Jan

6

I have been thinking about the recent attempted attack on a US airliner quite a bit. I have not really been able to put the right words together to solidify my thoughts. Mr. Friedman did it for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06friedman.html

Here are a few excerpts that struck a chord with me.

In speaking of the terrorists father…
“He went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and warned us that text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent, and possibly dangerous, radical.”

Not to mention that man put his life at risk in doing so. Would he have been willing to do this if we were still torturing people?

…and… he wrote

“We can’t let our country become just The United States of Fighting Terrorism and nothing more. We are the people of July 4th — not Sept. 11th.”

Dec

28

The recent terrorist attempt on flight 253 was a sobering reminder that extremists are alive and well and still want to kill us.

What I found even more interesting was that a few days later the same flight reported a similar incident. A man, also a Nigerian, created the false alert by spending too much time in the restroom. Turns out he was not feeling well.

At 30,000 feet, given the recent circumstances it is hard to fault peoples caution. But, this is not the point. In a post I wrote September 14th of 2009

http://everydollarmatters.com/blog/2009/09/14/frightening-and-intolerant/

I commented…

“All it really will take during this time is one plane into a building, one more meltdown of the economy and the behavior of rational people can change in a very bad way.”

You just saw a very small taste of this. During WWII we rounded up and interned Germany and Japenese citizens. The vast majority of these people were nothing more than hard working Americans that happened to be from nations we were at war with.

If you think America is too civilized for this to happen again you are incredibly naive. We are one attack or economic meltdown from becoming a nation of Glen Becks in the majority.

If you think that our behavior is motivated by race or religion you should think again. If a bunch of neo-nazis or skinheads or other white hate groups started attacking us on our soil we would be rounding up anyone with facial tatoos faster than you can say your name, and free speech would stop being free for these groups.

The fact is that as a nation we will tolerate hatred and other offensive perspectives to the extent that we do not feel threatened as a nation. We once again feel threatened by these extremest bastards. These twisted souls are filled with hatred. It is buried deep within their soul. 

These nut cases are not going away anytime soon.  Trying to maintain our ideals and democratic values is not easy when shit like this happens. But we must. If we do not then these evil dirtbags will have won. This is a very tight rope we are walking.

If these people are truly the minority in the Muslim world then Muslims need to stand up and unite against the extremists. Expecting Americans to do so will only result in a world that become divided by race and nationalism.

We need to remain diligent in our intelligence while still maintaining our civil liberties and freedoms. This is not and has never been a war about tanks and bombs.

One final note. I appluad the father of the captured terroist who five weeks ago reported to us that his son was a threat. We dropped the ball bigtime on this.

 

 

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