17 sailors were killed. 39 more were wounded. The 17 sailors who died left behind 11 children. Never forget the names of the fallen who gave their lives in service to our country.

1. Electronics Technician 1st Class Richard Costelow
2. Mess Management Specialist Lakina Francis
3. Information Systems Technician Tim Guana
4. Signalman Seaman Recruit Cherone Gunn
5. Seaman James McDaniels
6. Engineman 2nd Class Mark Nieto
7. Electronics Warfare Technician 3rd Class Ronald Owens
8. Seaman Recruit Lakiba Parker
9. Engineman Fireman Joshua Parlett
10. Fireman Apprentice Patrick Roy
11. Electronics Warfare Technician Kevin Rux
12. Petty Officer 3rd Class Ron Santiago
13. Operations Special 2nd Class Timothy Sanders
14. Fireman Gary Swenchonis Jr
15. Ensign Andrew Triplett
16. Seaman Apprentice Craig Wibberly
17. Hull Maintenance Technician 3rd Class Kenneth Clodfelter.

This was a deliberate act of war by the Al Qaeda organization, and it went ignored by the Clinton administration. The Bush administration responded on November 3, 2002, when the CIA fired a AGM-114 Hellfire missile from a Predator UAV at a vehicle carrying Abu Ali al-Harithi, a suspected planner of the bombing plot and Ahmed Hijazi, a U.S. citizen. Both men died. Now, the Obama administration has shelved prosecution of Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the bombing.

Indeed, October 12 has become a forgotten day of infamy. Don’t let the memory of the horror of that day fade away, and don’t let the memories of the sailors who were murdered die. Remember their sacrifices today. Remember the Cole.

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

The moral contrast lies in what we were willing to do before 9/11 and what we are willing to do today.  The basis for comparison is strong:  the character of information that tipped us to the threat before 9/11 was the same thing as what tipped us to the threat being revealed this week.  Consider these passages from one of ABC’s earliest reports on the current plan against Europe and the US (linked by AP here):

A senior US official said that while there is a “credible” threat, no specific time or place is known. President Obama has been briefed about the threat, say senior US officials…

In testimony before Congress last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, “We are all seeing increased activity by a more diverse set of groups and a more diverse set of threats.”

And this one from Newsweek (h/t AP again; link at top):

For weeks now, as missiles from American drones have snuffed out their leaders and terrorized their recruits in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, Al Qaeda fighters have kept their spirits up by telling each other they were about to have their revenge. “It’s like they’ve just been waiting for news, as if they were all excited about something big about to happen in the West,” says an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer known to NEWSWEEK who operates as a liaison between his organization and Al Qaeda.

A credible threat; no specific time or place known; increased activity by multiple groups; terrorist operatives talking about “something big” that was going to be done against the West – that describes perfectly the organized information US and other Western authorities had to work with before 9/11.

What we did not have before 9/11 was a military occupation and a cooperative government in Afghanistan, a detention center for terrorists in Bagram, a detainee interrogation program, the agreements with dozens of nations to take preemptive action against terrorists, or the willingness on our part to repeatedly conduct military attacks on terrorists operating in other nations’ sovereign territory, even when the other nations object (as Pakistan is doing), and when the terrorists haven’t committed their atrocities against us yet.

Each one of these measures and agreements has been essential to identifying the particulars of the current plot and acting effectively to avert it.  In the absence of 9/11 itself, I cannot imagine Americans or other Western nations deciding to institute such measures or agreements.  Yet if we were not willing to occupy the territory used by terrorists, and detain terrorists, interrogate them, and attack them in their strongholds before they can pull their plans off, we would be talking this fall about smoking rubble and charred bodies in Europe instead of terrorists being killed and their plots defeated.

Actionable prior intelligence on terror plots doesn’t just happen.  The main things it takes are the things we weren’t willing to do – had no idea of doing – before 9/11.  The events of the past week have clarified that, with a starkness we haven’t seen for quite a while. Something Americans must not forget is that if we weren’t keeping the nexus of this effort overseas, the price we would be paying would not just involve taking hits from terror attacks.  Our people would be unwilling to simply do nothing and wait for the next hit.  We would be focusing “prevention” inward – with less of an operational effect, but nevertheless rapidly destroying the civil liberties that make it matter to be an American in the first place.

I have strong reservations about Obama’s heavy reliance on drone strikes, which perilously skirts an ugly, amoral cynicism.  In fact, I’m quite concerned about the direction he is taking our operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  But with the larger strategy of fighting this war forward, we must agree, if we want to keep our own freedoms and have the highest likelihood of preventing future attacks.  This war, started on George W. Bush’s terms, has had its “goods and others,” but it does ultimately represent the lowest cost of any alternative we have.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Nine years ago, our country was changed forever. On a sunny September day, we were hit by a series of coordinated Al Qaeda attacks, killing almost 3,000 innocent Americans in cold blood. Much of that day will always be remembered with feelings of horror, shock, fear, and sadness. 19 terrorists hijacked four planes. The World Trade Center in New York City was first hit. The twin towers were followed by the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The fourth plane was allegedly intended to hit the White House, but passengers fought the hijackers and crashed the plane into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The World Trade Center got the worst of the attacks, with the twin towers ultimately collapsing and destroying many other buildings in the area.

Across the country, we watched in horror as the towers collapsed. We cried as we saw people leap from the towers to their deaths in a desperate attempt to escape the flames. We listened in shock to the phone calls of the passengers on board the hijacked planes, and wept as we heard them tell their families they loved them one last time. So much of that day will always be a mix of grief, sorrow, fear, and anger.

However, there were also feelings of pride and unity that arose from the flames. We read the heroic stories and watched with pride as ordinary citizens went above and beyond the call of duty to help their fellow Americans. As horrible as 9-11 was, it reminded many of us of what makes this country so great.

This year, I wanted to spotlight just a few of the incredible heroes of that fateful day. Some of them were police officers and firefighters; others were ordinary Americans just like you and me. All of them gave their lives that day; all of them deserve to be remembered.

Moira Smith, NYPD

Officer Moira Smith was a 13 year veteran of the New York Police Department. She was married to another NYPD officer, Jimmy Smith, and had a two-year-old daughter named Patricia. Officer Smith had shown heroism in the line of duty before, earning the Police Department’s Distinguished Duty Medal for her actions during the Aug. 27, 1991 subway crash in Union Square in which five were killed and more than 130 hurt. She saved dozens of lives that day, and on September 11, she would selflessly risk her life again to help other victims get out safely.

“She was … oh, God …” Charles Barbuti, a lieutenant in the 13th Precinct and Smith’s friend, paused before continuing. “I would have to describe Moira as active, dedicated, courageous. We had indications that on a number of occasions she had come out of the World Trade Center, carrying people out, then gone back in. She had the opportunity to leave and she chose not to.”

… “She was a lot of fun,” Barbuti said. She was vivacious, she was fun-loving, she was a joy to be around. That may sound like a cliche, speaking well of people who have passed, but in her case, it was true. She made everyone around her feel comfortable. Everyone liked her. No one had a harsh word to say about her.”

Smith put her life in danger to rescue people trapped in the World Trade Center, and ultimately, made the ultimate sacrifice that day. She was posthumously awarded the New York City Police Department’s Medal of Honor for her heroism that day. Her remains were recovered in March of 2002, and an East River high-speed ferry was named for her. Of the 23 NYPD officers killed on September 11, she was the only female. She was finally laid to rest on what would have been her 39th birthday.

Welles Crowther

It was not Welles Crowther’s job to save anyone’s life on September 11. He worked for Sandler O’Neill and Partners on the 104th floor of the South Tower as an equities trader. At about 9:00 in the morning, he was on the phone in his office. His body would be recovered from the lobby along with NYFD firefighters. Having worked as a volunteer firefighter as a teenager, when disaster struck, Welles Crowther sprung into action.

They sat bloody and petrified — the lights out, smoke engulfing the room and pain searing through their bodies. There was no escape from where they were in the South Tower, in pieces after being hit by United Airlines Flight 175 as far as they could tell.

Then out of nowhere, a young man burst in and took control. In a strong, authoritative voice, he directed them to the stairway — which was veiled by darkness, wreckage and haze — telling the injured to get out and the healthy to help them down.

“I see this incredible hero, running back and forth and saving the day,” recalled Judy Wein. “In his mind, he had a duty to do — to save people.”

