It is both draining and energizing to compile a list of scores of things that just feel wrong in today’s America. Trust me, because I just did it, and the result is the newly released Upside Down: How the Left Turned Right Into Wrong, Truth Into Lies and Good Into Bad.
Talk about a target-rich environment.
But amid my various laments about our worsening fiscal nightmares, the attacks on our Constitution and the abandonment of many traditional values, there is a chapter that addresses one noxious modern phenomenon that already has an established death toll that will only get worse if we don’t wise up: It is the campaign to restrain us from seriously battling global jihad.
“Political correctness” is the buzzword of the age. It can apply to many things, from free-speech suppression on college campuses to the soft-pedaling of hard truths in various societal debates. But the strain of PC that will leave a trail of bodies is the crusade to silence those who would aggressively identify and combat radical Islam.
We have seen the global cost of leadership that is more concerned about protecting Muslim feelings than obliterating Muslim terrorists. Much of Europe has been culturally overrun by migrating Islamic populations with little or no interest in assimilation. Draw attention to this in America as a problem to be avoided, and accusations of Islamophobia will swarm.
The pleasantly titled Council on American-Islamic Relations spends its days listing examples of bigotry which are often simple criticisms of Islam that they disagree with.
It is not Islamophobic to identify the disconnect between Sharia law and a Constitutional republic.
it is not Islamophobic to recoil at the violent extremes of the faith’s practitioners, from murdering the innocent to “honor killings” among their own ranks.
It is not Islamophobic to observe that migrating Muslim populations have historically spread the caliphate by the sword rather than peacefully coexist.
Islamophobia does exist, found in the broad scapegoating of peaceful Muslims by those who paint with too broad a brush. But CAIR and other self-appointed watchdogs do not place the bar at actual prejudice; they seek to stigmatize and ultimately silence voices who would call for American vigilance in a time when we are the target of a growing terrorist menace.
My state of Texas has been a recurring exhibit for such hazards. In November 2009 at Fort Hood, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan killed 13 and injured 32 in a bloodbath of jihadist fury. He had displayed a variety of behaviors that gave off multiple signals of his potential danger, but fellow soldiers knew they were the ones who would pay a price if they drew attention to his warning signs.
In the last year, the Dallas suburb of Irving has been tormented by lawsuits from the family of the Muslim teen seeking to brand the city and the school district as haters for their guarded reaction to the suspicious device he brought to school. The infamous homemade “clock” justifiably worried the school, and while the route to resolution in this case may have been imperfect by the officials’ own admission, the notion that it was the product of seething hatred of Muslims is a total fabrication.
The goal is the stigmatization of what we were all told to do post 9/11: “See something, say something.” The logic was that we would rather raise a concern and then learn it was not worrisome than unwisely mask our concerns and watch Americans die.
That wisdom is under attack, which leaves us vulnerable to literal attack. When we restrain ourselves from our proper suspicions, or when we muzzle ourselves amid provable dangers for fear of retribution, we are more easily killed.
Our war against terrorists is not purely a faraway Middle Eastern conflict; warriors are spreading across the globe, some with a goal of killing us on our own soil. The attempted stifling of proper attentiveness to that peril is not just a PC annoyance; it is a threat to our national security.