Gordon Kromberg: remember that name. Mr. Kromberg is a federal prosecutor who has investigated several radical Muslim groups in Virginia. In 2006, for example, Mr. Kromberg won a conviction against Sami Al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian activist, who pleaded guilty to aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Damascus-based terrorist group that has been responsible for dozens of bombings and scores of fatalities since the 1990s.
“Well, bully for Gordon Kromberg,” you might be thinking, “at last we can see some good come from the expenditure of the tax-payer’s money. What the world needs is fewer supporters of terrorists groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad walking the streets.”
Something like that, I confess, flitted through my mind when I first heard about Mr. Kromberg’s activities on behalf of the public weal: “Good job, Gordon!” more or less summed up my attitude. He didn’t make all of the 17 charges against Sami Al-Arian stick, but at least he put him behind bars for a while.
A little background. In 2003, Sami Al-Arian was accused of heading up a domestic cell of an organization that routinely murders people. His lawyers negotiated a deal in which he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. Judge James S. Moody Jr. sentenced Al-Arian to the maximum allowed under the sentencing guidelines. Responding to the objection that Al-Arian was merely attempting to aid women and children who had suffered in the Middle East, Judge Moody said that “The only connection to widows and orphans is that you create them.”
Fast forward to 2008. Lawyers for Sami Al-Arian are now attempting to turn the tables on Gordon Kromberg, accusing him, as an article in The New York Sun reports, of being “relentless” and “displaying his personal animus” in his pursuit of Islamic radicals.
Let me pause to declare an interest here. When it comes to fighting terrorism, I actually prefer prosecutors who exhibit the terrier instinct: I want them to be relentless, and if “personal animus”–i.e., a settled dislike of people who blow up school buses and otherwise maim and murder innocent people–helps nurture the relentlessness, so much the better.
That, anyway, is my feeling about the matter. But we live in an age in which soft jihad is on the rise–jihad that pursues its aim of establishing Islamic law worldwide not only by plowing jumbo jets into skyscrapers but also by using and abusing the institutions of democratic society in order to undermine those institutions. The legal system, for example, is used not as a tool to maintain the rule of law, but as a sort of sophistical stun-gun to stymie it. Thus we are treated to the spectacle of “human-rights” commissions who employ anti-discrimination legislation to silence journalists who have the temerity to call attention to the actions and goals of radical Muslims. And thus we find lawyers for Sami Al-Arian asking a federal judge to ponder the question of whether “anti-Muslim bias” fuelled the government’s case against him.
Of course, it’s not “anti-Muslim” bias that is at issue. If you want to use the language of bias at all, then what we are talking about is a “bias” against supporting terrorism. But really it’s not a question of “bias”–a word that suggests an irrational or unfounded dislike–but rather an entirely rational and well-founded hatred of evil.
Yes, yes, I know that “hatred” is not an OK, politically correct word today. We even have a whole new category of malefaction called “hate crimes.” What does that tell us?
It used to be that one could distinguish frankly between good and evil, affirming one, hating and rejecting the other. It has been one of the greatest triumphs of soft jihad to blur this distinction. It accomplishes the confusion by encouraging us to substitute the language of “bias talk” for the language of forthright moral discrimination. After a while the main issue–the Israeli school children who had been blown to bits in bus a bombing, for example–recedes to a limbo of endless pettifogging adjudication. Meanwhile, the stupefying mantras of multiculturalism–”diversity,” “bias,” “prejudice,” and the rest–assume center stage and we are lulled into believing, or half-believing, that somehow we are to blame for the depredations that take our very existence as their justification.
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7 Comments
1. Chip:Given the headlines of the past few days you’d have to be pretty stupid to consider Muslims to be just like old Methodist women at a pot luck. But suicidal multiculturalism is nothing if not legally-enforced supidity.
Notice none of the news stories covering serial bombings in India (dozens), Iraq (several), or Pakistan (several) mention the victims are all civilians or women and children. The media continues their triumphal coverage of jihadi murders, always reporting the number of killed as if they fight back. Whereas even remote packs of mujahideen killed in Afghanistan will ususally be described as a wedding or civilians before the truth creeps in days later and without any headlines.
The media not only supports the global jihad, but is its primary weapon. The attacks we’ve seen the last few days have little or no tactical and strategic value without the triumphal media coverage. The media even paints the Muslim attackers as poor victims of economic exploitation just in case someone notice the 11,500+ fatal attacks by Muslims since 2001.