“He’s definitely my guardian angel — no ifs, ands or buts — because without him, we would be sitting there, waiting [until] the building came down,” echoes Ling Young.

Wein and Young were separated by a few minutes and a few floors that day, but they share a similar story and a single hero: Welles Crowther.

Both women credit the equities trader and volunteer firefighter with saving their lives and dozens of others on September 11.

Crowther has been credited with saving at least 18 lives that day, if not more. One of the people he helped escape, Ling Young, keeps a framed photo of him in her home. He exited and entered the building at least three times, helping evacuate trapped victims. He ultimately perished when he entered the building one last time before it collapsed with other firefighters, making their way up the South Tower with the “Jaws of Life” to free more people. His body was recovered March 19, 2002.

Welles Crowther was an investment banker, not a firefighter or a police officer. He could have easily just exited the building and got himself to safety with no shame whatsoever. Instead, he found the courage to go above and beyond what was required of him, helping many people out of the tower and saving countless lives.

Tom Burnett

Tom Burnett was the COO and vice president of Thoratec Corporation, a medical devices company. He had a wife, Deena, and three daughters. On September 11, he was on United Airlines Flight 93. After the plane was hijacked, he called his wife and found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Mr. Burnett phoned his wife Deena four times. In the first call he told her about the situation on the plane and asked her to call authorities. The second time he phoned, he told her that he believed their captors were going to fly the plane into the ground. “The next time he called,” Mrs. Burnett said, “I could tell they were formulating a plan.” In the last call, he reportedly said, “I know we’re going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.”

Rather than just accept his fate, Burnett decided to act. He, and a small group of other passengers, decided to fight back against the hijackers. While the plan had been to regain control of the plane, they all ultimately perished when the plane crashed in that rural Pennsylvania field. Burnett knew that this was likely to be his fate, and chose to fight back anyways.

While we will never know the exact intended target of Flight 93, it’s generally accepted that the hijackers’ target was either the White House or the US Capitol building. What would have happened if they hadn’t fought the hijackers? What would have happened if they had decided to just accept their fate? If they had gone along with the hijackers, without fighting back? It’s a thought too horrifying to even consider.

It took incredible bravery that day to fight the hijackers, knowing that even if they did, it could cost them their lives.

Leonard Hatton, FBI

Special Agent Leonard Hatton was on his way to work that morning when he saw smoke and fire coming from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He responded immediately, even though he wasn’t even tasked with responding to the emergency. From the roof of the Mariott Hotel, he reported the second plane crashing into the South Tower.

He then entered one of the towers, helping to evacuate victims until the towers fell.

He radioed the F.B.I. and relayed what he was seeing, one of his supervisors recalled, “then tried to pitch in and help as best he could.”

For Mr. Hatton, 45, that meant going into the burning buildings and getting people out. “He didn’t have to do that, but that was my husband,” Mrs. Hatton said. “He joined right in with the fire department to help people and gave his life for it.”

Special Agent Hatton was a veteran of the Marine Corps, a volunteer firefighter, and had a wife and four children. He must have been an extraordinary man — fighting fires as a volunteer firefighter, fighting for freedom as a Marine, fighting crime as an FBI agent, and finally, fighting to save lives when it wasn’t his responsibility. When everyone else was running out, he was running in.

Ronald Bucca, New York Fire Marshal

Ronald Bucca served in the Army for 29 years, serving with the 101st Airborne during active duty. He served in the Special Forces, Green Berets and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was promoted to Warrant Officer, U.S.A.R, in 2001. After being discharged from active duty, he went on to join the New York Fire Department in 1978, eventually becoming fire marshal. He continued to serve as a reservist in the Army’s Special Forces. He was a firefighter for 23 years, and would become New York’s only fire marshal ever to be killed in the line of duty.

The last I had seen Ron was on August 12, 2001, where I worked with him during a special operations mission exercise, (very similar to the events that were to unfold a month later). And since we were supposed to attend WOBC together in October, we were in constant contact. He was a great man, and someone who I began to mentor off of.

Ron responded to the WTC attacks on 9/11. He was heading towards the 74th floor of the second tower when he was separated from his supervisor, who went to help a woman out of the building. Shortly after that the towers collapsed, he was the only Fire Marshall missing until October 23, 2001. They recovered his body close to one of the stairwells. He is the first Fire Marshall to be killed in the line of duty.

Ron had saved a number of people, by assisting them in escaping from the building. Make no mistake, Ron knew what he was getting into when he entered that hell. Besides being in the MI field in the Army, Ron was also part of the terrorism task force in NYC. He even had plans in his locker of the WTC’s!. And saying all that, the man ran into the building. For those of you who have not had the opportunity to visit my city, or the downtown area, I can only tell you that it is a city onto itself. The man is a hero.

Bucca made it all the way to the 78th floor before the building collapsed. His remains were recovered from a stairwell on October 23, 2001. In recognition of his military service and his heroism on 9-11, a US Army camp in Iraq was named Camp Bucca in his honor.

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

It’s a little frustrating to know that 9-11 has been forgotten for so many people. Personally, it’s hard to sympathize with people who want us to give up in Afghanistan, who can’t understand what we’re doing there or what we’re fighting for. My husband serves our country in the Marine Corps, he’s fighting in Afghanistan right now, and he does so because of what happened on 9-11. And too many people have simply forgotten. They’ve let it go.

We owe it to everyone who died that day, to the heroes who ran in the buildings when everyone was running out, to the men and women in uniform fighting for us right now… we owe it to all of them to never forget.

Remember Michael Costello.
Remember Todd Beamer.
Remember Barbara Olson.

Remember those who, in desperation, jumped to their death.

Remember CeeCee Lyles.

Remember Kevin Cosgrove.

Remember Betty Ong.

Remember Melissa Doi.

Remember Flight 93.

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri is the alleged mastermind of the Cole bombing. Before his capture in 2002, he headed Al Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf. In 2009, the Obama administration dropped charges against al-Nashiri, and now, they’ve shelved the prosecution altogether.

The Obama administration has shelved the planned prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a court filing.

The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.”

… Military officials said a team of prosecutors in the Nashiri case has been ready go to trial for some time. And several months ago, military officials seemed confident that Nashiri would be arraigned this summer.

“It’s politics at this point,” said one military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy. He said he thinks the administration does not want to proceed against a high-value detainee without some prospect of civilian trials for other major figures at Guantanamo Bay.

Interestingly, the only two cases being prosecuted out of Guantanamo Bay are two cases that were set in motion during the Bush administration. In January 2009, though, Defense Secretary Gates had the brilliant idea to stop referring cases for trial. Over a year later, that order still stands. Is it all just politics? It certainly seems like it. What practical reason does the Obama administration actually have to not prosecute al-Nashiri? This is the man who allegedly took the lives of 17 men who were serving their country, 17 men who deserve justice. But hey, it’ll bring up that whole argument of whether or not we should be prosecuting terrorists in civilian trials or in military commissions, and it’s right around election time. Can’t have that, can we?

What message does it send to the families of the men whose lives were taken that day? It’s been almost ten years, and now the Obama administration is basically telling these families that they don’t care. It’s outrageous, and a huge slap in the face. 17 men serving our country killed, and all the Obama administration can think about is how not to infringe on the “rights” of the terrorist. It’s despicable.

Never forget the USS Cole, and always remember the heroes who gave their lives that day.

Electronics Technician 1st Class Richard Costelow
Mess Management Specialist Lakina Francis
Information Systems Technician Tim Guana
Signalman Seaman Recruit Cherone Gunn
Seaman James McDaniels
Engineman 2nd Class Mark Nieto
Electronics Warfare Technician 3rd Class Ronald Owens
Seaman Recruit Lakiba Parker
Engineman Fireman Joshua Parlett
Fireman Apprentice Patrick Roy
Electronics Warfare Technician Kevin Rux
Petty Officer 3rd Class Ron Santiago
Operations Special 2nd Class Timothy Sanders
Fireman Gary Swenchonis Jr
Ensign Andrew Triplett
Seaman Apprentice Craig Wibberly
Hull Maintenance Technician 3rd Class Kenneth Clodfelter.

