September 11
Quote of the Day:
Remember, this war against us did not start that September day in 2001. It had been going on for a long time.
–Rudy Giuliani in today's Wall Street Journal
We all remember where we were fourteen years ago today.
We at IWF particularly remember Barbara Olson, the brilliant commentator and Clinton critic, who had served on IWF's board and who was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
It would be nice to say that the terror we saw that day has been defeated, but it would not be true. George W. Bush recognized immediately that day that the U.S. was engaged in a War on Terror, but many of us decided that we had overreacted, that there was really no war against us, or that we had done something to provoke it. Or we decided that it was something in the past.
On that last Rudolph Giuliani writes this morning in the Wall Street Journal:
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that 9/11 is now simply a part of the nation’s history, like Pearl Harbor. Because there is one big difference. The causes and hatreds that created 9/11 are still with us, and the terrorists have enlisted members who are even more diverse, cunning and determined. The Islamist terrorist war against us continues. This is not a matter of history but of current and future threats.
Remember, this war against us did not start that September day in 2001. It had been going on for a long time. The plane hijackings and killing of innocent people by Islamist terrorists, and their murderous attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Berlin, occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the late 1970s, Iran’s theocratic rulers began killing hundreds of thousands of their own people and took American hostages that the regime held for 444 days.
In 1985, Leon Klinghoffer, an American citizen in a wheelchair, was shot and thrown into the Mediterranean from a cruise ship by Islamist terrorist hijackers merely because he was Jewish. They were acting on the orders of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, later a Nobel Peace Prize recipient (so much for the Nobel organization’s legitimacy).
The same World Trade Center in New York was attacked by Islamist terrorists in 1993. The bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the naval vessel the USS Cole, which in prior administrations would have been considered an act of war, all happened in the late 1990s.
All of this should have suggested to America’s leadership that war was being waged against us. In case there was any uncertainty about the intentions of these people, Osama bin Laden clarified it by declaring war on us in the late 1990s. Instead of treating these incidents as part of a war, we treated them as discrete, individual crimes. All of these horrendous terrorist acts, and bin Laden’s declaration of war, shared one objective: destruction of the infidel. They were all undertaken in the name of an extremist interpretation of Muhammad’s call to jihad.
But America was in denial.
How sadly indicative of our post-September 11 denial that on this day we are on the brink of a deal with Iran that will help that vicious regime go nuclear and that sides with the mullahs, who chant "Death to America," while ignoring the Iranian opposition. Iranian proxies in the Middle East will be empowered.
Only twenty-one percent of Americans want this deal, according to a Pew poll, but President Obama, elected on the notion that a nation can take a vacation from history and end–or just ignore–a war that has become too unpopular and demands too many sacrifices, will flout law to get this deal. We are also learning that intelligence may have been manipulated to make it appear that we are succeeding against ISIS, the successor to Al Qaeda, when the contrary is the case.
America got tired of the War on Terror, but our enemies did not.