by mike Evans
Unfortunately, not every liberal in America agreed with talk show host Alan Colmes, of Hannity & Colmes fame. In his book Red, White, and Liberal, the very liberal Mr. Colmes wisely said, “The time to debate going to war was before the fact. Once American men and women were in harm’s way that debate was over and lost by those of us who opposed the intervention.”15
Conversely, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Nicholas de Genova, gave this rousing speech at what was cavalierly called a “teach-in”:
Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live—a world where the U.S. would have no place…. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus.16
Oddly enough, Dr. de Genova made these comments in reference to:
…the ambush of U.S. forces by an al-Qaeda warlord in Somalia in 1993. The Americans were there on a humanitarian mission to feed starving Somali Muslims. The al-Qaeda warlord was stealing the food and selling it on the black market. His forces killed 18 American soldiers and dragged their bodies through the streets in an act designed to humiliate their country.17
The hateful rhetoric aimed at American troops engaged in life and death battles did not lessen when American troops marched into Baghdad on April 9, 2003; indeed, the hue and cry to bring the soldiers home only rose. Even as Hussein’s heinous prisons were emptied and his monstrous torture chambers taken apart, even as tons of humanitarian aid flowed into Baghdad to feed the hungry and provide much-needed medication to the ill, the liberal Left was condemning the U.S. incursion into Iraq. Like de Genova, the most open and voluble of the detractors were among America’s university elite.
ISLAMOFASCISTS: NOTHING NEW
There has long been a fascination in the Islamic world with all things Hitler. In fact, the Arab states of Syria and Iraq, both Baath Party regimes, were patterned after Hitler’s Fascist concepts. Just as Hitler’s vision was a world under the domination of his Nazi regime, so the vision of today’s radical Islamic clerics is a world under the domination of Islamic, or Sharia, law.
This was never more apparent than when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini launched his Islamic revolution even as the shah of Iran was fleeing the country. As I stated earlier, it was Khomeini who dubbed America “The Great Satan” and tagged our closest ally, Israel, “The Little Satan.” Truthfully, these are the only two nations with the ability and the hope of the moral clarity needed to quench the flame of Islamic revolution before it ignites across the globe.
The liberal Left in America took up the banner of the oppressed and downtrodden in Iran and ran with it. What followed was a litany of charges leveled against America for her support of the shah’s regime, for supporting Israel locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Palestinians, for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, for Vietnam, and so on. Palestinian terrorists became “freedom fighters,” and the innocent victims of their atrocious acts became the instigators simply for daring to live in Israel. Suicide bombers who brought devastation to buses, restaurants, busy shopping malls, and even schools were given the religious designation of martyr.
Radical Islam has given birth to a weapon that truly cheapens human life: the suicide bomber. But this will be as nothing compared to the weapons of mass destruction under preparation in radical Islamist states—weapons whose targets may begin with Israel but ultimately are aimed at the world’s greatest democracy.
The secular, liberal Left refuses to accept the very serious threat posed by the Islamic radicals. They refuse to accept the fact that every American, place of origin not withstanding; every Jew, wherever found; and every Muslim who disagrees with the particular philosophy of the Islamic fanatics is a target. University professors will not be spared simply because they have supported the radical any more than the leftists siding with Khomeini were in deposing the shah; erudite philosophers will not be spared because of their education, and the religious Left will not be spared simply because of their worldview on religion. While their support is now welcomed and heralded worldwide by terrorist organizations, once the terrorists reach their goals, they will turn their guns on these as infidels just as they did following the Islamic revolution of 1979. No, everyone will be required to conform to the doctrines and dictates of the mad mullahs who have hijacked an entire religion—or else.
In fact, on February 26, 1993, Yigal Carmon, counterterrorism advisor to the prime minister of Israel, warned the Pentagon that, in his estimation, radical Islam was an imminent threat to America. At the end of his briefing, he was told by smirking critics that they did not consider religion to be a threat to national security.
Following his address at the Pentagon, Carmon flew to New York City, where, while having lunch at 12:18 p.m., a huge explosion took place nearby: Islamic terrorists had attempted to blow up the World Trade Center; one thousand were injured and six killed.
Islamic terrorists finished the job on September 11, 2001, and still no one wants to admit why we were attacked—just by whom. But Osama bin Laden is just the vanguard of a religious hatred that will engulf the entire world if not stopped.
Days before the 9/11 attacks, the UN sponsored a World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. Hidden behind that grand title was a hate-filled attack against Western democracy in general and the United States and Israel in particular. Charges such as racism, slavery, and colonialism were leveled against these two democracies. It was not surprising that the Muslim regimes still using these practices escaped such criticism. No mention was made of the genocide in Rwanda or Iraq; no condemnation was levied against Iran’s use of children as minesweepers during the Iran-Iraq War; nor was there a mention of the suppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia or of Syria’s subjugation of the Lebanese people.
