: "There is no place that does not have a symbolic monument that shows America's criminal acts against these victims, whether in Japan that was the first to be seared by the nuclear destruction weapons boasted by America, or Vietnam, Iraq ... or the criminal acts the U.S. is now perpetrating by supporting the criminal racist Zionism against our heroic Palestinian people."
Last Tuesday was indeed a "wake-up call" -- but not for liberals to escalate their anti-American crusade. It's time for everyone to rally to our country's defense. Even people like Bill Ayers appreciate on some level what an extraordinary nation they have the good fortune to call home. I interviewed Ayers 10 years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner-city children. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: "Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."
It is indeed a great country. A country worth fighting for.
About the writer
David Horowitz is a Salon columnist. For more articles by and about Horowitz, visit his archive.
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