southchild

Has the United States gone the way of so many European countries, such as the Netherlands, Denmark and France, where citizenship has become so amorphous — and tolerance so perverted — that not only is assimilation a bad word, but entirely new cultures hostile to the existence of the country accrete like pebbles in a conglomerate? Most Americans are aware of the assimilation problems of Hispanics who have entered the country illegally, but how many of our fellow citizens are aware of the Muslim enclaves right in our backyards who often support Islamic fascism?

Diana West addresses this question in Loyalty test: Time to declare war on the enemy. She writes,

In this wide-open question of loyalties we may see the expanding emptiness of the modern nation-state, where basic identification with the nation itself is no longer at the core of citizenship. And that includes the United States of America, where, for example, a good stretch of Main Street follows the Israeli war on Hezbollah via Al Jazeera — at least Main Street in Dearborn, Mich., which writer Debbie Schlussel has described as “the heart of Islamic America, and especially Shia Islam America.”

As The New York Times reported from Dearborn, “For miles along West Warren — in hair salons, restaurants and meat markets — shopkeepers and their relatively few customers stared at televisions tuned in to Al Jazeera.” Incidentally, there were “relatively few” customers out and about only because, as one baker knew, “most of his regular customers were home watching [Al Jazeera], just as they had all day, every day,” since Israel’s offensive began.

Why does this matter? Al Jazeera, of course, is the relentlessly anti-American, anti-Israel, jihad-boosting “news” network. To find sets in the heartland tuned in to this station today is roughly akin to coming across an American town, circa 1942, tuned in to Axis Power propagandists Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw.

But this isn’t, as they say, your father’s heartland. Hezbollah itself is popular in Dearborn, which can fill a banquet hall to celebrate “Lebanon Liberation Day” — the day Hezbollah claims as its 2000 victory over withdrawing Israeli forces. Osama Siblani, the publisher of Dearborn’s Arab American News, considers Hezbollah, along with Hamas and other jihadist groups, to be “freedom fighters.” And, as Siblani tells it to the Detroit News, he’s not alone: “If morally supporting Hezbollah or associating with [Hezbollah spiritual leader Muhammad Hussein] Fadlallah is a crime, ‘there is not (sic) going to be enough buses to haul the people out and take them to jail.'”

Siblani was speaking before the Israeli offensive began. But not before the 1983 Hezbollah bombings in Beirut that killed 241 US servicemen, 63 U.S. Embassy personnel and 58 French paratroopers. And not before the 1984 Hezbollah torture-murder of CIA station chief in Lebanon William Buckley. And not before the 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the torture-murder of Navy diver Robert Stethem. And not before the 1988 Hezbollah torture-murder of Col. William Higgins. And not before the Hezbollah bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, killing 29, the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 96, or the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 U.S. servicemen.

American sympathy for Hezbollah profanes American dead. In our wide-open society, however, such allegiance isn’t considered beyond the pale. But it should be. And it could be. I have long argued that the “war on terror” is an amorphous term, sacrificing clarity for fuzzy political correctness. What if we, as a nation, belatedly declared war on specific jihadist groups — Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and other organizations dedicated to our destruction? This would have the tonic effect of clarifying not only our enemies’ identity, but our own. We can’t fight if we don’t know who we’re fighting. We can’t win if we don’t know who we are.

Click here to read the entire essay. It’s well worth it.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 3:18 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.