1. Cal Thomas calls for us to get serious in the war against Islamo-fascism. He says it's time we broke out of the legalistic civil rights mindset that has constrained us for the last forty years.
The British are still shocked that people who are born in their country, go to their schools, have British accents and eat fish and chips would kill their fellow Brits. They do so because their allegiance is not to Britain, or to the Queen, but rather to their perverted view of God and the instructions from the hate preachers telling them to go bag some Jews, Christians, Westerners and other "infidels."
Health officials respond to plagues by isolation and eradication. Their objective is not only to control the spread of a disease, but also to kill it so it won't infect others. If that is an effective method for combating a plague, why is it not also a good strategy for combating the islamofascist plague?
This isn't about "civil rights" and constitutional protection. These people use our Constitution to protect themselves so they can kill us. And this is decidedly not a game. It is life and death. We want to live and they want us dead.
The war against Islamo-fascism is centuries old and yet completely new. The rules that western states have devised to maximize justice for their citizens so that people could live in safety may no longer work in an age in which the enemy's chief grievance is that you do not share his religion, his chief goal is to kill you and his chief blessing is to die in the attempt.
2. Are we safer now than before 9/11? Of all the nonsensical questions that keep getting asked by media types this has to rank near the top. How can anyone answer it? What would count as evidence one way or another? How could anyone possibly know? As long as there are people out there who wish to kill us, and have the means to do so, then we are not safe. Period.
3. A CNN talking head was discussing the need to eliminate poverty and joblessness among European Muslims in order to eliminate terrorism. Poverty, she averred, breeds hopelessness and hopelessness breeds alienation and alienation breeds terrorism. Unfortunately for this thesis the plotters were all middle class and all had jobs. One pundit noted that some of them lived in nicer homes than did most of the policeman who arrested them. Too many liberals seem locked in the Marxist categories popular during the sixties, and are just unable to grasp that terrorism is not about economics, or land, or American foreign policy. It's about religion and the Islamist desire to conquer the whole world for Islam.