—–

Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Tuesday’s clash on the border with Lebanon has gotten the most media attention. As Max Boot observes at Commentary’s “contentions,” UNIFIL’s acknowledgement of the facts points to culpability on the Lebanese side. He’s in broad company speculating that this provocation was intended by Hezbollah as a distraction from the UN tribunal’s impending report on the Rafiq Hariri assassination of 2005.  (See here and here also for good extended treatments of the border clash, including Hezbollah involvement.) Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah made an impassioned speech yesterday, within hours of the border skirmish, in which he accused Israel of being behind the assassination and promised retaliation against Israel in the future.

But the rocket attacks near Gaza and in the south – on Ashkelon, which fronts the Mediterranean, as well as on the Gulf of Aqaba resort city of Eilat, and on Aqaba, Jordan – are potentially of greater interest.

The 29 July attack on Ashkelon involved a Grad-type military-grade rocket launched from Gaza. (The Grad, a former-Soviet battlefield-rocket design, is a variant of the generic Katyusha; the 29 July rocket was reportedly of Chinese manufacture.) This profile, reminiscent of rocket attacks in 2008, is an established Hamas attack pattern.

But the 2 August attack on Eilat and Aqaba came from the Sinai. Unlike an earlier rocket attack from Sinai in April 2010, it involved military-grade Grad rockets fired in a salvo, probably from the mountain range north of Sinai’s Taba resort area.

Google Earth map; author annotation

It’s possible the rocket attack from Sinai was mounted by Hamas in a cross-border operation, but I doubt it. This is an incident that must bolster the IDF’s growing concern about a “new front” being opened by global jihadists. The salvo launch may well indicate the use of a military multiple-rocket launcher: not something Hamas could easily sneak into the Sinai.  (The thousands of terrorist rocket attacks on Israel, including those from Gaza since 2005, have more typically been launched from homemade apparatuses rather than from military MRLs; the latter “scoot” handily, but are big and hard to hide.)

 No responsibility has been claimed for the attack – in fact, Hamas has denied it – probably because one of the rockets hit Jordan. The IDF reportedly says the recovered rockets are of Iranian or North Korean manufacture, indicating the backing of a state sponsor (presumably Iran). But there are discrepancies that bear watching, with trying to make a “fingerprint match” to Hamas. It’s not ultimately a very good one.

The DEBKAfile report of a simultaneous attack on the UN MFO in the Sinai (near El-Arish and the border with Gaza) must be approached with skepticism. But another author makes a separate reference to that attack (not sourced to DEBKA); and if it did occur, the tally of attacks on 2 August is increasingly inconsistent with the apparent posture of Hamas: recalcitrant, certainly, but somewhat disorganized, and lacking a clear strategic direction of its own. The emerging focus on the Sinai is beyond the scope of the objective Commentary’s Evelyn Gordon attributes to Hamas in her well-reasoned piece: that is, wringing more concessions from Israel before agreeing to join talks.

But it’s what we would expect from Iran’s ongoing campaign of subversion in Egypt – involving the Sinai in particular – which achieved brief notoriety after an Egyptian security sweep in 2009. (For more on Iran’s long-term objectives, see here and here.)

Meanwhile, the momentum for political change in Egypt, gathering this summer with the Muslim Brotherhood’s endorsement of Mohamed ElBaradei’s opposition effort, makes Egypt a crucial battlefield for the competing Iranian and Arabist visions of regional hegemony. Saudi King Abdullah visited Egypt last week before the regional summit in Beirut, his first stop in a trip seen in Arab eyes as a “fence-mending” effort among Arab nations in advance of a U.S-Iran clash. The day of his arrival in Cairo, a bomb was detonated at an Egyptian residential compound near the country’s embassy in Beirut.

Things are likely to heat up further in the regional competition for Egypt’s future. From the Sinai, terrorists can affect both Israel and Egypt, a fact that Iran’s paramilitary planners have recognized for some time. Sunni guerrillas opposing the Iranian gambit will recognize it too. Iranian and Arab leaders, and the terrorists they sponsor, all anticipate a “coming storm” in the region; it’s not by any means too early to recognize that they are preparing to exploit the opportunities the storm will present.

I agree that Hamas has no intention of good-faith engagement with the peace process. But I don’t think the peace process – or the UN findings on the Hariri assassination – is the only driver of any regional actor’s strategy today.  I think they’re all looking ahead.  And we should be looking south – toward Egypt – as well as north.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Those opposed to building the center call it the Ground Zero Mosque (GZM), and the term has become widespread. Those opposed to the opposers object that the term is misleading: Cordoba House an Islamic cultural center, not a mosque, they argue; and it’s not to be emplaced exactly upon the rubble of Ground Zero but is actually a couple of blocks away

GZM opponents respond that the center will almost certainly include a mosque, or at least a place where center members can go for Islamic services, to pray, and to hear Islamic sermons… almost certainly radical Islamist sermons, given the nature of the center’s Imam, Muslim Brotherhood associate and possible member Feisal Abdul Rauf. It’s supposed to be dedicated on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (I don’t know that this is true, but that is the argument). And they argue that the GZM site chosen by Rauf was the closest he could get to Ground Zero itself; I believe even Rauf admits that, though he disputes the claim that he selected it in order to crow over the attack. And there stands the debate so far.

Brad and the third party wrote me to find out where I stood on the issue; this post is adapted from two e-mails I sent them addressing various aspects. (While Brad suggested I write about this debate, I haven’t the permission of the third party to drag his or her name into it; so please forgive me if I don’t use a name.)

The controversy has two sides (as most do); the first is the American virtues of religious liberty and property rights, enshrined in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Let’s take that side first.

…With liberty and justice for all

I don’t particularly respond to “sacred symbols” or “holy land.” I see nothing especially special about Mecca, Jerusalem, the Cross, the Magen David, Ground Zero, or for that matter, Arlington National Cemetary; each is just a physical thing or a spot on the map. While I am moved in various ways by the signified — the actual events and the purposes behind them — I feel nothing for the signifiers, the geographical places and symbolic objects that point at the more important ideas and events.

I take no personal umbrage at the owner of the property at Ground Zero — which happens to be the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, basically a two-state port district, or government-owned corporation — choosing to build another office building there, or a taco stand, or a shrine, or a mosque; it’s Port Authority property, and the corporation should be able do what it wants with it. But I do understand the power of symbolism to other people… in this case, both to most Americans and to nearly all Moslems:

• To the former, Ground Zero symbolizes a contemptible and unprovoked sneak attack on thousands of American civilians, innocent foreigners, our most revered part of the American government (the military), and indeed upon our entire economic system of (mostly) free enterprise.
• To a great many, if not most Moslems, Ground Zero symbolizes a righteous blow against the wicked Zionists and Crusaders — however regrettable it may be that some innocent infidels and even some of the faithful had to die in the striking.
• To other Moslems, it symbolizes the radical Islamism that holds Islam in thrall to Mediaevalism, tribalism, xenophobia, and totalitarianism. (I doubt that any but a handful of Moslems has no reaction whatsoever to Ground Zero as a symbol.)

Thus, for purely strategic reasons, an action in the war against radical Islamism, I would far, far prefer that any building erected on the actual site be a tall, powerful, arrogant, American commercial building, rising even higher than did the Twin Towers; and this time, let’s design the damn thing to look as much as possible like a colossal, world-bestriding middle finger extended to the Moloch worshippers who plotted and carried out the 9/11 attacks. I hope thereby to rally Americans to defense of our nation and our culture, and dishearten the Islamists by showing that we will not be cowed, intimidated, or defeated.

As a libertarian (or propertarian), I don’t believe the City of New York should be able to forbid the Port Authority from allowing someone to build an actual mosque on the actual site of 9/11; for that matter, as the Port Authority is owned by the states of New York and New Jersey, I don’t believe the city would have any legal authority to enact such a prohibition.

(I would be much less forgiving if the Port Authority built a groveling appeasement center at Ground Zero. I still believe the corporation should have the right to build such an apology to the jihadis, but its commissioners would be monumental asses to do so. And I would hope some gazillionaire would raise the funds to buy the site from the P.A. and build something more appropriate there instead — see design point above.)

But for the very same reason — the sanctity of private property — I also oppose allowing the city to prevent Rauf from building an Islamic center (or mosque) two blocks away, on land now owned by Soho Properties (a Moslem-run real-estate investment corporation). Soho owns it; the Cordoba Initiative (run by Rauf) presumably leases it; it’s their private property… not communal property owned by the citizens of New York City.

