Where Do We Go From Here?

Six years ago 19 Islamic murderers hijacked four air liners and crashed three of them into buildings in New York and Washington, and the fourth one into a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly three thousand innocent people. Today, there are thousands of memorial observances and tributes to the victims of radical Muslim intolerance, and there is no need for another one here at Observations.

Instead, I want to present and discuss a comment that addresses not what happened in 2001, but about our future and the importance of the decisions we make about how we proceed.

While much of the focus continues on Iraq, an equally important war must be prosecuted and won at home. Like a vast shell game, we must find the Islamofascist pea inside growing numbers of pods. Is the mosque down the street from you peaceful, or a sanctuary for terrorist plots? Is the Islamic school teaching peaceful religion, or jihad? Is the government monitoring them, in spite of opposition to such things from “civil libertarians”?

In that comment, columnist Cal Thomas identifies the most serious threat America has to deal with if it is to survive: the growing threat of the perverse Muslim element bent on our destruction that exists within our own borders. Addressing how the nation deals with this threat, Thomas continued:

How many civil libertarians exist in the type of society OBL wishes to impose on us? If bin Laden succeeds, the ACLU will be among the first organizations crushed, after appropriate thanks for helping to make the takeover possible.

Thomas is right: If we allow ideologues on the Left to control our response and thwart efforts to defend ourselves against this very real threat, our demise will be hastened.

Opponents of efforts at self-defense cite infringement on individual rights and freedoms, real and imagined, of intelligence measures designed to find terrorists before they strike. They say we cannot sacrifice any of our freedoms for any length of time. Our safety is not more important than our freedom, they say.

However, if terrorists succeed in unleashing more attacks on the United States, killing and injuring hundreds or thousands more Americans, of what value will that passionate defense of individual freedom have been to those hundreds or thousands?

Americans appreciate the freedoms they have, and none of us wants to lose them. However, if we are sensible, vigilant and aggressive in our efforts to find and root out these pockets of fundamentalist Islamic intolerance planning to end our way of life, we can thwart most terrorist acts before they are carried out. And the tiny concession of freedom that we sacrifice will have been worth it, if not to the individual freedom ideologues, at least to those whose lives and safety were protected.

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