Terrorism doesn't go away when you ignore it And Denying Jihad — Again

The Sultan and Robert Spenser sum up the Islamic threat to the West and why the West is it's own worst enemy.

FROM SULTANKNISH:

Terrorism doesn't go away when you ignore it

By Daniel Greenfield

Terrorism doesn't go away when you ignore it. Much like a massive oil spill, it doesn't go away just because you want to play golf or bask in the attention of a worshipful press at a Correspondents Dinner that seems to have more celebrities, both Hollywood and Big Media, than honest hardworking reporters. Terrorism doesn't take a day off or take holidays off. Not even Muslim holidays. Not even for Ramadan. Terrorism doesn't go away until you defeat it. It's that simple.

Islamic terrorism is one of those things that isn't supposed to exist anymore in the realm of human affairs. The zero sum game. The struggle to which there can only be two outcomes. An unambiguous victory by one side or the other. No amount of negotiations, outreach programs, speeches, concessions, scholarships and books will change that. And that is a shame because for the last century our culture has embraced the idea that every problem in human affairs can be settled if we all sit down and talk it out. And that naive idea of violence in human affairs resulting from a lack of concessions is exactly the kind of thing our enemies would like us to believe. All the better for them to cut our throats.

The negotiation fallacy depends on the assumption that every player in the game would rather talk than fight, would rather settle for 33 percent of the pie, than 100 percent of the pie. Human history alone testifies to the fact that such players not only exist, but that they tend to walk away with the whole pie, which is not surprising as history tends to be written by those who play to win, rather than by those who play to draw even. An inconvenient truth for the apostles of soft power who think that empires of paper tigers are all it takes to usher in a new world order.

Unfortunately for them, wars so often come down to who wants victory more. In WW2, Nazi Germany swept the field because its soldiers wanted it more, while the Allies and even the Russians initially wanted to split the difference, to keep Fritz at bay, until everyone had a chance to talk it over, and pick up as much as they could from the new state of affairs. Only when England and Russia looked into the abyss, did they actually begin to want it more. Only then did they begin making the sacrifices, putting forth the desperate effort and endurance that allowed them to survive long enough to exhaust Germany's warfighting capabilities and bring the United States into the war.

Today we aren't the ones who want victory more. Our enemies do. And they make a point of it every time a suicide bomber walks into a crowd. His death is their way of communicating to us their ruthlessness and their determination to stay in the fight until the last infidel is dead or in chains. Suicide bombing is not strategy, it's propaganda by those who make up for their lack of strategic and military acumen, with their contempt for the "soft and decadent enemy" whom they see as wanting nothing more than a comfortable life surrounded by consumer goods. An assessment of the modern world that Islamists shared with Khrushchev and Hitler, not to mention your average progressive critic of American consumerism.
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Here Robert Spenser like Daniel Greenfield looks at the West's determination to ignore and deny the ever growing Jihad.

Denying Jihad — AgainBy Robert Spenser

FROM FRONTPAGEMAGAZINE:

We know now that the car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. But the mainstream media, following its usual pattern, is once again denying, minimizing, or obfuscating this fact.

Writing in The Nation on Monday, Robert Dreyfuss epitomized the mainstream media’s hope that the car bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence plates were stolen.”

In reality, according to Pakistani authorities, Faisal Shahzad, the would-be car bomber, attended a jihad training camp in that country. He spent five months in Pakistan recently, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the attack — a claim that American authorities immediately dismissed, but which gained a new claim to serious consideration when Shahzad’s Pakistani connections were revealed.

Shahzad parked his explosives-laden SUV outside the offices of Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, which presents South Park, the cartoon whose creators were just threatened with death by Islamic supremacists in New York for daring to lampoon Muhammad. The Muslim group that issued the threat, Revolution Muslim, was proselytizing in Times Square just hours before Shahzad’s car bomb was discovered.

Yet for all this, virtually no media reports are saying anything about Shahzad being a Muslim. Such a reference, however, would hardly be gratuitous: Islamic jihad theology and the death penalty enshrined in Islamic law for anyone who insults Allah or Muhammad are the most likely keys to Shahzad’s motivation. But the politically correct, multiculturalist imperative demands that Islam and Muslims, being (at least in this addled view) non-white and non-Western, must always be portrayed as victims, no matter how imaginative the lengths to which analysts must go in order to find something, anything, to blame for the carnage other than Islam’s doctrines of hatred of and violence against unbelievers.

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post led the way in the imaginative department. Observing that Shahzad defaulted on the mortgage on his home in Connecticut and that the property is now in foreclosure, Klein discovered a hitherto-unnoticed motivation for violent jihad: “foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don’t make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we’ve done to save the financial sector, we’ve not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.” Help struggling homeowners, or they’ll try to set off car bombs in Times Square!

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, meanwhile, may not have had to face the heartbreak of foreclosure, but she had her own reason to feel “an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression”: what got Brewer down was that Shahzad turned out to be a Muslim. “There was a part of me,” lamented Brewer once the perpetrator was identified, “that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country.”
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