A preliminary hearing for Mohamed H. Dawod is scheduled to take place Monday at 10 a.m. Central in Springfield, Mo. The 25-year-old Glendale, Ariz., man is charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the Sept. 8 shooting death of an Ohio man at a Greyhound bus station in the southwest Missouri community.

Mohamed H. Dawod

Dawod is accused of shooting Justin Hall, 32, of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, during a late-night rest stop for travelers on a St. Louis-bound bus full of passengers from as far away as Amarillo, Texas, point of origin for the bus.

On Sept. 9, I was the first to raise the possibility that the shooting might be a case of terrorism at my website and at BigGovernment.com after officials in the Southwest Missouri community, according to a report in the Springfield News-Leader, were quick to say the shooting appeared random.

A day later, a KSPR-TV report cited Springfield police officials as saying that, because of a language barrier, they only learned Dawod’s name and had asked the FBI to help them with the investigation. That local television report included this telling paragraph:

Ten separate witnesses say they did not notice the men fighting or arguing before the shooting. One passenger said she watched the suspect wander around the terminal until the call to line up to re-board the bus. “She then observed the suspect remove a silver and black handgun from a back pack he was carrying,” the officer wrote. “The suspect then pointed the handgun upward while saying something. The witness could not understand what the suspect said and didn’t know if he was speaking English.” No matter what was said the witness said Hall didn’t react or turn around. Shortly after the witness says Dawod shot him from a few feet away.

I went on to draw information from two other television news reports that seemed to reveal more than the “official” story lets on about the deadly incident that involved a man with a Muslim name allegedly shooting someone he did not know less than 48 hours ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States:

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As Americans prepare to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorists attacks, The Heritage Foundation has been busy reminding Congress and the public of the importance of staying the course in the War on Terror.

Since 9/11, at least 40 terrorist plots aimed at the US have been foiled. We have disrupted terrorist networks, captured or killed their leaders, and worked to keep them from rebuilding. But as Heritage’s James Carafano explains, our continued security is anything but certain:

The Administration now seeks to treat terrorism under a law enforcement paradigm that failed to protect Americans from terrorism when it was adopted by the Clinton Administration before 9/11. In addition, the White House intends to follow a “small footprint” strategy for overseas operations, relying primarily on Special Forces operations, covert action, and strikes with unmanned aerial vehicles.

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Today, I’ll be thinking less about the World Trade Center and more about my father and the relentless – probably unique – ability of New York City to bury its dead and move on without a backward glance.

My father was born in Manhattan in 1923, in a tenement building off Columbus Circle. A few years later, he moved to Brooklyn, a borough that was considered the country back then, a place that had more horses than cars. By the time he left there for good in 1966, it wasn’t the country anymore, that’s for sure.

He worked for Sea-Land, a shipping company that was one of the World Trade Center’s original tenants, and one of my very earliest memories is of my older brother and me playing in the company’s unfinished offices in one of the towers before the complex opened to the public in 1973.

Like many, probably most, New Yorkers, my father hated the Twin Towers at first, preferring the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, which had gone up during his childhood.

He’d seen King Kong when it came out in 1933, he explained, and he just couldn’t see the big ape climbing the towers. By the late ‘70s – after Philippe Petit tightrope walked across them, George Willig scaled them, Owen Quinn parachuted from them, and King Kong himself had been shot off them in a 1976 remake – he’d come around.

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“…on a day when others tried to divide us, we can regain the sense of common purpose that stirred in our hearts 10 years ago. As a nation, we face difficult challenges, and as citizens in a democratic society we engage in vigorous debates about the future. But as we do, let’s never forget the lesson we learned anew 10 years ago — that our differences pale beside what unites us and that when we choose to move forward together, as one American family, the United States doesn’t just endure, we can emerge from our tests and trials stronger than before. That’s the America we were on 9/11 and in the days that followed. That’s the America we can and must always be.”
– Pres. Barack Obama, USA Today, Sept. 8, 2011

Ten year have passed since the Islamist attacks on the United States of America; attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA. Since that time we have routed the Taliban from their haven in Afghanistan, dispatched Osama bin Laden to the icy deep and lopped off many of the heads of the Islamist terror hydra. We have grown as a people to better understand the dysfunctional relationship that the Islamic theo-political dogma has with Western Culture. And we have done our best to attain closure, for ourselves, for our society and for our country.

