Remember…We ARE At War

Remember…We ARE At War

Wednesday, June 06, 2007 12:45 PM

Patriot Post

2007|23|Chronicle

THE FOUNDATION: NATIONAL DEFENSE

“The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed.” —Alexander Hamilton

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

“This time it was John F. Kennedy International Airport. Nothing new about big-city airports—seven years ago, Los Angeles International Airport was targeted. Nothing new about New York City, either. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, and finally destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. The United Nations complex, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the FBI’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal—they’ve all been on the hit list. Big Western cities, in fact, are the hit list. New York, L.A., Chicago, Washington, London, Paris, Madrid… on it goes. And, of course, there is nothing new about the culprit. The story is always the same: radical Islamic terror. The storyline is the same, too. But an element of Western opinion always wants to obscure it, turning a blind eye to the ideology of hate that motivates these would-be murderers. The root-causes crowd has little interest in that root cause. No, it must be poverty (even when the terrorists turn out to be comfortable, well-educated, and fully employed); or the Palestinian issue (even though organizations like al Qaeda have barely mentioned the Israeli Palestinian dispute, and some terror targets, like Bali, had no rational connection to it); or, it goes without saying, George W. Bush and ‘his’ war in Iraq (no matter how many attacks occurred before his presidency). … But even if the grand design was beyond the cell’s competence, an attempt could well have killed hundreds of people. As with the recent thwarting of a jihadist plot on Fort Dix, this intended atrocity appears to have been prevented by the cooperation of federal and local law enforcement, who managed to infiltrate the conspiracy with an informant—proving, yet again, that if we are to stop terror attacks rather than react to them, there is no substitute for human intelligence. The deepest lesson here, though, is that we are at war with an enemy that hates us, that will stop at nothing—even death—to harm us, and that we must understand in order to defeat. That is the first step in the real battle of ideas.” —National Review

Studies In Islam (Jihadism) will give a clue or two about the enemies we face.

“You know that minor deal about catching those guys who wanted to blow up JFK Airport? The New York Times decided it was not worthy of front page coverage in its Sunday editions. Nor the second page, nor the third. The NY Times, in what can only be described as editorializing by placement, put it on page THIRTY, the page after the obituaries and the page before the chess column.” —Rich Galen