Do you think the State Department noticed that no one in Arizona, Mexico, or even Mars took to the streets to celebrate the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords? No one seemed to think it was a “natural” act — the Islamic term du jour to rationalize the throat-slitting massacre of a sleeping Jewish family: 36-year-old Udi Fogel, his 35-year-old wife, Ruth, and, yes, their three children: 11-year-old Yoav, 4-year-old Elad, and Hadas, their 3-month-old baby.
There had been about a week between this most hideous Muslim barbarity and . . . well, the last hideous Muslim barbarity. On that one, the Obama administration could not bring itself to label as “terrorism” a Kosovar jihadist’s gory attack on American airmen in Germany.
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Arid Uka had opened fire in a sneak attack at the Frankfurt airport, killing two and seriously wounding two others while screaming the obligatory “Allahu Akbar!” Wasn’t that a terrorist attack? Gee whiz, you know, the State Department’s chief spokesman just couldn’t say. After all, in P. J. Crowley’s mindless yet seemingly inevitable comparison, “was the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords a terrorist attack?”
Muslims are frequently found carrying out the Koranic directive to “strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” Actually, make that the Koranic theme, so often is it reiterated in the scriptures devout Muslims take to be the verbatim commands of Allah. (See, e.g., Suras 3:151, 8:12–13, 8:60, 9:5, 33:25–27, 59:2–4, 59:13.) And that is beside the hadith, scriptures in which Mohammed, taken to be the perfect Muslim role model, boasts, “I have been made victorious with terror.” (Bukhari 4.52.220 — just scroll down from here, through the glories promised to Muslims who wage jihad against the infidels.)
Muslims, in fact, are more often exhorted by their scriptures to brutalize non-Muslims than Christians are urged by the gospels to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. Yet, though we assume the latter are meant to take the message to heart, we are somehow sure Islam doesn’t really mean what it says — that when Muslims strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, it must be Israel’s fault, or America’s, or something, anything, other than Islam, the only common denominator in these attacks.
For U.S. officials, it is a bridge too far to acknowledge the welter of doctrinal grounding that supports these atrocities. Sort the deranged likes of Jared Loughner from the ideologically driven adherents of Islam? Observe the chasm between mentally disturbed killers and mentally conditioned killers? No way.
So here’s a suggestion: Maybe our paralyzed policy makers could see their way clear to noticing how Muslims respond to Muslim jihadists: Like the Muslims across the globe who cheered the 9/11 attacks; like those who littered Arid Uka’s Facebook with such commentary as, “Way to go, you old killer!” and “That is part of this beautiful religion. One is allowed to fight the unbelievers when attacked.”
Maybe then the American government could be as revolted as the American people are by the celebrations in Gaza over last Friday’s murder of the Fogel family (or nearly the whole family — three of the children managed to survive). Gaza, of course, is controlled by Hamas, the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. You may know the Brothers as the “largely secular” “moderates” the Obama administration and the European Union see as part of the solution to the strife currently rippling through one Islamic country after another — a studiously underreported staple of which is Jew-hatred, with mob promises to conquer Jerusalem and depictions of dictators like Mubarak and Qaddafi as Israeli spies.
This reminds me of an episode of the classic wartime radio show "The Life of Riley" when William Bendix is with his lodge brothers laughing and drinking while passing around pictures of radiation victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a riot, even for today! Oh wait, there never was an episode like that. Americans do not celebrate such things, even against a hated enemy.
Clearly, our administration fears our possible responses to jihadist violence more than the daily outrages of Islam. Avoiding the "T-word" is clearly not for Islam's benefit or diplomatic sensitivity, but to keep white, christian America's temper from boiling over. So low is their opinion of us. Don't believe it? Remember in the aftermath of the Fort Hood murders Janet Napalitano's "preemptive" apology to the muslim world for all the mosques she seemed to think we were going to burn down?
Strange piece. There were lots of people in the US who celebrated the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you consider them monsters? No of course not, since when we kill the innocent, we always do it for a reason. That is the logic isn't it? And that makes everything ok?
Mr. McCarthy - Superb (and, implicitly, good answer to Peter Wehner in Commentary Contentions). The SIDS has struck again in Israel: Satanic Ideology of Death Syndrome.
@Ingen: America was at war with Japan, and the Japanese were going to fight to the last man, woman and child. See for example Okinanawa. Had America not dropped the bomb, many, many Americans and Japanese, or their offsprings, would not be alive today. The bomb was a terrible calculus, but one that had to be pursued to save the Japaneses from themselves.
My dad was one of the soldiers who would have fought on Japan's shores, and city by city. Many more would have died had we had to take it the way we fought in Germany. Of the WWII vets I know, and the public film footage I've seen, there was no American rejoicing over the deaths of innocents, but rejoicing that the war was over and won. What the Japanese did in WWII was a little different than building settlements, defending yourselves from terrorist attacks and attacks by other nations, or any other contrived "reason" for the un-jihad . There's nothing holy about them.
They are in a different moral universe. If you can't see that, well, there's nowhere to go from there.
Andrew, you have written many brilliant articles on this subject. I just hope that some policy makers wake up before it's too late. The problem is Islam itself. What possible good can come from a belief system that is founded on the words and actions of a monstrous individual like Muhammad? As you note here,many of the actions, the exhortations, the justifications, and the pronouncements of Muhammad are barbaric and they enable millions of muslims to define barbarism as virtue. No good can come of Islam doctrines; they are worse than evil.
As you have also pointed out many times, large swathes of the non-muslim world seem intent on denying these obvious facts. It seems that this truth is simply too terrible for many people to face.
Your articles are so refreshing for their lucidity and courageousness.