Oh yes, and declaring the site, an old Burlington Coat factory, a “historical landmark” in order to deprive its owner of the right to commercially exploit the real estate is an anti-capitalist scheme that would be denounced by every conservative and libertarian in America… if only Soho Properties and the Cordoba Initiative were Christian or Jewish organizations. I understand from Mike Gallagher’s radio show that the vote to declare it a landmark failed. Hallelujah, the God of Take-a-Deep-Breath was working overtime that day.

As to whether Cordoba House will include a mosque… so what if it does? There are plenty of mosques in New York already, as well as Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Hindu temples, Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, Mormon temples, and probably Scientology churches. Obviously we cannot single out one religion and say “but we don’t want them!”

Moslems have as much right to erect Islamic cultural and religious centers as do members of any other religion; we have freedom of religion in America. But that does bring us to the other side of this controversy: How far does religious liberty extend? And must we treat every religious institution with exactly the same degree of scrutiny as all of the others, or can we discriminate on the basis of actual behavior?

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

The best article about the GZM controversy I have yet read is “Rauf’s Dawa from the World Trade Center Rubble,” by Andrew McCarthy, the former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who successfully prosecuted the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, and eleven co-defendents for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centers. McCarthy also assisted in the prosecution of the terrorists who bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and he is the author of what I believe to be the single most important book on radical Islamism thus far — the Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America — which I urge you all to read.

He argues that Cordoba House is not intended for “interfaith cooperation,” as Rauf claims, but is in fact an exercise of dawa, Arabic for spreading Islam by means other than brute force; besides ordinary proselytizing, dawa includes propaganda, lying, bribery, extortion, infiltration, sedition, and sabotage, each of which is condoned by Moslem law if the goal is to advance Islam, specifically radical Islamism and sharia. (Advancing the supremacy of Islam by brute force would be jihad; thus dawa is sometimes called soft jihad by supporters and critics alike.)

McCarthy also amasses good evidence that Rauf is either a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, or at the very least in league with them:

• Two Brotherhood front groups published a special edition of Rauf’s 2004 book on Islamism.

• Rauf has high praise for the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, Yusuf Qaradawi, a fundamentalist Islamist (and Brother) who explicitly supports Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation, and suicide attacks on any Israeli and on any American in Iraq. Qaradawi is an exterminationist antisemite who praises Hitler and expresses the desire that during the next Holocaust — though he claims the Jews exaggerated the previous one — the final extermination of all Jews in the world will be brought about “at the hand of the believers” (that is, by Moslems).

  To Feisal Abdul Rauf, this is a band leader to follow!

Jihadi jiu jitsu

So the question becomes, given that Cordoba House is likely to be a radical Islamist recruitment center, assuming it takes after its founding imam, and a source of infiltration and sabotage into the government and institutions of the United States, for the avowed purpose of overthrowing them and replacing all with a sharia-based Islamic state — what should be our response? Most of us supported the outing and prosecution of Communist infiltrators, agitators, and saboteurs in the last century; should we not likewise support the outing and prosecution of radical Islamists in this one?

I don’t believe the proper response is to prevent it from being sited so close to Ground Zero; but that being said, we certainly have the right to defend ourselves, our nation, and our culture. As Justice Robert H. Jackson opined, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

So let’s use a little asymmetrical warfare against those who would destroy us. Let’s use American ingenuity, which I daresay we have in nigh-infinitely greater supply than adherents of a religion that is frozen in time at the seventh century. We’ll turn the enemy’s own strength against him: We step back and allow the Cordoba Initiative to proceed, let Rauf build his Cordoba House dawa center; but as it’s being built on the site of the old Burlington Coat factory, we should bug the entire building, surveille everyone, and infiltrate the staff and membership.

I suspect such an effort would produce a veritable deluge of actionable, anti-Islamist intelligence. It would allow us to avert numerous terrorist attacks and other crimes, including terrorist funding efforts, sabotage, and espionage. It would give the FBI a tool to uncover untold numbers of Islamist moles, seemingly benign charitable organizations that are in fact the ideological heirs to the Holy Land Foundation. And it would allow us to keep tabs on a very dangerous group of insurgents right here in the United States.

Of course, I would also not be averse to revoking the legal residency or naturalization of any foreign-born resident at the center caught engaging in anti-American activities.

None of these responses conflicts with the principles religious liberty or property rights; certainly law-enforcement agencies have the authority to investigate possible crimes, even when committed by clergy or congregants; and intelligence agencies have authority to detect threats to national security and expedite their extirpation.

The liberal “elites” will believe they have won the day, and in an orgy of overconfidence will take a three-month victory lap. Those conservatives who are eager to trade essential liberty for temporary security will be prevented from giving in to their own worst impulses. And we’ll be better able to take the war against radical Islamism straight to the enemy.

See? The quick and the clever can always find a middle ground between fascist tendencies on the Right — and liberal-fascist tendencies on the Left.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

The United States will contribute $400 million in development aid to the Palestinian territories and work with Israel to loosen its embargo on Gaza, President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama’s announcement came after White House talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The money will be used to build housing, schools, water and health care systems in both the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank and Gaza, which is ruled by the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas.

Obama called the situation in Gaza “unsustainable,” and said the United States would work with its European allies, Egypt and Israel to find a “new conceptual framework” for the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

“We agree Israelis have right to prevent arms from coming into Gaza,” Obama said. But he said “new mechanisms” were needed to allow more goods to reach the territory – and he repeated that the long-term solution was a permanent deal creating “a Palestinian state side-by-side with an Israel that is secure.”

Right. Surely this must be the best time to loosen the Gaza blockade, fresh off of the controversy of the Gaza flotilla that was armed to the teeth and filled with terrorists who ambushed and attacked IDF soldiers. Makes perfect sense.

If that idiocrity wasn’t enough for you, there’s also the sheer lunacy of throwing away $400 million to a terrorist state… especially when our economy is doing as badly as it is. Obama doesn’t need to be doing this, if for no other reason than because we cannot freaking afford it. As Exurban Jon puts it,

Let me get this straight. Our economy has cratered. Unemployment is nearly 10 percent. The national debt is expected to exceed our gross national product by next year. And we’re giving $400,000,000 to our mortal enemies in Gaza?

$400,000,000 to the Hamas-led death cult allied with Iran and Syria? $400,000,000 to the people who celebrated the destruction of the twin towers? $400,000,000 to rain thousands more rockets upon Israeli women and children?

The Right, the Left and everyone in between needs to raise hell. This. Cannot. Happen.

Truer words were never spoken. Obama and the Democrats who think this is a good idea can act as noble as they’d like. The truth remains, though, that every dollar of aid that the Palestinians are given is one less dollar they have to spend out of their own pocket — giving them one more dollar they can use to obtain weapons to murder innocent Israeli citizens. And we’re supposed to believe that Obama, our president who is giving aid to the Hamas genocidal death cult, is not against Israel? Is not against America?

The man is giving aid to a regime who wants to destroy the only functioning democracy in the Middle East. Liberals can bleat all they want about how Israelis and Palestinians can live peacefully side-by-side if Israelis would just stop occupying Palestinian land, but they forget one key detail: Palestinians don’t want to live peacefully with Israelis. They want to kill Israelis. They want the Israeli state completely annihilated, wiped off the map. And by funding Palestine, we are funding that goal. Call it humanitarian aid all you want, but giving money to Palestine means giving money to terrorists. And they won’t use it to help build a better life for Palestinians, they’ll use it to end the lives of innocent Israelis. It’s an outrage. It should be enough for someone possessing a modicum of common sense to know that this is a bad idea, but then again, look at who our president is.

If keeping money out of the hands of terrorist organizations isn’t a good enough reason, then what is?

Hey, I know! Couldn’t that money be put to better use here? Like, oh, I don’t know, to maybe help combat the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Obama is literally just throwing $400 million away, and for nothing.

And, as Melissa Clouthier points out, this is why people cannot take Obama seriously, and especially not on national security. We are at war with Islamic terrorists, whether you call it a War on Terror or not. We have soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran is becoming more and more dangerous and unstable every day. Yet Obama wants to give hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists in Palestine? He’s literally funding our enemies? Somehow, the phrase “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” is coming to mind.

