"All Jihad is Local"...

Mark Steyn on American "leadership's" inablility to call Islamic Terrorism what it is.

Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Micheal Bloomberg all went out of their way to persuade us that the Times Square Bomber was most likely a White Male Tea Party Dude. And then that this attempted bombing was an "isolated incident" without the least "connection to Islamic Terrorism". That was before Faisal Shahzad was identified as the owner of the car-bomb and arrested, after an Islamic Terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attempt, and 10 people are arrested in Pakistan in connection with it. We later learned that this "isolated extremist with no apparent ties to international terrorism" spent half the last year in Pakistan's notorious Northwest Frontier area, an Al'Qaeda and Taliban stronghold. And finally, they ensure us that "the System Worked"...after they've arrested a man on a No-Fly List on an airliner just minutes from take-off, who was only caught in the first place because he failed to detonate his bomb, leaving his car, house and getaway car keys and a ton of evidence behind -- and ultimately because two street vendors and three NYPD cops exercised some personal initiative and responsibility to avert disaster.

Not a single Federal Agent anywhere to be found when they might have been useful, which is before the attempt. Where this guy does come into contact with Federal Agencies, he manages a visa to enter the country, he managed to leave the country several times for months on end and his travel patterns evoke no curiosity, he wasn't identified, nor his travel scrutinized. He wasn't on the FBI's radar, nor the State Department's infamous "terror lists", nor were the TSA or ICE looking for him.

In fact, when Federal Agents were, belatedly, on his tail -- that is, in the hours after the failed bombing, his identification, and presumably when his name and address become known -- their surveilance fails them and they lost track of the guy for several hours, which is how he wound up on an Emirates flight out of JFK bound for Dubai, despite being on a "No-Fly" list.

You begin to wonder just what "System" was at work here. The ineffectual, inept, always-one-step-behind Federal System, or the System in which five individuals who obeyed the simple guidance of "If you See Something, Say Something" achieved a tangible result without scads of taxpayer money, and a alphabet soup of enforcement agencies? Five men see something, and they do what seems logical for them to do, given their experiences and training, and they save hundreds of lives. The Government sees the same situation...and starts looking for Angry White Males with Private Health Insurance. Presumably, I mean, who knows what they were doing and thinking? . Yes, I understand that you follow all leads, but do you have to go on television and make such stupid, and false, pronouncements which are based on ignorance and politics? Shouldn't you be obliged to apologize for being a douchebag and an asshole, afterwards?

I think the people who talk and think this way, people who skip around the truth of Islam being an ideology for violent retards, is that the truth is too frightening to admit from the standpoint of not matching their Kumbaya vision of the world. This willful blindness ensures that more Americans are going to be killed, and it's perhaps the main reason why we declare a War on Terrorism that now requires "Enemy Combatants" be given Constitutional Rights, and not made uncomfortable by the conditions of their interrogations and trials, and that soldiers sent to engage the enemies of this nation be given medals for NOT shooting at said enemy.

These policies are wrong. These attitudes are deadly. The inability to face the truth gets people killed, and when you scream "Islam is a religion of peace!, you only encourage more Islamic douchebags with an explosives fetish. How many more people have to die before the people who "lead" us finally wake up to the reality of what we're facing? When when people stop getting on television in the course of a state of emergency and talking out of both sides of their mouth and rectum, simultaneously? People like that become part of the problem, not the solution.