MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Never Forget: Islamic Terrorism

• Posted by Beth on September 12th, 2007 filed in Afghanistan, General, Iraq, Islamofascism, Moonbats, Politics, Terrorism, The War    

Ace had a post (I hate the word “post” for something like this) up yesterday about 9/11 that has compelled me to write despite my hiatus. Actually, this started as a comment but it started to get long, so here I am. Just a bit here, but go read it all.

I miss that feeling I had with my neighbors, people I’d barely said hello to after three years of living among them. It was such a good feeling to feel truly connected to one’s fellow Americans, to feel as if we really were in this together, that we were a team, united and mighty.

But it was of course an illusion. As someone wrote the other day, one cannot expect one third of the country to commit psychological suicide, to kill the very core of their politico-religio-psychological identity. Their identity did not die; it simply went away for a little while to recover, to heal up in the woods.

A short while later were were more divided than ever. Not united but alone. What had been a relatively low-impact difference between us was now more central than ever, as half of us thought our worldviews were quite well corroborated by the demolition of the Towers, and a third of us, after a time of reflection, reasserted their own core belief — There is no war but that the US provokes or permits to happen through negligence or malice — as full-throatedly as ever.

What he wrote is the painful truth that nobody really likes to ponder. It was a bit longer for me before I was assaulted again by the vile blame-America mentality of the left just as it existed long before 9/11, but I knew those few initial days of shock would wear off only to reveal the ugly truth of their self-loathing soon enough.

Strangely, I was shocked, but not at all surprised on 9/11, and I knew who did it immediately, only because I was already acutely aware of Islamic terrorism and had a running count in my head since Tehran ‘79–or at least since Beirut, anyway, and was used to terror threats and awareness for years while in the military. It still seems kinda strange to me how I just knew, almost as if I’d seen a script, although I wouldn’t have dreamed it’d happen that way–I had countless friends working at the Pentagon then, and had only recently quit working there myself. “My” Pentagon? How the hell did a plane crash into it?, I thought. How the hell did they hit the fucking WTC? My neighbor and friend Margaret’s husband worked in that side of the Pentagon, and I spent the day with her while she worried about him trying to go back in to help–but nobody cried or panicked, we just “knew.” We knew we were at full war at that moment, and we had resolve.

For weeks–even months–in DC, everyone was a little bit gentler with one another, almost as if you weren’t sure if “that person” you spoke to may have lost someone, and then there was the anthrax scare where we would actually microwave our damn mail, and the Beltway Sniper (which was in a strange way, almost more unnerving). For that period, while DC still felt under siege, there were no frothing protestors, no idiots loudly blaming Americans–at least in my monkeysphere*, anyway. And then for other real-life personal reasons, I sort of disconnected from politics until talk started up about Iraq. That’s when I got sucked back into noticing that soulless black hole of unreality that is the Left.

There are times when I look at Joe Schmo who is blissfully uninterested in world affairs and politics, and I feel a twinge of envy. We all laugh about those people’s blissful ignorance, but really, they don’t have the angst we all feel about the existential threat of terrorism or people so hell-bent on being the “winner” in political issues that they openly oppose and subvert their own country’s interests because the guy in the White House has an “R” next to his name or just because we are American. We bemoan the national attention being on Britney/Paris/Lindsay/American Idol, but those people don’t sit up at night obsessively reading, watching, writing about things over which it maddeningly seems, at times, we have little control. If there were just something…something we could do to stop the bleeding, so to speak, of anti-Americanism, of terrorism–just something. (And on cue, the Left will chant their tired refrain, “sign up, neocon,” because it’s easier to attack the messenger rather than the message–nevermind the reason I haven’t “signed up” again–that would require them having a clue.)

I’ve been asked by the “uninterested” why I bother caring about this stuff; how do you explain that you can’t not care? For me, it didn’t start with 9/11; it started long ago. For a startling number of fools, this war–against terrorists, and the ideological war in America–only started with 9/11, as though Munich-Teheran-Beirut-Achille Lauro-Berlin-Lockerbie-Kuwait-WTC ‘93-Khobar Towers-Tanzania-Kenya-USS Cole-et cetera didn’t exist. “Never forget,” we say–in vain. For too many people, there is no “forgetting” what isn’t a threat to this country in the first place. America is the threat. “Iraq didn’t attack us,” they say. No, they didn’t, not on our soil. Nor did Afghanistan, either. (I would remind those people that precisely three places loudly applauded 9/11–Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “palestinian” territories, but I digress.) But as for why I care, this says it succinctly:

While ignorance is bliss, I would rather prepare myself for the probability that my young children could very well join this fight in the future.

I don’t want my daughter to have to live this fight. I want it to end. We aren’t the “warmongers” or “imperialists,” it is the Islamists who are, just as were the Communists were in my and my parents’ generations, and the Nazis in my grandparents’ generation. I don’t believe there will ever be a “world at peace” as long as humans exist, but there needn’t be a threat to my daughter’s way of life. What worries me, though, is that other Americans will prolong this world war by denying, lying, subverting, and perverting the reality of it. We (conservatives) aren’t “pro-war”–in fact, it seems more like the Left is “pro-war” considering their absolute unwillingness to win the war we’re in. There is no walking away from a war in which the enemy is actively engaged, because we aren’t fighting a non-existent enemy. They’ve already demonstrated their desire to kill “the infidel” thousands of times.

The worst thing? The truth is, if 9/11 didn’t make people see the enemy for who they are, there isn’t a damn thing that will. Sure, there could be an even worse attack, but I have no illusions about the Left. They would still blame America first, and for a large and disproportionately vocal number of them, the political party in power would be irrelevant, as long as America is still the most powerful nation on earth. They will only be satisfied when the United States is no longer the dominant world power, and they don’t even seem to care who or what would supplant that power.