Is America Awake?

Ten Years Later,

They Still Want

To Kill Us All.

Do We Know It?

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has created a media stir of considerable magnitude. The tenth anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1951, caused relatively little stir. But by then, we had won World War II.

Anxiety has been augmented by the authorities reporting a "credible threat" of another terrorist attack on the date of the catastrophe in 1991. By the time you read this, another attack may or may not have occurred. If it did, it most likely was on a far lesser scale than 9/11, but may still inflict substantial damage and attract world attention. Unfortunately, to many people in other countries, an attack on the United States would be a cause for rejoicing.

Police Commissioner Kelly tells us that in the last ten years, thirteen credible plots to attack New York City have been foiled. In an article yesterday from The Daily Beast, John Avlon reports that nationwide 45 jihadist terrorist plots have been thwarted since 9/11. Some, like the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, failed only because of the clumsiness of the plotter. Others were stopped by the excellent work of our intelligence community. Whatever the case, it is conceivable that some day our lucky streak will come to an end.

Meanwhile, the American people have differing levels of awareness as to threat of terror. Our government seems reluctant to think of this ongoing danger as directly related to a radical branch of Islam, which it clearly is. The army report on the Fort Hood massacre, where an Islamist army major, who had made no secret of where his sympathies lay, murdered 13 American soldiers on a military base in Texas, tiptoed around the issue of why Major Nidal Malik Hasan acted the way he did. And army psychiatrists approved his performance despite hearing his tirades about infidels.

Another fact that has remained below the radar screen is that "according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, in 2009 at least 43 American citizens or residents aligned with Sunni militant groups or their ideology were charged or convicted of terrorism crimes in the United States or elsewhere, the highest number in any year since 9/11." One incident in 2009, hardly remembered today, occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas when a Muslim convert, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the former Carlos Bledsoe, shot at soldiers waiting in line outside a military recruiting office, killing one soldier and injuring another. Many similar incidents have not been widely reported; they have become too common to attract great notice unless there are a number of fatalities.

The departure of American-born Muslim youths from Minnesota to join the jihad in Somalia, although not a crime, is cause for concern. Some of these young men were killed on the battlefield, one was slain when he tried to return to the United States.

A web of organizations in the United States have defended radical terrorists on First Amendment grounds as exercising their religious freedom. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is as follows:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There is nothing in the First Amendment protecting bomb makers, or people who commit acts of violence or exhort others to do so. Far beyond shouting 'fire' in crowded theaters, there are ideologues who would set fires in crowded theaters, or buses, or subways if they could. Just this Tuesday, Agron Hasbajrami, an Albanian citizen who had been living legally in Brooklyn since 2008, was arrested and indicted by a grand jury on charges that he provided material support to terrorists and had been planning to join a radical Islamic group in Pakistan. He had purchased a one-way ticket to Istanbul.

The struggle against Islamic terrorism is one that will continue well into the future. It has by no means ended with the death of Osama bin Laden. It is different from our previous wars in that it is not fought by national armies over defined territories, and concluded with the victory of one side and the surrender of the other. The enemy here is a malignant ideology which believes, as a matter of faith, that non-believers must become subservient to one particular theology, and that all who do not should be required to pay tribute, or be put to death..

That may sound ridiculous to you, but if millions of people believe it and thousands act on it, the matter is quite serious. And there may be billions of people who, even if they do not necessarily believe it and are highly unlikely to act on it, would not be enormously upset if that ideology prevailed and Earth became a theocracy.

The struggle for freedom and democracy, values we take for granted, can be a lonely effort. Another human impulse is submission, the desire to be guided by someone else and freed from personal responsibility. We saw that in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, and in Germany in the 1930's. Circumstances do not require everyone to feel that way, just enough party members to control the government, the army and the police who rule the country.

With the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the world has become more dangerous. The ability of individual non-state actors to do enormous damage has increased substantially and will continue to do so. Technology has brought a dazzling parade of inventions in recent years, especially in communications. The dark side is the ability of bad men to do evil, and we are not worried at this time about the world being ruled by mutant robots.

The survival of representative governments is complicated by the fact that many law-abiding people are unable or unwilling to identify and confront the enemy, despite repeated incidents of violence, like the mass killings in peaceful Norway, of all places. Sure the attackers can be called crazy, but their insanity sometimes takes the form of murdering others on behalf of particular causes. The Norway nut hated Muslims, and his act shows that violence is not confined by ethnicity or ideology. The Son of Sam obeyed his dog and killed retail, but that was 35 years ago, before the AK-47.

It makes good sense, however, to look for violence in or near places where it has occurred, and among people who have repeatedly committed violent aggressive. And it is important that the entire society be made aware of what is going on. The jihadists state their goals openly, as Adolf Hitler did in Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926. He followed his course unimpeded for thirteen years, while civilized Westerners, exemplified by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, averted their gaze and swallowed Hitler's lies.

