Fouling their own nests

posted at 2:19 pm on July 14, 2010 by Steven Den Beste

Sometimes a zealot is his own worst enemy. That’s been one of the interesting aspects of the War on Terror: in places where al Qaeda or the Taliban gain control, and implement their extremist policies, they soon make the locals hate them. The result, eventually, has been backlash. That’s what led to the Anbar Awakening, where the local Sunnis decided they were better off allying with the Americans than the extremists.

The Islamists are experts at fouling their own nests. They gained some credibility with the legendary “Muslim Street” with their attacks in New York, Washington, London, and Madrid. But certain behind-the-scenes intelligence gathering operations soon shut most of that down, and instead of redoubling their efforts to put together attacks on the West, they began to choose easier targets.

Which is to say, they began to target fellow Muslims. At this point, the vast majority of innocents killed by al Qaeda are Muslims, not “Crusaders”. And this, too, has discredited them.

But it’s the way they rule once they have full control in an area which really has harmed them most. When trying to seduce a local population to gain support, they make all kinds of promises and what they say seems to sound pretty good. However, once they win and take control, they implement their real agenda — and usually end up inspiring a huge backlash.

Isn’t it interesting that the Democrats in the US also seem to have fouled their own nest? I’m not suggesting that the Democrats are in any other important way the same as al Qaeda, but they did make all kinds of pie-in-the-sky promises in the 2008 election campaign.

And having won the White House and a huge majority in both chambers of Congress, they too showed their true colors — and American voters don’t like what they’re seeing. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that the majority hate it.

Traditionally the party out of power makes big gains in the mid-term election, but we seem to be heading into a historical blow-out for the Republicans. If that happens, the Democrats will have no one but themselves to blame for it.

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