In attendance at the conference were such stalwart liberals as Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond and ten members of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus. In a world forum, the group took its own country to task and called for the United States to pay trillions of dollars in compensation for the slavery that had been abolished in the United States in 1865. No such demands were made against other states, including those African nations that willingly participated in the trafficking of human beings. Although Cuba is said to have imported more slaves than the United States, favorite son Fidel Castro escaped condemnation unscathed. This only served to underline the double standard practiced by the UN.
As the rhetoric inside the conference became more bitter and the conference deteriorated into a blatant anti-Semitic attack against Israel, President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the Israeli delegation exited the proceedings in protest. Some conference-goers took to the streets to parade vile posters with swastikas and pictures of Jews with fangs that dripped blood. Richard Heideman, president of B’nai B’rith International, in an open letter to all Jewish community leaders, said of the Durban Conference:
We and other delegates have been bombarded by Nazi-like propaganda, by caricatures, by hate material, by physical and verbal assaults and by intimidation. And all within sight of U.N. officials, all in clear and open violation of the charters, conventions and declarations which define the very purpose of the world body.18
The British representative of the World Jewish Congress, Lord Greville Janner, said it “was the worst example of anti-Semitism I’ve ever seen.”19
The conference was attended by a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the Ford Foundation and drawn from the ranks of the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the National Lawyers Guild (labeled by J. Edgar Hoover as a subversive organization and possibly a cover for the Communist Party), and the pro-Castro Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).
Leftist groups that had once focused on social justice turned their focus almost entirely on Palestine and Iraq. These two terrorist-harboring and supporting states
became the darlings of the liberals worldwide. Countries and organizations that differed ideologically became frightful enemies. Their venom focused on one group in particular, the World Trade Organization, whose projects were deemed to be a major cause of environmental concerns worldwide.
The hatred for this organization and its participants congealed into one of the largest protests, some 50,000 strong, ever seen in Seattle, Washington. Anarchy ruled as streets were blocked, Molotov cocktails destroyed local businesses, and chaos reigned. Successive meetings of the World Trade Organization in Czechoslovakia, Canada, and Italy were also disrupted by demonstrators. From these protests was born the World Social Forum, a group whose professed aim is to “mobilize solidarity for the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination as they face brutal occupation by the Israeli state.” Simply put, this world coalition of leftist liberals has one aim: the emasculation of the United States and the destruction of Israel.
PALESTINE: THE CATALYST
The various wars that have occurred in the Middle East are over what is perceived to be skirmishes on the periphery of the current war on terror and therefore completely separate from the jihad declared on the United States. It is easier, then, to view the terrorists as despairing victims and not the murderers and hate-mongers they are.
When the original UN partition plan was drawn for Palestine, the Jews and Palestinians were to occupy 20 percent of the Palestine Mandate initiated by the League of Nations in the 1920s. Great Britain was entrusted with the execution of the mandate. The League of Nations and Britain determined in September 1922 that a homeland for the Jews would not include any of the land east of the Jordan River, three-fourths of the territory outlined in the mandate. That area would ultimately become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, an area with a Palestinian majority. Jews were banned from settling anywhere in that area.
In 1937, a royal commission of inquiry was given the directive to try to resolve the differences between the Palestinians and the Jews. A plan was put forth to divide the territory into two separate states. This was rejected by the Arabs because it called for the creation of a Jewish state in which some Palestinians would live. The Jews resisted the plan because it only allotted them approximately 1,900 of the available 10,310 square miles in the territory. They, however, agreed to negotiate, while the Arabs refused.
Again, in 1939, the British tried to persuade the Arabs to agree to a state in Palestine, and a limitation on the number of Jews that would be allowed to immigrate. This was also declined by the Arabs. How can one explain, then, the vilification of the Jews that has resulted simply because they occupy 1 percent of Arab lands in the Middle East and only 10 percent of the entire Palestine Mandate?
