WhatFinger


Enough of the PC-induced self-flaggelation

The PC Strategy for Dealing With Terrorism?  Stay Lucky



Who wants to die for political correctness sake? No doubt many will think the question is absurd, but is it? Apparently we have dodged yet another Islamic terrorist bullet when ink cartridges filled with explosives and put on planes were discovered before they could do any damage. That means only one thing: the insufferable, PC status quo will remain virtually unchanged. Here's some questions for the politically correct among us, for whom no threat ever alters their perceptions, no matter how removed from reality those perceptions are:

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--Do you think maybe it's time we got serious about border control? We all know what the politically correct answer is: of course not, you nativist bigot. The flow of "human capital" should not be impeded by such "artificial demarcations" as national borders. The utter nonsense of this one can be demonstrated by a simple math equation: according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based group that studies the nation's Latino population, "300,000 illegal immigrants entered the U.S. each year from 2007 to 2009, down from the roughly 850,000 that entered annually from 2000 to 2005." That's a total of 4,850,000 illegals entering the United States in nine years. If one ten-thousandth of one percent of them are Islamic terrorists, that comes to 485 people. Number of terrorists it took to bring down the World Trade Center, damage the Pentagon and put the entire nation on red-alert? Nineteen. The number it took to kill 14 and wound 31 soldiers at Fort Hood? One. --Is it time to start shutting down mosques and madrassas here in the United States where jihadists have advocated violence against Americans? In 2009, the FBI estimated that "10% of the 2000 mosques in the United States preach jihad and extremism." "25% of Muslims between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that suicide bombings can be justified," according to a Pew Research Center poll. Where do the PCers stand? In an ideologically induced coma: “We do not yet have a complete understanding of what would cause a United States person to radicalize to the extent of violence,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in September. “There’s no one way of counter-messaging,” she added. “We’re learning a lot about counter-messaging.” Here's a counter-message, Ms. Napolitano: as long as the United States remains at war with Islamic radicals, we reserve the right to both monitor and/or curtail any activity which may aid and abet their ambitions to destroy our nation. Also, what about our prison system where Muslim clerics continue radicalizing our convict population on a daily basis? How much longer should Americans put up with that insanity? --Is it time to limit legal immigration from, and economic activity with, Muslim nations? According to the Associated Press, a UPS employee said that as a result of the latest plot, "they had been instructed not to receive any packages for delivery (from Yemen) for the time being." To paraphrase, "packages don't kill people. Packages packed with explosives by Muslim terrorists do." Maybe both legal immigration and economic activity should be tied to the number of terrorist plots originating in Muslim countries. More plots equals less of both. The downside? Some countries would purposefully keep plots secret. The upside? Muslims would be forced to deal with their domestic terrorist problems themselves, in order to avoid "pariah" status with the Unites States. Of course, such a policy is only possible if the following question is answered correctly: --Is it time to treat the domestic development of energy resources as the national security issue it truly is? We send hundreds of billions of dollars to countries that hate our guts, year in and year out. These billions are the lifeblood of international terrorist financing. Only a nation completely addled by political correctness would be underwriting its own demise. The ability to tell Middle East nations, "thanks but no thanks" with regard to oil would engender a paradigm shift in the prevailing attitudes of countries whose entire economies depend on oil exports. More importantly, it would also give the United States, which has historically vacillated between international involvement and isolationism, a tremendous amount of flexibility in dealing with some of the worst actors on the planet. Don't think for a second that, currently, the thought of Iran being able to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most vital oil routes, doesn't figure into the equation of how we deal with them. It does, big time--and they know it. Ironically, the very same PCers who bemoan our military presence in the Middle East "for the oil" are the ones fighting tooth and nail to prevent us from being masters of our own destiny--not to mention invigorators of our own economy. Better to let Cubans and Chinese drill off our coasts? Better to let our "ally" Saudi Arabia dictate terms? Better to prostrate ourselves before OPEC--or the Iran's newest ally, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who just recently signed a deal with Russia to "go nuclear?" Enough of the PC-induced self-flagellation. --What will Americans have to endure before we eliminate al Qaeda's command-and-control center in Pakistan? The last time America was faced with an enemy which used suicide bombing to advance a political agenda, we nuked them. Twice. That al Qaeda remains fully functional in North Waziristan is a testament to a political correctness, in which even one civilian death constitutes barbarity on our part. Compared to what? The deadly attrition of American troops forced to fight--for the better part of a decade--with one hand tied behind their backs? The ongoing ability of al Qaeda to coordinate plots like this most recent one? How about giving terrorists enough time to finally secure nuclear weapons--while we're busy "winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world?" The trade-off with regard to civilian deaths is this: is it preferable to endure substantial numbers of them in a shorter war--or perhaps even greater numbers as a result of drawing war out? While the future is always unknowable, there is historical precedence with regard to such trade-offs. In Vietnam, our refusal to bring the might of the United States military to bear may have resulted in less civilian casualties in the short run, but our withdrawal absent a victory led directly to the deaths of three million Asians at the hands of Communist butchers. That's a lot of innocent civilians about whom the PCers used to profess so much concern. I say used to, because other than using civilian deaths in Iraq to bash our military, I see very little concern regarding the future deaths of innocent civilians there or in Afghanistan should we adhere to our scheduled withdrawal from both places. I remember a time when PCers were "champions of the oppressed and downtrodden." Perhaps for today's PCers, some oppressed and downtrodden are "more equal" than others. --Have we had enough of treating terrorism as a "law enforcement issue?" In the most recent civilian trial of an alleged terrorist, Judge Lewis Kaplan disallowed government evidence against Ahmed Ghailani who is being tried for conspiring to bomb the U.S. embassy in his native Tanzania in 1998. Kaplan said prosecutors may not use information gathered through coercion of a detainee to prosecute that individual for a criminal offense. Yet the judge also said that even if Ghailani is found innocent, he may be detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant. Yet Kaplan also said that "the CIA Program was effective in obtaining useful intelligence from Ghailani," that "this valuable intelligence could not have been obtained except by putting Ghailani into the [CIA] program," and that such a program "served compelling interests of national security." In other words, coercive techniques used to save American lives are apparently permissible, but using them as evidence against a terrorist defendant in a civilian trial are not--but it doesn't matter because we can keep him locked up indefinitely anyway. Confusing enough for you? What about the civilian trials of 9/11 masterminds, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al? During a trip to Asia in 2009, president Barack Obama said those objecting to a civilian trial won't find it "offensive at all when he’s (KSM) convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." He quickly backtracked saying, he wasn't "prejudging" the case. But such a statement clearly is prejudicial--which allows for the possibility, however remote, that a mistrial could be declared for the man responsible for murdering nearly 3000 Americans. Military tribunals are the obvious answer. But that would force PCers to admit we are at war with radical Islam, not "policing" it into submission. Finally, there's context. All of the above questions--and answers--drive the PC crowd crazy and elicit all kinds of familiar name-calling: neo-con, eco-fascist, hate- and war- monger, heartless, cruel etc., etc. Yet such indignity is a luxury borne of only one reality: an unsuccessful follow-up to 9/11. There is no question the national conversation would be completely different had the Christmas Eve or Times Square bomber been successful, or if Fex Ex and UPS had delivered the latest packages to their intended destinations and they had exploded. It is an indignity that could still be rendered utterly irrelevant, or worse, criminally negligent, if some horrific tragedy can be linked to one of the aforementioned items distorted by political correctness. For example, a terrorist armed with an al Qaeda-provided nuke, sneaking across our southern border and detonating it--perhaps in a "sanctuary city"--would render every aspect of political correctness with respect to terror instantly obsolete. So would a series of coordinated attacks on shopping malls by home-grown terrorists radicalized right under our collective noses, in a mosque, madrassa or prison. Question: why are we waiting for something to happen first? The Constitution, as it has been said, is not a suicide pact. And America has historical precedent with respect to avoiding such suicide as evidenced by Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, or FDR trying six German spies before a military tribunal and having them executed after a guilty verdict was reached. Such deviations from Constitutional norms were temporary. But both presidents, along with many Americans, recognized that extraordinary events demand extraordinary solutions. They also recognized that our democratic republic is flexible: rights were restored after hostilities ceased. As for rights per se, those which give terrorists greater chances to succeed in exterminating thousands, if not millions, of Americans are, at best, competing ones. Perhaps it is time the PC crowd told Americans which of those competing rights supersedes the one with which most Americans are ultimately concerned: The right to live.


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Arnold Ahlert -- Bio and Archives

Arnold Ahlert was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years.


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