Andrew C. McCarthy on The Elephant in the Room (in Toronto) :
Not only were all those arrested Muslims. The reported evidence against them fits to a tee the shopworn pattern of Islamic terrorism repeated for much of the last two decades. Young men were radicalized at the local mosque and its companion school by elders preaching from the Koran. They participated in paramilitary training in rural outposts. The training involved firearms and communications equipment. The plotters may have conducted surveillance on specific targets. And they ordered prodigious amounts of explosives components—in this case, tons of fertilizer in preparation for the construction of crude but deadly effective ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) bombs.Nonetheless, the rigorous media practice in Phase One is to suppress any reference to Islam, the single thread that runs through virtually all modern terrorism—from New York, to Virginia, to Bali, the Djerba, to Baghdad, to Mombassa, to Tel Aviv, to Nairobi, to Dar es Salaam, to Ankara, to Paris, to Riyadh, to Amman, to Sharm el-Sheikh, to Aden, to London, to Madrid, and, now, to Toronto.
McCarthy explains Phase Two as well – the group hug. Worth a look.
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6 Comments
1. Jamie Irons:Roger,
Your piece and Mr. McCarthy’s do an excellent job of pointing out this seeming anomaly.
To make a chemical analogy, I think one’s coming to understand what we’re up against, so that denial and group hugs become a thing of the past, requires that one get over a sort of hill analogous to the “activation energy” in a chemical reaction. Something just has to push you up and over, and once you’re there, you stay there — you are forever changed.
Just after 9/11 there was a very brief interval (to me it seemed to last only a day or two) where virtually everyone seemed to have made this transition — even the French!
But only a minority in this country (I would guess about 20% of the population, really remained on our side of the hill.
Jamie Irons
Jun 5, 2006 - 11:58 am 2. jedrury:Jamie – wonderful post.
Jun 5, 2006 - 12:42 pm 3. MarkD:The MSM still wonders why their circulation is declining. President Bush the first lied to me and it cost him my vote. The NY Times deceives, and I likewise will have nothing to do with them.
It’s self preservation.
Jun 5, 2006 - 6:17 pm 4. Imperial Valley Christian Center:The real elephant in the room is not that the terrorist were moslems but that they were in Canada. Let’s see
- Canada 3,145 mile border with the U.S.
- Mexico 2000 mile border.
Yet the only country that needs a border fence is Mexico. Somehow I think the border fence has absolutely nothing to do with security.
Greg Marquez
Jun 5, 2006 - 9:08 pm 5. David Thomson:ìSomehow I think the border fence has absolutely nothing to do with security.î
The risk of terrorist infiltration from Mexico has been greatly exaggerated. I am all for building the fence—but not especially for that particular reason. The risk from Canada is admittedly far greater.
Jun 5, 2006 - 10:04 pm 6. Kevin Fleming:The near-absolute refusal to see what one does not want to see creates a dangerous world. This rose-colored glasses approach is no defense at all, it just obscures the truth.
To me, the entire split between left and right in the US runs along this edge. Does one admit this threat exists or not? Answer that, and all subsequent beliefs can be readily predicted.
But how do you wake people up, except by repeated violence? And what if not even then? Is this how some Jews felt in Germany (and the US) the late 1920s and early 1930s?
Jun 6, 2006 - 9:31 am