The Middle East conflict is not about land or the establishment of a state for the Palestinian people. This has been offered and rejected various times—at Oslo in 1939, at Camp David, and in Washington DC. The conflict is about the destruction of the State of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t want a portion of Jerusalem, but rather all of Jerusalem. They do not simply desire to occupy the West Bank, but all of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It is not a matter of “land for peace”; it is a matter of using any means possible to rid the Middle East of the Jewish population altogether. They do not wish the subjugation of the Jewish people; they wish their destruction. This was Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s agenda. It was Yasser Arafat’s agenda. It is the agenda of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
Perhaps Yasser Arafat condensed the Arab-Israeli conflict into the most succinct statement of all when he said: “We shall oppose the establishment of this state to the last member of the Palestinian people, for if ever such a state is established it will spell the end of the whole Palestinian cause [the obliteration of Israel].”20
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Political pundits are quick to point out that the war in Iraq is President Bush’s war, when, in fact, it is an unfinished chapter in the presidency of Bill Clinton. When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, Clinton was in office. It was under his watch that Americans were targeted by Islamic radicals. It was the Clinton administration that failed to hold the regimes responsible for the attack. It was in 1998 that Saddam Hussein defied the UN and expelled the weapons inspectors. Clinton went so far as to call for a regime change and launched air and missile strikes against Iraq, but considered nothing further. Former CIA director James Woolsey had this to say about the effectiveness of the missile strikes:
In ’93, Saddam [Hussein] tries to kill former President [George H. W.] Bush in Kuwait with a bomb. And President Clinton launches two-dozen cruise missiles against an Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night so it would be empty. And has his secretary of state explain that we did it in the middle of the night so there wouldn’t be anyone there. I don’t know what we had against Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but I would not have called that an effective response.21
When President Bush picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Saddam Hussein and began his campaign to pursue terrorist-supporting and terrorist-harboring states, he was strongly supported. Even his previous opponent in the run for the White House, Al Gore, strongly supported the action. However, once the troops were committed to engage Hussein’s forces, the detractors began to rise to the surface. Democratic leaders were urged to abandon Bush and resist the call for the invasion of Iraq.
A petition signed by thousands, including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem, and a host of Hollywood celebrities, caused the political Left to rethink their commitment. Suddenly Al Gore, once a proponent of the war in Iraq, began to criticize President Bush when he saw that doing the right thing might be politically dangerous to his agenda. He was soon joined by former president Jimmy Carter, who seemed to have conveniently forgotten that President Bush had sought the help of the UN Security Council. He also seemed to have forgotten that Democratic president Bill Clinton had approved strikes against Afghanistan and Iraq, among others, without prior UN sanction.
Carter and Gore proved to be just the tip of the iceberg of quick Democratic opposition to the war. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi made her dissatisfaction known just as quickly in a press conference soon after American forces entered Baghdad. Said Pelosi, who voted against going to war with Iraq, “I have absolutely no regret about my vote on this war…. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably $100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue [referring to the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein] for a lot less.”22 (Following the 2006 elections, Ms. Pelosi was elected House majority leader.)
Before the war began, the liberal Left set a course to defame, denigrate, and malign President Bush with no thought for the thousands of troops stationed in and around Iraq. They had no regard for the newly elected Iraqi officials who have struggled to build a stable government on the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s evil dictatorship. The president’s credibility, veracity, and ideologies have been questioned. He was accused of having conducted a pointless and independent war, devoid of allies such as Russia and France.
It was pointed out time and again that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction, as the president had led the American people to believe—despite the fact that Hussein had used chemical weapons in the war with Iran, and again to murder scores of his own people in the Kurdish north. No credence was given to the proposal that Hussein had ample time before the beginning of the conflict to move those weapons across the border into Syria and entrust them to al-Assad. And the fact that some twenty-five million Iraqis had been freed from the control of the vicious Hussein was casually overlooked.
The liberal Left continues to obsess over weapons of mass destruction while, at the same time, infecting the nation with “weapons of mass deception.” I doubt that few, if any, of these “bleeding-heart liberals” have visited the mass graves of the Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein
. Even as I write this, I am looking into the faces of Kurds who experienced Hussein’s unspeakably horrific acts against the Kurdish people. The sadness reflected on their faces is heartbreaking.
The presidential election of 2004 was an all-out assault against the Iraq war, the Bush doctrine on terror, and the American people who strongly supported the president. It proved the truth of the adage that if you’re told a lie often enough, it becomes believable. Howard Dean, a rabid war critic, tossed his hat into the candidate ring, then Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and John Kerry. The candidates vied for the honor of producing the most hateful campaign rhetoric against the war in Iraq. It was even suggested that the war on Iraq was conceived before the attack on America on September 11, 2001.
At the end of a bitter and divisive campaign during which Senator Kerry proffered that the war on terror was simply a police action and could easily be handled by occasional military intervention and accused the White House of assaulting the basic freedoms of the American people, George Bush was reelected to another term as president. The liberal Left, however, remains firmly committed to the agenda of appeasement and apathy.
ATTACK OF THE LIBERALS
Attacks against America’s spiritual and moral foundation have been ceaseless during the past decades. Yet according to the Barna report, 47 percent of American adults attend church in a typical weekend, 71 percent believe in God described as the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect Creator of the universe who rules the world today, and 54 percent of all Americans identify themselves as Christians. Americans, in general, are still church attendees. Witness the success of the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The Bible is still an all-time national best seller.