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it is as important to look to the future as it is to honor the heroes and recall the past. Our efforts should be devoted to seeing that no such tragedy occurs again, and that the people of the United States and other nations be roused from their self-centered stupor, and begin to take actions to protect themselves before it is too late. At this point in world history, it appears highly unlikely, at least to us, that time is on our side.

StarQuest #778 9.9.2011 1231 words

Terminated

Bin Laden Came to Timely End

Killer of Thousands Is Executed

By U.S., Home of Many Victims

Not to write about Osama bin Laden this week would be to ignore an event of historic importance.

He is directly responsible for the death of almost three thousand New Yorkers, a figure surpassed most notably by Hitler, who is primarily accountable for the tragedy of World War II. Mao Tse-Tung, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, and various African genocidal tyrants were also mass murderers, but usually employed more primitive means than the Nazi fuhrer and the Wahhabi devotee.

Bin Laden was terminated with extreme prejudice by well-trained Americans who, we presume, followed the instructions they were given. The thought that he should have been taken alive is naive. Who would try him? On what authority? How would a sentence be carried out? How much attention would he get for years while the legal system took its protracted course? What would the International Court of Justice opine on the matter? And what consideration did the thousands of innocent civilians receive before he sent the hijacked airliners to crash into their offices?

It was clearly in the national interest to dispose of the matter on the spot, and the result was presumably dictated by the elected official who is commander-in-chief. There is a certain irony in a Nobel Peace Prize recipient personally involved in the murder of an unarmed captive, whether in the presence of his daughter or not. But think of how many lives would have been saved if Bin Laden had been stopped ten years ago, before 9-11, when President Clinton authorized the removal of Bin Laden from the planet after the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole on October 12, 2000 (perhaps a jab at Columbus Day). Clinton later said that his order was never carried out because the United States was unable to establish a military presence in Uzbekistan and because American intelligence and law enforcement agencies refused to confirm that bin Laden had authorized the bombing.

On the photo issue, I completely agree with the President. As he said, we do not spike the football after a touchdown, nor should we create an iconic image for Bin Laden's followers to venerate. The conspiracy theorists will never be satisfied, nor need they be, for the further they depart from reality, the less credible they become.

Burial at sea was also entirely appropriate. No remains, no relics, no tomb, no shrine. Life began in the sea, and it is not the worst place to decompose. As the fate of Luca Brasi, who killed far fewer people than Osama bin Laden, was poetically described by his colleagues, "He sleeps with the fishes." Besides, if he is going to meet the 72 virgins who Muslim theologians say await him in paradise, the North Arabian Sea will simply be a stop on his journey.

"With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds" begins the last paragraph of Ted Sorensen's elegant inaugural address for John F. Kennedy. We cannot speak to bin Laden's conscience, or whether he has one, but we strongly believe history will judge him harshly, as a killer of innocents, not as a builder.

Osama bin Laden did not liberate anyone from tyranny. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was harsh and oppressive, a medieval theocracy brutal to its own people. We predict that Bin Laden will be regarded over the years primarily as a mass murderer, who employed the ingenious method of hijacking jet planes whose tanks were filled with gasoline. He caused the death of thousands of innocents as part of a deluded conspiracy to re-establish the Caliphate and rule the world. The lesson of his life is how much harm one individual can do using modern technology.

Three years before 9-11, the bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on August 7, 1998, with simultaneous explosions injuring thousands of people, primarily Africans, should have alerted the world to the menace of Bin Laden. In the two bombings 223 people were killed. Ironically, only twelve were Americans.

His battle with the world may come in part from sibling rivalry, he was the 17th of 54 progeny of his father, and if Mohammed bin Laden had not been killed in a plane crash in 1967, when Osama was 10 years old, there would have been more. The plane, a company-owned Beechcraft, was piloted by an American who misjudged the landing.

Osama's mother was reportedly looked down upon by her husband's 21 other wives (but no more than four at a time, pursuant to religious law.) She was of Syrian birth, while the other wives were Saudi Arabian. Who knows what effect his father's death or his mother's isolation had on Osama's personality, particularly his lack of regard for the lives of others?

It was also interesting to learn that, rather than wandering in the wilderness as Moses did, or moving at night from cave to cave to avoid detection, as many imagined, Osama was residing in comfort in a military town not far from Islamabad, with goats brought regularly for him and his entourage to consume.

Much more will be written about Bin Laden and his remarkable career. But if he had to bedescribed in one word on his non-existent tombstone, we suggest that "murderer" rather than "martyr" would be an appropriate appellation.

The world is better off without this sociopath, but much more must be done to assure that other mass killers, with even more powerful weapons, are not enabled through the apathy or ignorance of free countries, to pursue their destructive course. It has always been easier to destroy than to build, and as the years pass, weapons of mass destruction will be more dispersed. The combination of religious fanaticism and the capacity to destroy civilization present our planet with its greatest challenge since the extinction of our ancestors, the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago.