From AFP:

A small group of Islamist demonstrators staged a protest outside the US embassy in London Sunday during a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Around 50 people brandished anti-US banners, chanted slogans and burnt a small piece of paper with a picture of the US flag on it, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

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If you are upset about the Orwellian TSA screening procedures in effect in our nation’s airports, too bad.

Our country has gone back to sleep, reverting to a 9/10 military posture vis-à-vis the Jihad being waged against us infidels. How can you tell? Once again, Progressive Americans are treating terrorists as though they are simply criminals who should face justice in a civilian-criminal court of law. When Yemen sends crotch and printer bombs, we send in the FBI. This was the 9/10 (or) Progressive response to the Jihad, which made possible the events of 9/11.

Another example of our return to a 9/10 mindset can be found in our reactions to Islamists declaring Jihad against us. When Osama did it in 1996 (FROM YEMEN), the West yawned. Who was this sandman to declare war on us, we thought. Only we declare war – nobody else has that power or capacity, right? Once again, Jihad has been declared against us, now by the Muslim Brotherhood directly. The West is yawning once more.

When we briefly adopted a 9/12 posture against our Islamist enemies, they were too busy running and hiding and dying, to be planning and launching multiple attempts to blow us out of the sky. Our enemies seem to have all the time and breathing room in the world now though, inspiring the question: What ever could have changed over the past couple of years, leading to this new “normal” of repeated Yemeni-Jihad bomb plots? Oh well, we could wonder for hours and probably never put our finger on it.

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Bill Clinton was absolutely right when he wrote the following in the New York Times:

Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.

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Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right all the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.

We are again dealing with difficulties in a contentious, partisan time. We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

We couldn’t agree with President Clinton more. We must all be vigilant in our efforts to avoid fostering an environment that offers quarter to extremist and violent elements.

This is as true for the Tea Party as it is for any other political movement – and while we are on the subject of other movements, we trust that President Clinton’s intellectual consistency would necessarily lead him to condemn Lisa Fithian’s United For Justice and Peace the Direct Action Tendency (DAT) anarchy group.

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On conservative talk shows, defenders of President Obama have frequently asserted that it is too soon into the term of the new administration to fairly judge the policies and performance of our President.  Well, nearly a full year has elapsed since the Obama administration took office and we’ve now all had plenty of chance to “give Obama a chance.”  The oft-repeated mantras that “It’s too soon to tell” and “It’s all George Bush’s fault” won’t hold beer any longer.   If his plummeting poll numbers are any indication, many who fell for Obama’s neatly packaged utopian vapors of hope, change, and transformation are finally starting to emerge from their media-induced slumber.  And, while many of us could easily predict that the shallowness residing at the core of Barack Obama would soon lead to a precipitous disillusionment, the speed with which that is taking place is actually quite breathtaking.

Despite what European Socialists may think of us, Americans are not entirely stupid.  While the well-oiled hype machine of the Left-biased news media and the air headed Hollywood crowd helped to induce the large scale brain freeze that got Obama elected, as his serious failures of policy have mounted and the significant impact of those failures is felt, no amount of propaganda will suffice to resurrect the messianic fervor that once surrounded the heady days of Obama’s campaign.  Daily some new facet of the administration’s incompetence (at best) and fecklessness (at worst) is displayed, and increasing numbers of those who initially fell under his thrall are awakening to the profound danger Obama’s Presidency poses to both world peace and our American way of life. (more…)

For those who were expecting the election of Barack Obama to yield a peace dividend in the war on terror, the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come as a surprise. Obama’s obsequious diplomacy was supposed to be a tonic to the aggressions of the Bush years, but his appeasement seems to have only encouraged more war. Rather than calm the Islamic world, Obama’s passivity has invited attack.

As in the Cold War, the current battle of ideology takes place in proxy wars. Unlike in the Cold War, the war on terror is largely fought through symbolic actions. Islamists do not make tactical attacks. They do not bomb Boeing factories or destroy highways and rail lines. Instead they destroy iconic buildings, trains, and airplanes. They use the spectacle of destruction, carried out in a diabolical way by suicide agents, as their means of waging war. That is the definition of a terror campaign.

The proper response to terror is not appeasement but counterattack. Islamists wage their terror campaigns in order to cow American influence abroad, especially in the Gulf. The answer to such attacks, if we hope to avoid them in the future, is to increase American involvement in Muslim countries both through soft influence and force of arms. Such a strategy was one of the best but least articulated justifications for the Second Gulf War.

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