As Melissa says,

When America sends this savage bunch money, she participates in the arming aiding of our own enemy–of Israel’s enemy. It’s absurd.

It’s absurd unless you hate Israel. It’s absurd unless you believe America to be a bunch of terrorists, instead of a force for good in the world. And this is why people believe the President took in more at old Jeremiah Wright’s church than previously assumed.

Every American that loves their country should be outraged over this. These are the people who voted Hamas, the anti-Israeli, anti-American, murderous, genocidal, drunk-on-bloodlust death cult who want to bring about the deaths of every innocent Israeli and the deaths of Americans too, and Obama wants to give them money. He’s destroying us with his domestic policy, and he’s destroying us with his foreign policy as well. It is un-freaking-believable.

I think we can now officially declare Obama the worst president in American history.

—–

Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

In case you missed it, the first announcement of plans to build a mosque close to the site of the World Trade Center came last week. The structure, Cordoba House, is being underwritten by the American Society for Muslim Advancement. The building selected to house the 13-story cultural center is one that was damaged by the debris from one of the jetliners flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And just in case your blood isn’t quite at the boiling point, get a load of the date selected for the grand opening: Sept. 11, 2011.

This time around the message is even more “in your face,” if such a thing is possible. The website of Masjid Manhattan, the organization raising funds for the construction, features a banner that taunts: “Build the ‘House of Allah’ next to the World Trade Center! Help us raise the flag of ‘LA ILLAH ILLA ALLAH’ in downtown Manhattan.”

According to FOX News, the group has already raised $8.5 million in donations. Once it has secured another $2.5 million, construction on the mosque will begin.

Daisy Kahn, executive director of the Cordoba Initiative—the group spearheading construction of Cordoba House—claims to have had no knowledge of Masjid Manhattan’s plans. “They have no connection to us,” a spokesperson for Kahn is reported to have told FOX News. “We didn’t even know they were there.”

Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1, which oversees development in the district surrounding Ground Zero, has been unavailable so far for comment. The same is true for leaders of Masjid Manhattan, though the banner at their website seems to speak loud and clear.

The lack of response from either side is significant. I suspect that Menin, who is a contributing blogger to the Huffington Post and occasional voice for the far left on Hannity, would be yapping up a blue streak if the plans were for a center to eradicate worldwide terrorism. As for the courageous leaders of the mosque, I suspect they will have plenty to say as well the next time some westerner draws a cartoon depiction of Allah.

The Left often pays lips service to, while actually doing nothing about, the  military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Yet, in regards to radical Islam, that is exactly what the left wants us to do. Don’t ask.  And, dear Allah, never tell!

Instead, they prefer to demagogue American citizens, while “bitterly clinging” to their insane politically correct worship of diversity and tolerance.  It’s funny how those who deride religion constantly, are actually zealots in their own right. They worship at the altar of Better Than You ™ multiculturalism.

It has never been more apparent than it is now. In just the past couple of months alone, examples of this attitude have uncovered that what was once perhaps just dangerous naivety, is now the purposeful ignoring of what should be basic knowledge. All in order to appease, accommodate and appear culturally sensitive. The fact that the very people for whom they are apologists want to, you know, kill them is somehow lost on them.

They have yet to realize, or are choosing to ignore in their moral vacuum, the fact that political correctness is no longer just incredibly annoying. It’s now deadly. The politically correct culture has been hurl-worthy to me for years, but it has recently reached gastric lows. First, there was the absurd narrative being pushed about the Fort Hood terrorist. Oh, he was “bullied” and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – via osmosis, apparently, as he was never once deployed.

Flash forward to the attempted Times Square car bomb and the delusional narratives were even worse. Not only was the first thought of our alleged leaders and the mainstream media an attempt to demonize the new fall guy “someone upset about health care”, but even after the attempted bomber’s name and history was known, they were more concerned with being “culturally sensitive” than the actual bomb attempt itself.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says New York City “will not tolerate any bias” following the arrest of a U.S. citizen from Pakistan in the Times Square car bombing attempt.

Bloomberg said Tuesday that also applies to potential backlash against Muslim New Yorkers.

Like I said then, it’s rather telling that the only time the words Muslim or Islam ever appear is when the rest of us are being accused of being racist, bigoted half wits. Don’t ask! And don’t tell. That must explain the administration’s silence on two other recent developments. Firstly, Iran being appointed to the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women. I wrote the following when it was announced and, to my knowledge, they all still remain silent:

The United States Ambassador, Susan Rice, appointed by President Obama, was silent and did not even attend the vote. In fact, she wasn’t even in the building. Apparently, the administration believes that Iran will help shatter that glass ceiling with stray rocks, used as they stone women to death for being raped. A week later, and they remain mum. Not one word of denouncement from President Obama, who is too busy demonizing one of our own American states and and ignoring devastating floods. Too bad we can’t call ourselves “Los Women”. Maybe he’d give a hoot then. Ambassador Rice also refuses to comment, which is the status quo with her, evidently. The State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, she of “not staying at home baking cookies” because that would be demeaning fame, is silent.

Not long after that affront to sane human beings everywhere, the American Academy of Pediatrics went one further in the “who can be the most vile in their attempts to appease” game. They decided that female genital mutilation should now just be called cutting (not as offensive sounding, you see) and that perhaps it would be okay to just allow doctors to perform a ritual “nicking”.  What’s a little nicking and all? As long as we can all get along and everyone feels nice and appeased. Well, except for the girls you are sacrificing and who are being barbarically maimed.

What is worse is that the left doesn’t just look the other way; they have actually become apologists for barbaric behavior under the guise of tolerance. They explain away all wrongs perpetrated by others by trying to equate them in some way, usually invented out of whole cloth, with some delusionally perceived American wrong or Christian wrong.

Phyllis Chesler recently published an article entitled Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings. When the American Academy of Pediatrics released their “nicking” opinion, I said that it was the same as saying “well, don’t actually behead your wife in an honor killing. Just slit her throat a little.” Turns out, that actually is how the left thinks, as Chesler explains:

Former National Organization for Women (NOW) president Kim Gandy compared the battered and beheaded Aasiya Hassan[9] to the battered (but still living) pop star Rihanna and further questioned whether Hassan’s murder was an honor killing:

Is a Muslim man in Buffalo more likely to kill his wife than a Catholic man in Buffalo? A Jewish man in Buffalo? I don’t know the answer to that, but I know that there is plenty of violence to go around—and that the long and sordid history of oppressing women in the name of religion surely includes Islam, but is not limited to Islam.[10]

At the time of the Hassan beheading, a coalition of domestic violence workers sent an (unpublished) letter to the Erie County district attorney’s office and to some media stating that this was not an honor killing, that honor killings had nothing to do with Islam, and that sensationalizing Muslim domestic violence was not only racist but also served to render invisible the much larger incidence of both domestic violence and domestic femicide.

Misogyny apologizing again, under the guise of tolerance. Only now, that apologist position may end up being complicit in murders. Don’t ask! And don’t tell!

The Left’s default position is that other cultures, no matter how barbaric, must be revered and honored. But American traditions, must be eradicated and are the true root of all evil. Anyone who doesn’t do the same, must be a redneck-y rube. And a racist, of course.

My hometown in New Jersey, for instance, no longer has an Easter Egg Hunt. It is now called Spring Celebration with Bunny.  A town that is lily white and primarily Christian and Jewish. In all my 39 years, I’ve yet to come across a person of the Jewish faith who was offended by Easter bunnies or Christmas for that matter. And, even if offended, they’d never threaten to set off a bomb in the town or commit acts of violent intimidation as seen in this video after the assault on Lars Vilks. But, I suppose my “rich life experiences” don’t count, since I’m plain old Caucasian and all.

Finally, most recently our own Attorney General, Eric Holder, could not even bring himself to utter the word Islam when being questioned about the Faisal Shahzad investigation.

See, it’s not about truth or even common sense. It’s about furthering an agenda, always. That agenda relies on identity politics and is more important to them than actual human beings.

Apologizing for evil, violent acts is not embracing diversity. It’s embracing insanity. It’s not just condoning barbarism; it is complicit in it’s perpetuation.

So, I am asking. And I am telling. Because, as George Washington said, “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

—–

(cross-posted from NewsReal, RedState)

New York dodged a bullet Saturday night—again. The big question going forward is whether the Big Apple will be as lucky next time around.

