And if you flipped on the news today, you probably saw this news item:
Two New Jersey men were arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport as they were allegedly trying to board separate flights to Egypt on their way to join the terrorist group Al Shabaab and wage "violent jihad" against people outside the U.S., prosecutors said Sunday.
But possibly you didn't see this opinion piece by Richard Bernstein in the NYT last week.
“Fatwa on your head?” the ad reads, in a message apparently aimed at Muslims who want to convert to another religion or simply not to be Muslims anymore. “Is your family or community threatening you?”
Now, I don't trust histrionic blogger Pamela Geller, who is pushing this ad campaign, for much of anything. She still calls Obama a Muslim, for goodness sakes. Yet, capital punishment for apostate Muslims is no invention of hers. The Rifqa Bary circus was, well, it was a circus. But plenty of young Muslim women, not all of them overseas, have been murdered by male family members for less than whatever she was fleeing.
Read the piece yourself. The author concedes pretty much every salient point. Yes, radical Islam is a murderous plague. Yes, the much-hypothesized moderate Muslims are stubbornly silent about it. Yes, there is a stealth jihad lurking in the mosques of America. Yes, honor killing and capital punishment of apostates are uniquely Muslim horrors. But. But, but, but...Admitting those things, and then drawing conclusions from them, making your synapses fire in the same direction as a disdained Red Stater, well that's just too much, apparently. Much more comforting to fall back into the condescending--and safe--liberal habit of bemoaning the stereotypical "vicious cycle", instead:
If there are more terrorist attempts by Muslims on American soil, there will be more Americans paying for bus ads and other things to express their rage at Islam itself as well as at Muslims in America, and to encourage the idea that America is, or ought to be, its and their enemy.
This of course is exactly what the jihadists want them to do. The more we make all Muslims our enemies, the more enemy Muslims we are going to have.
No. Their attacks on us sprang from their own evil hearts, not from anything we did or said. 9/11 was not a wake-up call for me; Jihadists have been murdering Jews and Americans my whole adult life, long before that September morn. If there are more terrorist attacks on American soil, Muslims will be thanking God that the public's response will be no stronger than bus ads. They as well as libs know full well how religious minorities are treated in Muslim lands, and thus ought to realize the fundamental decency of the American people. But evil needs only the slenderest of excuses to urge itself into motion.
Thus far, and no farther.
