Americans No Longer See Terrorism as Threat

If you can’t beat them... Forget 9/11. Forget the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Forget the fatwahs of al Qaeda and its sister organizations. Forget the scores of attacks that have occurred or been thwarted on American soil during the past eight years.

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Americans, according to a Gallup poll, are less concerned about terrorism than at any point since August 2004 – with only 36% saying they are very or somewhat worried that they or a family member will become a victim of a terrorist attack. Americans’ collective level of worry about terrorism is the lowest recorded since August 2004 (34%) and down sharply from the all-time high of 59% recorded in October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks. 30% now say they are not too worried about the threat of another terrorist attack and 34% say they are not at all worried. In a separate Gallup Poll, a scant 1% of the Americans surveyed mentioned terrorism as the most important problem facing the United States. Although President Obama, apart from Bubba Bill Clinton, is the only U.S. Commander-in-Chief never to serve in the Army, 73% of Americans say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the Obama Administration and the Democrat majority in the House and Senate to protect them from future acts of terrorism — unchanged from 2006. Two-thirds of the liberals in America, according to a recent ABC poll, maintain that Islam is a peaceful religion that poses no threat to the country. Sixty-two percent of the registered Democrats and Independents concur. Islam, the ABC pollsters discovered, is more apt to be seen unfavorably by less-educated adults, Southerners and senior citizens than by their counterparts. Compared with the ABC poll of October 2001, unfavorable views of Islam have increased by 23 points among senior citizens, 19 points among conservatives, 18 points among Republicans and 12 points among Southerners. There’s one group – liberals – among whom unfavorable views of Islam have declined, by 11 points. These findings are supported by the collapse of the market for books dealing with terrorism. Harry Crocker of Regnery, the publisher of such works as Stealth Jihad by Robert Spencer and America Alone by Mark Steyn, says that books on terrorism no longer sell well. The new attitude of the American people goes a long way to explain the failure to drum up a substantial number of protestors to decry the convention of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group with espouses terror attacks against Israel and the United States, at the Oak Lawn Hilton Hotel on the outskirts of Chicago. The subject of the gathering was “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Capitalism.” The event, according to the Chicago Sun Times, attracted 800 Islamists but less than fifty people showed up to protest. Hilton Oak Lawn General Manager Rick Harmon said Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic for “the Party of Liberation”) used its own name when it reserved the room for the conference, but the hotel was not aware of the content of the event, which includes lectures entitled “Capitalism is Doomed to Fail,” “The Global Rise of Islam,” and the “Role of Muslims in America,” until after the contract was signed. Harmon said the hotel is open to all kinds of meetings, including presumably gatherings of Muslims who are intent upon the destruction of America and its economic system. Hizb ut-Tahrir, according to Islam expert Walid Phares, offers indoctrination that prepares al Qaeda and other terrorist groups for the jihad against Israel and the United States. It is a global Sunni network. Some prominent members included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander al Qaeda in Iraq; Asif Muhammad Hanif, a British jihadi who blew himself up outside a bar in Tel Aviv, killing four people (including himself) and wounding more than 50; and Omar Bakri Mohammed, a imam currently banned from Britain who praised the 9/11 attacks, raised funds for Hezbollah and Hamas and called for attacks on the Dublin airport where U.S. troops transferred there en route to Iraq. In his book, “How the Khilafah Was Destroyed,” Sheikh Abdul Qadeem Zalloom, the former global leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, says anyone who rules by a non-Islamic system should “either retract or be killed … even if this led to several years of fighting and even if it led to the killing of millions of Muslims and to the martyrdom of millions of believers.” Hizb ut-Tahrir’s official ruling on the permissibility of hijacking planes says, “If the plane belongs to a country at war with Muslims, like Israel, it is allowed to hijack it, for there is no sanctity for Israel or for the Jews in it.” Interestingly for Americans, one of the organization’s more recent leaflets, published in March, calls for the declaration of “a state of war against America.” Former member Ed Husain, who left the Muslim organization and denounced it in his book The Islamist, says: “The only difference between Islamists from Hizb ut-Tahrir and jihadists, is that the former are waiting for their state and caliph before they commence jihad, while the latter believes the time for jihad is now.” Hizb-ut-Tahrir is outlawed in Russia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and numerous Muslim countries (including Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia) that regard it as a radical, subversive, terrorist organization that spreads “hate and violence” and seeks to overthrow their governments. But the group remains off the State Department’s terror watch list and remains free to expand its operations throughout our country.

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