But closure can be hard to attain when there are no bodies to bury and no pointed victory over a vanquished foe. And when closure alludes because of unresolved issues we must always re-examine the event; the moment; the realities.

At the ten year mark, an American president is foolishly stopping short of succeeding in a generational conflict with fundamentalist Islamists…or radical Islamists…or jihadists, you pick the politically correct term the Progressive-Left elitists are sanctioning as appropriate this week. To me, they are the enemy; bloodthirsty ideologues who are committed to ideological conquest by the sword in their quest to establish a global Caliphate existing under the exclusive stricture of Sharia Law. But then, that’s just me…educated on the subject and painfully realistic in my examination. You see, I dispensed with the self-imposed mental handicap of political correctness years ago…and I feel a lot better for having done so. I also see things a lot clearer without the fog of stupidity clouding every issue.

At the ten year mark, a secularist New York Mayor – along with the Progressive elites of his ilk – is advocating for the construction of a victory mosque within the footprint of the fallen World Trade Center. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, about as self-righteous as they come, is so certain that a “kumbaya” inclusionist approach to fundamentalist Islam will heal the rift between cultures that he refuses to examine the Islamic traditions of conquest; traditions that include building great mosques over conquered lands and, in particular, conquered religious properties. One need only understand that mosques now stand over holy places meaningful to religions that existed long before Muhammad or the theo-political creed that is Islam, established in 610 A.D., to validate this reality.

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While the KXAN television news video below paints a graphic portrait of the damage wrought by wildfires in the Texas Hill Country east of Austin during the past two weeks, it makes no mention of three blameworthy factors that might have played pivotal roles in reducing the size and scope of this red-hot disaster.

The three factors appear below:

First, there’s the lack of enough firefighting air tankers. One could blame President Barack Obama for this, according to a Human Events report Wednesday, because someone in his administration grounded nearly half of the federal government’s firefighting air tankers after a contract dispute with Aero Union just weeks before wildfires swept through the Lone Star State. That decision, no doubt, left fewer resources available to Gov. Rick Perry and his team to fight the fires.

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Last week, Barack Obama declared that September 11 is a day of service, and encouraged everyone to get in on it: “There are so many ways to get involved,” he said, “and every American can do something.” He added: “Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost; a way to reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.”

True to his authoritarian leanings, Obama isn’t just hoping Americans get involved in this, either. Now schoolchildren are being indoctrinated, too.

Organizers of the 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance and the educational organization Scholastic announced Monday that they were partnering in a new educational program that they said was “designed to help America’s children learn about 9/11 in a constructive, nonthreatening way and inspire them to participate in the 9/11 Day Observance through good deeds and charitable service.”

In a press release, the 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance and Scholastic stated that “MyGoodDeed, a leading 9/11 nonprofit organization, and HandsOn Network, the volunteer activation division of Points of Light Institute, are co-leading the national effort to organize the single largest day of charitable service in U.S. history in observance of the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 in tribute to the victims and survivors, and the many who heroically rose in service in response to the tragedy.”

The calls for service on September 11 are inappropriate and sacrilegious. September 11 is a national day of mourning. It should not be a day of service, but of remembrance for those who died in a surprise military strike against the United States of America conducted by the military wing of the global jihad, resulting in the largest loss of life from domestic terrorism in American history.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to discuss the importance of Osama bin Laden’s death photos, and why waterboarding is an important tool in the war against terrorism.

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:

Closer look at bin Laden’s compound
White House Weighing Release of Bin Laden Photographs from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Deck of Aircraft Carrier
‘Cheney’s assassination squad’ just killed bin Laden
Pej: Means To An End
Republicans note harsh interrogation helped bin Laden operation

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Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Dan McLaughlin to discuss his experience on September 11, 2001, and what the death of Osama bin Laden means to him, the country and the legacy of 9/11.

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:

WHY BASEBALL STILL MATTERS: My September 11 Story
Bin Laden Announcement Has Highest Sustained Tweet Rate Ever, At 3440 Tweets Per Second
Osama Is Dead. Don’t Believe It Makes Obama Invulnerable to Defeat
Coffee & Markets: The Symbolism of Osama Bin Laden’s Death

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