Not that luck is what the city needs at this point. The failure of the attempted car bombing in Times Square on Saturday is attributable to the crudeness of the device and possibly to a lack of experience on the part of the perpetrator charged with setting it off. There is no reason to expect that the terrorists won’t learn from their mistakes.

So what can be done to help avert the next attack? One solution would be for the Obama administration to restore the funding that it cut from New York’s anti-terror program. Despite the growing proclivity among terrorists to attempt to launch attacks in subways and on trains and buses, the federal budget for New York’s Transit Security Grant program was shrunk by almost $45 million dollars. That represents a 25 percent cut. Overall, federal funding went from $153.3 million to $110.6 million.

The city’s busy ports are another resource that that need protection, not only to keep the city safe from terrorist threats but to protect other areas of the country that might be vulnerable to attack from weapons sneaked into through a local port. Yet, federal funds for the Port Security Grant Program was also reduced by about 25 percent, from $45 million to $33.8 million.

These budgetary cutbacks are all the more glaring in the face of Washington’s penchant for out-of-control spending these days. Maybe it is time for the president to reorder his priorities. He has enough troubles to contend with without having to worry that the next 9/11 will happen on his watch.

It’s not how they should be done in any religion, but sadly that just isn’t the world we live in.

Much has been written in recent days on the pickle “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone put themselves in by depicting (or rather not depicting by dressing him in a bear costume) the prophet Mohammed in an episode of their popular cartoon series. By now, the absurdly over-the-top reaction of a New York-based jihadist group has been too ubiquitously documented to require reprise here.

Much of what I’ve seen in commentaries adopts the same point of view as an editorial in today’s New York Post titled “Cowardly Central.” The bottom line of the editorial is summed up in a single, closing sentence: “And until the West decides—culturally and collectively—not to take it any longer, it’s only going to get worse.”

The general point is hard to dispute. Behind it is the attitude—in a very real sense it was a warning—that we Americans conveyed in the days and weeks after 9/11 by flying the American flag and displaying posters showing Old Glory and carrying the legend “These colors don’t run.”

But there is an important distinction between that situation and this one. It is one thing to stand tall and hang tough as a nation. It is quite another to do the same when you as an individual have been singled out and have a bounty on your head.

Before you exception me your exceptions, understand: I agree with the general tenet that if you give the islamist cretins an inch, they’ll take a mile, and that we should not tolerate their threats, which are little more in the end than thinly veiled excuses to kill more of us “non-believers.” They certainly needed no provocation to wantonly murder 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11, and we now know from another headline this morning that they will keep on trying with every last breath in their being.

That eventuality—a day when the last of these monstrous miscreants takes his last breath—is something to be devoutly wished for. But until it arrives, we need to do what it takes to survive—both en masse and as individuals. If that means we resist depicting their prophet, so be it. It’s a small sacrifice to make it if means living to fight another day.

It is a truism of survival that under threatening circumstances it is important first and foremost to keep you head. At this critical juncture in the lives of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, let us all pray that they are able to keep theirs.

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Those rules to live by, courtesy of the late Jim Croce, were joined some years ago by a fourth rule that—like it or not—one would be wise to heed. That rule is: Don’t poke fun at Muhammad. Not even the most innocent kind of fun.

This is a message that Matt Stone and Trey Parke, creators of the popular Comedy Central series South Park decided to ignore when they depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a recent episode as a character wearing a bear suit.

As a result of the broadcast, they have been “warned” by a radical Islamic group based in New York that maintains the website RevolutionMuslim.com, which since appears to have gone dark.

An article in today’s New York Daily News contains text that appeared on the web site before it was pulled. According to the article, the site contained a posting that read in part: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid. They will probably end up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show.” The reference was to the Dutch filmmaker who was murdered  in 2004 over a documentary he made  addressing violence against Muslim women.

“This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them,” the statement reportedly concluded.

I don’t know, it sounds a lot like a threat to me, especially considering that the post included a photo of the murdered filmmaker with a knife still protruding from his chest. More sobering still, the poster included information about where Stone and Parker work, along with a sermon calling for punishments for blasphemy against the Muslim religion.

Authorities have claimed that unless the group makes an explicit threat against the cartoonists, their hands are tied. In the meantime, one can’t help but wonder what the show’s creators thought they hoped to accomplish by their depiction.

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Ultimately, however, the best explanation of Columbine came from comedian Chris Rock: “Whatever happened to crazy?”

“What, you can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary? . . . When l was a kid, they used to separate the crazy kids from everybody. When l was a kid, the crazy kids went to school in a little-a– bus. They had a class at the end of the school . . . Just in case they went crazy, they would only hurt other crazy kids. And we was all safe.”

Chris Rock’s analysis came to mind Friday as I watched this YouTube video in which Pentagon shooter J. Patrick Bedell explained his idea of “information currency”:

We could analyze Bedell’s “invention,” or we could analyze Bedell’s behavior — his geeky mannerisms, etc. — but no such analysis would suffice to explain why Bedell decided to show up Thursday at the Pentagon with a pair of 9-mm pistols and multiple ammunition clips. In the end, it’s hard to look at Bedell’s sad little video without thinking of Chris Rock’s question: “Whatever happened to crazy?”

In fact, a family friend told the Los Angeles Times, Bedell had been mentally ill for more than a decade:

San Benito County Supervisor Reb Monaco said he had been a close friend of the Bedell family for 35 years. . . .
Patrick, he said, had suffered from mental illness for at least 15 years.
“He probably was mentally ill for that period of time,” said Monaco, a retired schoolteacher. “He seemed rather paranoid. He was a heavy marijuana user and tended to self-medicate with marijuana. . . .”

The San Francisco Chronicle similarly reports:

A portrait emerged of 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell as a man who appeared to deteriorate mentally in recent years as he ran up a record of minor crimes and posted conspiracy theories about the government on the Internet. . . .
Bedell lived off and on with his parents in his native Hollister and had himself admitted to mental health centers four times in recent years . . .

By all accounts, Bedell was very intelligent and did well in school, but in real life — outside the classroom — he appears to have been a failure, a misfit, the stereotypical loner:

Students knew him as someone who was dedicated to his work but did not socialize much.
“I used to see him study a lot,” said Miguel Munguia, an electrical engineering undergraduate. “Nobody really knew him personally. I think he kept to himself.”

This is the man whom many are now trying to portray as a “right-wing extremist,” a symbol of the Tea Party movement or libertarianism or “lone wolf” terrorism. But whatever happened to crazy?

Failure and Scapegoating

Several pundits seeking to view Bedell’s final act of suicidal violence through the prism of contemporary politics have compared him to Joseph Stack III, whose kamikaze dive into an Internal Revenue Service office in Texas stirred New York Times columnist Frank Rich to new heights of ridiculousness.

The comparison of Stack and Bedell is apt, however, in that both of them were failures who ended their lives with attacks on scapegoats. As was clear from Stack’s suicide note, he blamed not only the IRS, but also his accountants, President Bush and “the monsters of organized religion” for his failures. Bedell’s own scapegoating of the Pentagon was even crazier, involving his claim that the suicide of a Marine in 1991 was related to a U.S. government conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks.

Scapegoating represents the externalization of blame, and we see this pattern clearly in Stack’s case. Tens of millions of Americans deal with the IRS every year without having their lives ruined by the experience. Was it really true, as Stack claimed, that his accountants, the IRS and others were exclusively responsible for his tax problems? Or – far more likely — was Stack blaming others because he was unable to accept responsibility for his own failures?

Compared to Stack, whose tax grievances were specific and personal, Bedell’s scapegoating was more elaborate and grandiose. Why? Because Bedell’s failure was so complete and so chronic.

Whereas Stack had a job, a home and a wife — he even played bass in a country-rock band – Bedell appears to have spent most of his adulthood living with his parents. So far, no reporter has even suggested that Bedell had a career or romantic interests. His only hobbies seem to have been computers and marijuana.

Victimhood and the Blameless Self

“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Lasch’s insight about the connection between culpability and competence, and the way in which “therapeutic morality” undermines self-sufficiency by negating personal responsibility, is essential to understanding the impact of a culture that fosters narcissistic personality traits.

Good mental health is characterized by optimism and a sense of agency — that is to say, the belief that we are ultimately in control of our own lives. The sense of agency is critical to success and happiness in every area of life, in large part because it is necessary to self-improvement and problem-solving.