Enjoy the bubble of freedom while it lasts, which won’t be much longer. Your take on America simply doesn’t hold water in light of the media, higher education, and even the corporate world surrendering to the global jihad, Islamic supremacist and legal division. Institutions from the Pentagon to the Anglican Church are giving up so fast it make my head spin.
Jul 28, 2008 - 5:48 am 2. srlucado:Unfortunately, this problem starts at the top. The President set the stage with that “religion of peace” nonsense (Islam is more politics than religion, and violence is its oxygen), and it’s trickled down.
And sure enough, anyone who doesn’t buy into the idea that this mass-murdering is just the result of some simple misunderstandings is seen as a fanatic, worse than the terrorists.
Argh.
Scott
Jul 28, 2008 - 7:12 am 3. Lefroy:I don’t want to be depressing, but let’s just hope these awful bastards don’t get their hands on a bomb. For 50 years we and the Russkies eyed each other off but there was never much risk that the Americans or the Fedora-hatted brutes in the Kremlin were going to press the button.
Psychotic fruitcakes like Bin Laden regard turning New York or London into toast as the highest good. The president of Iran would probably like to help – a global firestorm will hasten the return of the 12th Imam.
Why can’t people like Bin Laden be seen for what they are – sociopaths with a killing fantasy; improving the world by mass-slaughter, just like Hitler and Stalin.
Jul 28, 2008 - 3:21 pm 4. Chip:Sorry for the typos in my first post.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the US media seemed even slightly interested in the biggest threat to free speech since…ever?
covers most everything I’ve been worried about for a few years now.
I hope that HTML works. PJM could use a preview function.
Jul 28, 2008 - 5:59 pm 5. Polemicscat:The failure to understand jihad didn’t begin with Bush; it is symptomatic of the difference between Islamic and western habits of mind. Liberals and many others in the West think if we are nice to muslims they will abandon a thousand-year-old cultural mindset overnight. Trifkovic’s Defeating Jihad has an excellent discussion of this failure of West to understand the roots of jihad. Our multicultural and politically correct nonsense is the manure that jihad needed to sprout to full growth.
Jul 28, 2008 - 8:44 pm 6. A. Kievalar:Daniel Pipes, the redoubtable and astute commentator on (what he calls) Islamism or militant Islam, has for years warned us about “soft Jihad”, the pernicious incursion of Islam (and eventually Islamism) into Western societies by lawful means.
In other words, for example, if even a tiny fraction of US employers are forced to privilege Muslim employees so that they can perform their prayers 5 times a day at the workplace regardless of job requirements, basically forcing non-Moslem employees to do their jobs for them during these periods of religious observance, that is a victory of sorts for the Islamists.
A victory because the idea is that eventually, ALL work places in the US will be “mandated” to accept this practice, much as they have been required to accept “affirmative action” in the name of the baneful mantras of “fairness, equality and (ugh) multiculturalism”.
Nevertheless, the danger of Islam, I’ve come to believe, has been overstated or at the very least misinterpreted – badly. (I believe that Russia continues to pose a far greater existential danger to the “US way of life”, in the long run, than Islam or Islamism ever could).
Almost without a doubt, what we are witnessing is not the “rebirth” or the “resurgence” of Islam to any significant degree. In fact, what we are witnessing are the last days of Islam.
Islam, for example, is not the fastest growing religion in Africa or anywhere else….Christianity is. That is to say, new “converts” to Islam are very few and far between.
True, there are many more Moslems today than 30 years ago (just as there are more mosques)….but that’s also true that there are many more Christians, so it is a false and specious argument to declare that “Islam is growing” without finishing the argument that that is true of every other religion too.
That is not to say that a dying Islam isn’t dangerous. It is precisely BECAUSE it is disintegrating that it is dangerous, not because it is “growing”.
If you believe this as I do, that leads to all kinds of important ramifications. For example, it is really a waste of time to “learn” Arabic. If you want your children to be prepared for the future, they really better become proficient in Russian.
In my forthcoming book (unwritten as yet), I plan to show why the entire Islamic “question” has been out of kilter with what’s really taking place.
Jul 29, 2008 - 5:11 pm 7. Carter:It’s bizarre how Mr. Kimball can repeatedly discuss certain topics without mentioning immigration.
Jul 31, 2008 - 5:23 pm