Conway, Arkansas has now produced two remarkable 20-somethings in the same year. The first: Kris Allen, the newest American Idol. The second: Private William Long. Sadly, you know a lot more about the former than the latter.
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PFC Long was murdered in cold blood last Monday. Abdulhakim Muhammad gunned him down in a spray of bullets as Long stood in front of a military recruiting station in Little Rock. Long hails from a long line of American soldiers. His father served in the Marines, his mother in the Navy. Long's older brother is on active duty, and younger William chose to follow suit. At the time of his assassination, Long was recruiting fellow Arkansans to serve the United States of America, a noble vocation. Muhammad admitted that he murdered Long for religious reasons and wished that he could have killed more American soldiers. Moreover, the early indications point to Muhammad's being a part of a larger plot. Time will tell.
Muhammad murdered PFC Long the day after Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller, the notorious abortionist, in Wichita, Kansas. The media coverage of the two stories could not be more divergent, and commentators, like Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, have rightly noted that disparity. The media's obsessive coverage and hyper-analysis of Tiller's murder only serves to accentuate its utter disregard for the life and death of PFC Long.
Still more remarkable, the President of the United States and the Attorney General felt compelled to comment immediately and vigorously on the Tiller murder. By contrast, they remain strangely quiet and dispassionate regarding Muhammad's killing of a young American serving in the military near his own hometown. Do they not see the larger picture or do they simply choose to ignore it?
Perhaps a lesson in recent American history and simple math will help:
- A young man drives a car into a crowd in Chapel Hill, NC as an act of jihad.
- Four young men are arrested in the Bronx for plotting to bomb Jewish sites
- A Seattle man plots to bomb a Jewish charity
- A man coordinates an attack on the El Al airline counter in the Los Angeles airport
- Two young men are arrested near a Navy base in South Carolina while possessing pipe bombs in the trunk of their car
- A Georgia Tech student stands trial for participating in terror plots
- Four young men lead a jihadist group in Virginia
- More than twenty male Minneapolis residents, many of them middle class and wealthy, leave America to share in terror plans in Somalia. One becomes the first American suicide-bomber. Others return to America with unknown intentions
- On multiple occasions, American soldiers plot or attempt to infiltrate their own colleagues in order to kill them.
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