Everyone encounters failure and disappointment, but a person who believes that his life is within his own control will respond to such setbacks in a positive, constructive way — analyzing the cause of the failure, seeking ways to improve, determing to work harder to overcome disadvantages and remedy personal deficiencies. A psychologically healthy person therefore must accept responsibility for his failures and shortcomings just as willingly as he accepts reward for his successes and abilities.

While it is true that other people sometimes contribute to our failures by undermining our efforts, it is also true that our successes generally require the assistance of others. Factors which are genuinely beyond our control tend to even out over time. In a free and prosperous society, few people are so disastrously disadvantaged as to have no hope whatsoever of improving their lot in life.

 Thus, it is psychologically unhealthy to blame others whenever things go wrong in our lives, but this is exactly what “therapeutic morality” encourages.

Attempting to comfort people by flattering their sense of blamelessness — “It’s not your fault” — therapeutic morality ultimately undermines the vital sense of agency, in effect telling people that they are neither culpable nor competent. It promotes the notion of innocent victimhood, the blameless self, and encourages people to avoid responsibility for their failures by wallowing in self-pitying rationalizations.

The Politics of Envy

Self-pity and envy are closely associated emotions. If we are not to blame for our own failures, then others deserve no credit for their success. And here the conservative reader recognizes the basic content of a main theme of modern liberalism, namely class warfare.

Liberalism tells us that rich people are rich because they have some advantage that is fundamentally unfair, and that poor people are victims of an unjust system that is rigged against them. Mocking this attitude in 1964 — at the very height of liberalism’s prestige during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson — Ronald Reagan famously quipped: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

What does all this have to do with J. Patrick Bedell? Consider his evident aimlessness, his retreat into a marijuana-induced fog, and his fantasy of marketing “information currency” software when he couldn’t even find and keep a meaningful job. Now consider his appetite for conspiracy theories, his rantings against powerful forces that secretly control the world – paranoia.

Paranoia is rooted in the narcissist’s need to rationalize failure, to find scapegoats for his own shortcomings. Bedell had been mired in hopeless failure for years, and his scapegoats had to be large enough to psychologically compensate that failure. Rather than comparing Bedell to Joseph Stack, then, we might more profitably compare the Pentagon shooter to John Hinckley, who succumbed to the psychotic delusion that he could win the affection of Jodie Foster by assassinating Ronald Reagan.

Much like Hinckley, Bedell seems to have believed that his act of violence would lend significance to his otherwise meaningless existence. And though both Hinckley and Bedell attacked politically symbolic targets, their attacks were not ultimately political acts. They were both just crazy.

Political Psychosis

Very little knowledge of Bedell’s personal story was necessary, however, for some people to construe his Pentagon attack as politically important. They had their explanations ready-made, thanks to an army of “experts” who had been warning since last year that political opposition to the Obama administration was inherently dangerous, rooted in irrational malevolence with an extraordinary potential for violence.

In December, a Democrat delivered one of the most remarkable Senate speeches in recent memory:

Even before the Senate voted on cloture, the Democrats’ health-care legislation was already delivering benefits in the form of a free mental-health screening delivered by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: If you oppose this bill, you’re a dangerous nut.
Such was the essence of Sunday’s floor speech in which the junior senator from Rhode Island quoted at length from Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 classic, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and offered it as a diagnosis of the health bill’s opponents.
Whitehouse paraphrased Hofstadter’s thesis, warning of “the dangers of an aggrieved right-wing minority with the power to create what [Hofstadter] called a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

For decades, liberals have cherished the Hofstadter theory that, because no one could rationally oppose liberal policies, therefore opponents must be suffering from mass psychosis. This belief in the irrationality of their opponents means that liberals don’t actually have to debate policy on its merits, they need merely point out that conservatives are scary kooks.

So it was that every liberal journalist and blogger was eager to be the first to declare that J. Patrick Bedell was the smoking-gun proof of conservative kookery. Never mind the evidence that Bedell was just plain crazy, and that his particular brand of craziness didn’t match squarely with the Left’s pre-fab motif of Deranged Tea Party Terrorist. Heedless of these contradictions, liberals engaged in a laughably predictable rush to judgment. It deserved to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how:

• Send the Body to Keith Olbermann
• Quit Smoking Dope or You’ll Go on a Psycho Rampage, You Libertarian Freaks
• One Bong Hit Away From Murder: Warning Signs of Psycho-Libertarianism

Maybe an “Irony Alert” would have been helpful. A Twitter buddy asked, “Dude, what have you got against libertarians?” Nothing at all, actually. I was merely mocking a certain blogger’s declaration that Bedell was “an extreme right wing libertarian” and “an anti-government right wing extremist of the Ron Paulian persuasion.”

This raises the question of agency, you see. Who was really responsible for the Pentagon attack: Patrick Bedell or Ron Paul? Was Bedell’s violence endorsed or praised by Campaign for Liberty? Are there other “extreme right wing libertarian” killers lurking out there?

No, Bedell was just a crazy dopehead loser. And whatever happened to crazy?

Last week, Israel’s ambassador to Britain was called in for an official reprimand by the Foreign Office. In Dubai, Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the chief of police for the emirate, has said he is “99 percent” sure that operatives of the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, killed Mr. al-Mabhouh.

But I still haven’t seen a single shred of evidence that Mossad, Israel’s premier agency for intelligence, covert ops, and counter-terrorism, was behind the bizarre scheme… and several tantalizing bits indicating that they weren’t:

• In general, the hit job was too elaborate, too complex, too Byzantine. Gas? Guns? Electrocutions? This is silly.
• The 26-member hit squad was far too large for the job; that scrum was almost guaranteed to be found out!
• The killers were clumsy enough to be caught on surveillance video, which seems very unlike the highly professional Mossad.
• They stole the identities of real Israeli citizens. Far from pointing the finger at Mossad, I believe this curious fact points firmly away from that agency; why would they intentionally implicate their own citizens?

• And a new piece of intel I’d not seen until today: According to Dubai intelligence, one of the best in the Middle East, two of the assassins chose a peculiar refuge to flee after the hit:

  Nonetheless, some details have emerged that do not track with traditional Israeli intelligence tradecraft. The Dubai authorities this week said two of the operatives fled to Iran.

Let’s do a little detecting. We need a suspect group that (a) kills Hamas members; (b) doesn’t mind implicating Israel; and (c) has some sort of affinity with Iran. Hm… that’s a toughie; unless, just possibly, the hit was actually carried out by Hezbollah.

1. Hezbollah is fighting Hamas for control of Gaza and the West Bank; they have ample reason to want to assassinate al-Mabhouh.
2. Hezbollah takes its cue from Iran, and no country on Earth hates Israel more than Iran. Killing al-Mabhouh — and ensuring that Israel would get the blame in the international community, which is always eager to blame the Jews for everything bad in the world, anyway — would send a tingle down Hassan Nasrallah’s leg.
3. Hezbollah is Iran’s private terrorist group, which they send out to other countries and regions, notably Syria and the Palestinian Authority, to enforce Iran’s will. It makes perfect sense for Hezbollah assassins to flee to Iran for sanctuary.

To my thoughts, all signs point to Hezbollah, not Mossad, as the author of this plot. It seems that even the Devil can do a good deed now and again, albeit for his own nefarious reasons.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Fort Jackson is located in South Carolina and is the largest training base in the Army.

UPDATE: CBN News has more information about the poison attempt:

A source with intimate knowledge of the investigation, which is ongoing, told CBN News investigators suspect the “Fort Jackson Five” may have been in contact with the group of five Washington, DC area Muslims that traveled to Pakistan to wage jihad against U.S. troops in December. That group was arrested by Pakistani authorities, also just before Christmas.

UPDATE: Fox News has a statement from a spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Division.

The Army is taking the allegations “extremely seriously,” Grey said, but so far, “there is no credible information to support the allegations.”

