The President should acknowledge that there is, after all, "a War Against Terrorism". Authorities should be plain, of course, that the enemy is not Islam or Muslims, per se, but radical Islamists--and that that includes not just al Qaida, but also Iran, through its paid surrogates, Hamas and Hezbollah, assisted by the totalitarian communists in North Korea that ship nuclear and other armaments and the dictatorship in Venezuela that attempts to destabilize democracies (Honduras, Colombia) and makes common cause with Iran. Islamist radicals in Europe (especially the U.K.) and now inside the U.S. have been recruited, so they are properly identifiable as foes. What these allied terrorist groups and terror-supporting regimes have in common is hatred toward freedom and democracy as Westerners understand them. They hate Jews and Christians and will kill them in Iraq, Pakistan or wherever they can find them. They also have no compunction about killing fellow Muslims, so CAIR, et al, should spare us the argument that targeting Muslim extremists is targeting Muslims in general.
Be grateful for Muslims who have joined in the fight against the Islamist radicals, reporting them to authorities. They often do so at personal peril, which is why you don't hear about them much. We need to protect and encourage such people. Muslims arguably are suffering more than anyone from the radicals in their midst.
It is an obvious self-delusion in the West that radical Muslims don't kill other Muslims, that mosques are so sacred that they will not be attacked by Muslims (that mainly is a ruse to intimidate gullible westerners) and that there are certain holy days when no Muslim will attack another. Just look at what the Iranian authorities have done during the holy time of Ashura.
Meanwhile, closing down Gitmo and staging high profile trials in New York doesn't impress the terrorists or their likely recruits. Such actions may look like weakness. And if they are done to impress the sensitivities of the European Union, one might ask, what is the EU doing to impress us? We need French and German troops in Afghanistan. Where are they?
In contrast, consider the heroic sacrifices of young people and other Muslim (and non-religious) regime opponents right now in Iran. Photos from Tehran, Tabriz and other cities show people of all classes rebelling against real theocratic tyranny. Congress should be asking, what can we do to give them stronger support? Hint: it doesn't involve sending Sen. Kerry over there to meet with government officials.
Meanwhile, let us get real about airplane safety. It is political correctness raised to social suicide not to profile people getting on planes. If Israel practiced such policies, they would be in a condition of collapse by now. Yes, TSA should be polite, and actually, T.S.A. personnel almost always are polite. But it should be official policy that some types of people are more likely to get screened more carefully than others. Sorry about that, but that's life, and there is no secondary embarrassment endured by people who are carefully inspected.
By the way, there are many other Middle Eastern countries besides Israel that profile for terrorists. I am sorry to tell my more liberal friends, but I myself, as a middle aged American, am seldom checked rigorously when I travel in Arab lands. At the same border checks, I see many traveling Arabs checked very carefully against lots of lists and presumably for lots of reasons.
Then, as the Christmas Day news showed, there is one salient lesson from the "underpants bomber" (as our colleague Michael Medved calls him); namely, that U.S. intelligence still is not sharing its data adequately with airline personnel and foreign border control agencies and our own varied authorities. A suspect should not have to be "elevated" to the "no fly list" in order to get certain minimal special attention. Today's computers can scan even 500,000 names long in advance of a plane's departure. The fact that the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab alerted U.S. authorities in November to his son's growing radicalism should have put Umar on a list of persons who would be checked more carefully at any airport than would, say, a parson from Peoria. New equipment is good; why not use the "Stimulus" money for that? But even a mere human pat-down would have revealed the leg-device worn by Umar.
This sort of thing is just common sense, and it is totally achievable. We do not need to harry ordinary passengers any further--indeed, we absolutely should avoid doing so. What we need is a federal government that will make common sense common practice.