The Palestinians believe that the land is as much theirs as the Jews and are thus fighting a fundamental battle against an occupying force. American has aligned itself with the interests of Israel but that does not reflexively diminish the position of the Palestinians. It is difficult to predict how America would react if ruled by an "occupying power." Morals are relative and might makes right.
It has been said before that if the Arabs laid down their weapons, there would be no conflict. If the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be no Israel.
At the conclusion of World War II, there was no American desire, intent or plan to wipe Italy, Japan or Germany off the map.
Jihadists are not interested in the defeat of Israel so much as they are the extinction of Israel. You can not compare that to any action by the US in WW II.
So if the Palestinians laid down their arms, the Israelis would leave the occupied territories? Dismantle illegal settlements? Recognize a Paletinian nation? Somehow I don't think that's true and the Wikileaks cable dump shows otherwise as well. So what "Shamed" really means is that if the Palestinians lay down arms, the Israelis will be happy to treat them as second-class citizens and steal their land. Check.
That comparison between those two Japanese cities that we nuked (the best solution, by the way) and that terror attack on that family, is way off the base:
1) It was the Japanese government that started that war by killing our people. It was Palestinians and other Muslims that started killing the Jews in Israel, Israel has just been defending itself: Israel has the means to wipe out all Palestinians in a matter of a week. They have a huge power in their hands, but they're people. If the Palestinians had that kinda weapons, all Jews in Israel would be turned into ashes right away.
2) If we had had the ability to pinpoint Japanese soldiers only, we woulda done it straight away. But that kinda technology wasn't there and doesn't exist even today. Even if we assume that those Palestinian terrorists were doing the right thing using force to drive the Jews out of the West Bank (but that's not the case), wasn't it possible to slaughter the parents (the threat) without slaughtering the kids? Of course it was, they used knives, not an aircraft bomb. They coulda wasted the parents without killing the kids.
3) We dropped those nukes to stop a war and to avoid millions more deaths, and not because we wanted to cancel the Japanese people from off the face of the earth. What's Hamas' and other Palestinian terror organizations' publicly declared objective? Everybody knows.
"Strange piece. There were lots of people in the US who celebrated the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you consider them monsters? No of course not, since when we kill the innocent, we always do it for a reason. That is the logic isn't it? And that makes everything ok?"
Hmm, what a strange thing to say since it was the Japanese that started the war with us first. On top of this, aren't Americans helping the Japanese in their current time of need? Get back to me when the Jews suffer an earthquake and the first to offer assistance are the Palestinians (assuming the Earth doesn't swallow them up at the same time).
@Smither-Jones: Whoever is right, there is no excuse, no apology, and no defense for the atrocity in Itamar. BTW The only reason the Arabs are there is that they stole it from the Byzantine Empire (aka Roman Empire in the East) who stole it from the Jews/Israelites (who stole it from the Canaanites). But that is the way of the world. The Israelis have as much claim to it as do the Franks to France, the Anglo-Saxons to England, the Slavs to Eastern Europe, the Turks to Turkey or the Americans to America. There is nothing illegal about Itamar, Israel having won it fair and square in a defensive war.
Most major religious movements can be boiled down to a few basic tenets that provide the guidelines for most behaviors.
The Christian tenet for dealing with opposition to their beliefs is "turn the other cheek." The Muslim tenet for dealing with opposition to their beliefs is MURDER the opposition.
That explains the behavior in question here. It's no more complicated than that.
I see the moral equivalence brigade is out in force this morning. Let's not talk about the young family that was targeted and murdured. Let's not talk about the Gazan celebration of the event. Let's change the subject and talk about American sins instead. We're just as bad as they are. Who are we to condemn murder, murderers, and celebrations of murderers?
According to the UN and the international court of justice the settlements are in violation of Geneva Conventions.
However, I agree, this crime is an atrocity. These comments tend to run away from the specifics of the crims in questions (as does Mr. McCarthy)but I want to be clear that while I disagree with Israel, I'm not a criminal (or even Hamas) apologist.
@MikeB
Well certainly the proposal is not to annihilate the Muslim peoples from the earth. And you KNOW FULL WELL that it isn't the point of the excellent articles that A. McCarthy has been writing. What is your goal in this, MikeB? What is your moral ground? Appeasement? Look the other way?
Be assimilated?
The point here is to recognize that the writing and the current teachings within their religion teaches them to eradicate and terrorize non-muslims. We observe that muslims (particularly Palestinians by evidence of this article) desire to eliminate the Jewish peoples, not merely regain some land that they "believe" is theirs. Many, many muslims are actively pursuing these goals. Many more CELEBRATE the most gruesome detials of exploits of murderers.
If we fail to recognize the difference between warfare and genocidal tendencies, we will not respond the way we should as a nation and as a people. If we are any longer "a" people.
WE RECOGNIZE IT. Whether a conservative puts the number of bad apples at 800 million or a liberal puts the number at 80 million, we recognize the problem.
MikeB:
Since almost no one other thatn Mr.McCarthy seems willing to even acknowledge the problem he identifies, I'd say he wins. Kingdom of blind, one-eyed man, etc.
I'm so sorry to read the comments for this ridicules piece of leade "article"
If you all don't know, Islam & its followers have been around over one thousand four hundred years. Why this last 10 or 30 or 60 years we are hearing about "Terrorist Muslems, Jihad, Quran,& etc...Just think about it. Way? Go search for yourself to see which nation, group of people,as is fashionable these days,or religion "terrorised through the available history. For instance, look at the US history who terrorized & massacred Native American, who terrorized & salved the Africans, who terrorized & owned the salves, who terrorized & lynched the African- Americans....
The pentagon & the government hire "writers" like this guy to change public opinion with this kind of piece s...
You have a brain, so us it. THINK!