The suspects were part of a Arabic translation program called “09 Lima” and use Arabic as their first language, two sources told Fox News. Another military source said they were Muslim.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

• primarydoc: blame the Bush Lost Decade?
• Dave From Oregon: hell, blame Reagan, Bush I and II. This stuff started in the 80s.
• ditsylilg: One of our biggest problems in this country is that we have no real access to comprehensive mental health care. Thank Reagan for that. Americans can no longer be made to feel as if they are not respected. The last 30 years have been hard for many of us. To not have any concern for one’s fellow citizens is why we are in this mess.
• hesiod: He’s a teabagger through and through. That could have been written by just about any freeper or teabagger in America.
• cardshark: That’s NOT the point. The point is to SPIN this as a Teabagger act to discredit them and the Republicans because the Republicans are meeting at this moment to figure out how to spin this against Obama.
• DavidHeart: Rovian, but I like it. You’re right. This isn’t the time to play “on the other hand” equanimities. This should be used to go after the GOP / Teabagger jugular.
• healthy: No. Rather an insane independant. He does not like government to take his money, but he wants governement to fix his problems (e.g. health care). Therefore he cannot be for Democrats – who supposedly are pro-tax, but he can’t be for Republicans who don’t care about social programs. What he has in common with the teabaggers is the anti-tax, less-government stance and most of all, the insanity.

The DUmmies took it even farther, calling this another 9-11 and saying tea partiers were defending the terrorist.

• EFerrari: So, how can the tea baggers defend this guy when he did a rerun of 9/11? I don’t get it. It’s okay to fly planes into buildings if they agree with your issue?
• donco6: Thus it has ever been. One man’s patriotism is another man’s terrorism.
• HiFructosePronSyrup: Because now that the president’s a democrat and black, they hate America.
• Sebastian Doyle: If 9/11 had been done by white rednecks with confederate flags on their planes they would have defended that too.
• lapfog_1: The Teabaggers want an armed revolution. They just don’t have the cojones to actually start the war. They applaud anyone who preaches succession or who physically attacks their enemies (us godless commies). It’s not clear that Stack even shares their beliefs other than his hatred of the IRS and government bailouts of the auto industry. But they are ready to award him some sort of accolade for “standing up to the government” (never mind the act of attempted mass murder of people who actually have very little power to shape policy or anything else, but they need a job so they work for the IRS and become targets of the hate of the wacko right).
• arcadian: If Glenn Beck flew a plane into the Sears Tower it would kick off a national trend.
• rcrush: They don’t seem to realize that this guy just screwed them over big time. What do they think is gonna happen when someone who claims to be a part of your group decides to suicide bomb a building in your groups name? Just gives people an excuse to come after you. Good job moran!

Who can really say they’re surprised here? Others in the MSM are starting to follow the “teabagger” meme, and Allah’s got the examples to prove it. I haven’t seen one person defending this man on the left OR on the right, yet because this man’s rambling suicide note complained about taxes, it automatically means that he must be a “teabagger”. And apparently, if he was a teabagger, then all teabaggers must agree with him.

Isn’t liberal logic fun??

Oh well. It really was only a matter of time.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

The cost of the trial is the least of the problems New Yorkers and Americans in general have with the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, here rather than in a military tribunal. The bigger issue is the Obama administration’s weak stance on national security, a dramatically candid glimpse of which was provided on by the botched handling on Christmas Day of the underpants bomber. After 50 minutes of interrogation by the FBI, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab freely admitted that other attacks were in the works, the interview was cut short on orders from the Justice Department. The terrorist was promptly read his Miranda rights and then permitted to lawyer up after which he clammed up.

Although the administration has tried lamely to defend this decision — by, for example, having spokesman Robert Gibbs appear on FOX News Sunday to claim that “useful intelligence was gotten” — the incident made it abundantly clear that Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, subscribe to a pre-9/11 mentality. This is a recipe for disaster.

Which is why New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio drafted a letter of his in response to McMahon’s that highlights the sheer lunacy of proceeding as planned with the 9/11 trials. The letter, addressed to Congress, noted the duty of “representatives of the people to stand up not just for our own personal ideology, but for the basic views and values we swore to protect. This decision runs anathema to those basic views and values.” The letter is reprinted in its entirety at Human Events, which has also drafted a petition to Holder that currently has over 118,000 signatures. You can add your own by visiting this link.

With three quarters of the American populace now opposed to giving suspected terrorists the rights of U.S. citizens, which include the right to a “trial by one’s peers,” this misguided decision now becomes the latest in a succession of damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn’t decisions confronting Obama. As with his benighted health care agenda, if he goes forward with the plans to conduct the 9/11 trials a few blocks from ground zero, he will be viewed as resisting the will of the people. If he relents, he will lose even more political currency with his dwindling far-left base, while telegraphing the message to the entire electorate that he botched a critical decision in the first place.

As we speak, four men are in custody that Fate tied together. One, a known, wanted terrorist who’s known crimes against Americans are too gruesome to even describe on the nightly news. The other three are members of one of the most esteemed, honorable, and lauded military organizations ever created. In a time of war against Muslim terrorists, common sense would dictate that justice would be on the side of those fighting on our behalf. Logic would use the history of actions committed by terrorists, both on the battlefield and in custody, to predict the behavior of one that has been captured. Patriotism and belief in the justness of the cause for which we fight would combine to give our soldiers a wide berth when dealing with our enemies.

None of these are being implemented in the case against Matthew McCabe, Julio Huertas, Jr, and Jonathan Keefe. These three courageous boys are members of SEAL Team 10, and had been among those to capture Ahmed Hashim Abed. Abed remains a captured al Qaeda terrorist, wanted for the slaying of four Blackwater security contractors (and former commandos themselves) in a most heinous fashion. These three SEALs are being charged with either abusing Abed, or covering up the abuse.

A poll of 100 random Americans, if shown the pictures of the charred bodies of four of our citizens hanging from a bridge, would find 99 of them volunteering to “abuse” Abed. I would count myself among them. Abed does not possess the sense of decency we do. He could have held the Blackwater members captive, fed, clothed, and cared for their medical needs – as we do – in a comfortable cell. He showed no such compassion. He murdered them, burned their bodies, then dragged their charred remains through the streets among cheering crowds. Since that did not satisfy his evil desires, he then hung the bodies from a bridge to be played with by locals (including children) and called several news agencies to take pictures such as this one.

In capturing Abed, who was armed at the time of his capture, no SEAL harmed him. At that time, they could have, or even shot him, but they didn’t. He was also initially turned over to Iraqi police. It was back in U.S. custody that the alleged “abuse” occurred. It is also well known that al Qaeda training manuals instruct terrorists to claim abuse while in custody, even to the point of self-inflicting wounds as “evidence”. Abed’s word should mean nothing. The government has not released photographs or video of the injuries (it is undergoing “classification review”), and balked at allowing our soldiers to directly face him at their courts-martial. The government has also delayed the case, presumably because the only credible witness to the abuse, a third class master-at-arms, can’t seem to get his story straight. At least five different statements by the unnamed sailor have been made and appear to conflict with each other.

The SEALS initially were faced with an Article 15 “Captains Mast”, which is a non-judicial proceeding by their commanding officer. All three declined as it is viewed as an admission of guilt. These soldiers wanted their day in court knowing that a guilty verdict in a courts-martial will carry a harsher sentence. Guilty people try to find a way to avoid harsh sentences, innocent people want to clear their name.

When boiled down to the nutshell version, this smells like a witch hunt. Why the master-at-arms is lying is anyone’s guess at this point, but people telling the truth don’t give conflicting statements, though they may add or delete details as time progresses. The bigger question, however, is why does anyone care about the alleged “abuse” of this piece-of-trash? Americans don’t care. At least 40 Congressmen don’t care. In the wake of Abu-Ghraib, I can understand some heightened sensitivity toward claims of abuse, but also understand that everyone in the military does not want a repeat of those actions. Our soldiers are going out of their way, and often being put in harms way, to avoid harming prisoners of war. I have also had the honor of knowing many Navy SEALS, these men do NOT lie to their commanding officers. They are among the most honorable people I have ever met. In other words, I would take the word of one SEAL over the word of 10 masters-at-arms and 1,000 terrorists. When three SEALS tell the same story, only the direct Word of God could convince me they are lying.

And Abed’s “abuse”, seriously, is merely a punch in the stomach. It is in their charge-sheets. So apparently on top of being a complete waste of carbon, Abed also lacks the intestinal fortitude to injure himself properly or thoroughly.

The SEALS still need our help. For more information on how you can help, and more details on this case, please go here. They have sacrificed so much for us, the least we can do for them is write a letter or make a phone call. For these three men to even stand trial is the greatest travesty of justice I have ever witnessed.