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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Ken Ballen to discuss his book Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals, which provides case studies of individual extremists, their life histories, and their personal perspectives, in the context of showing how the United States can better understand the Islamic world.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Buy Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals on Amazon
Terrorists in Love
TerrorFreeTomorrow.org

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The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

Most Americans are unaware (although readers of my website, AtlasShrugs.com, are well aware) of the atrocity that is taking place at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The New York Times reported last Sunday that “a dispute” is taking place over the remains of 9/11 victims, “between some of the victims’ families and the officials planning the National September 11 Memorial and Museum underneath where the twin towers stood.”

The dispute has arisen, says the Times, because “officials plan to take the remains seven stories below ground and place them in the new museum behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil about never forgetting, studded in letters of World Trade Center steel. But the families, appalled by the idea of remains that could belong to their loved ones being turned into a lure for tourists, want them kept in a separate above-ground memorial that would be treated like hallowed ground.”

The remains of the victims of the September 11th Islamic attack on this country do not belong to those ghouls at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum (Ground Zero mosqueteer Daisy the Khan is on their advisory board). Sally Regenhard, who lost her son Christian on 9/11, explained: “I personally feel I’ve been robbed of access to where my son’s remains are potentially being buried. My entire family, we will never go in there. This is a post-traumatic stress situation waiting to happen.” Rosemary Cain, whose son George, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, said that putting the remains in the museum was “like a freak show.”

However, the president of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Joe Daniels, was fine with the freak show: “What the families need most and what the public needs most is a memorial they can come to to pay their respects at.” The hubris of this creep. He is going to tell the 911 family members what they need.

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Like everybody else, when I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood I immediately rushed to judgment, assuming that anybody opening fire on soldiers on an army base in Texas expected to die. Thus the shooter was either 1) a soldier who had cracked or 2) a priapic jihadist aroused by the thought of all those virgins in paradise. Reasoning that an armed Islamist would struggle to penetrate Fort Hood’s security, I concluded that the shooter was probably an unfortunate soldier gone berserk. A few hours later however I discovered secret option 3) that the “alleged” shooter Nidal Hasan was both a soldier and a jihadi nutbag- an entirely new hybrid, in other words.

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in.  Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)

Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.

Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.

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