Clipping blog

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 06:00 AM PDT

Ten years ago, soldiers acting on the fatwa, the declaration of war, by the leader of a group bent on the conquest and subjugation of the Western world attacked pre-selected targets in New York City and Virginia. They chose these targets — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House — because they believed that destroying them would destroy the heart of America. They did not hesitate because their targets contained tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They held no regard for the laws of war nor of the centuries-old agreement between civilized nations that non-combatants are off-limits. Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda warband, believed he could deliver in one day an attack so devastating that we would collapse from the inside, our heart and soul gutted by the airplanes his men hijacked.

As a military, or even a terrorist attack, 9/11 was a failure for al Qaeda. Bin Laden’s soldiers killed less than a twentieth of the people they could have killed. The four airplanes destroyed only two of the intended targets; one of them fell well short thanks to a counterattack by brave American citizens who overpowered the Islamists and crashed the plane in Shanksville, PA. America’s President responded as well. Armed with an authorization to destroy al Qaeda and their friends and the finest military ever known on Earth, George W. Bush drove the Taliban from the government of Afghanistan and put them on the run. He turned his attention to tyrants who were well-known for their support of international terrorism (especially of the Islamist stripe) and put them on notice. To ensure that he had their attention, he sent America’s armies on a mission of righteous reprisal and humanitarian mercy the likes of which the world had never seen. Our soldiers dragged the butcher Saddam Hussein from the rathole in which he hid for years and turned him over to a freely-elected, representative Iraqi government — the first ever Arab government to govern with the authority of a popularly-ratified constitution. That government tried him and hanged him higher than Haman.

Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, killed by a team of American soldier who dropped in out of the night, caught him by surprise, and turned him into a historical footnote. His army, which name means “The Base” is not a base; its fighters are scattered and the number of governments that once offered them material and shelter is far smaller than it was ten years ago. Though Islamists continue to launch attacks against the United States, they have not achieved even a fraction of the death and destruction their mostly-failed attack caused on September 11, 2011.

There is a rather large “but” coming, though. Not all battles are fought for tactical advantage. Some are meant to be symbols, either to the enemy or to allies. The Battle of Thermopylae was a symbol, both to the invading Persians and to the Greeks. Texans fought at the Alamo not because they honestly believed they could hold off the Mexican army, but because they believed that a show of open defiance would rally their fellow Texans to eventual victory. Similarly, 9/11 was an immense symbolic victory for Osama bin Laden and the cause of Islamism. But he didn’t score the victory himself. He had help from American and world media, who did the very same thing to us in the weeks and months after 9/11 as the MSM did to America after another famous battle 43 years ago.

From the very beginning of their reporting on 9/11, our news media outlets treated American citizens as bloodthirsty maniacs. They refused to release images of the “jumpers” lest we rise up as an uncontrollable mob and lynch anyone who looked even remotely Muslim. Indeed the “backlash against Muslims” meme appears every year about this time, as the MSM continue to paint Americans as the villains of 9/11. Heroes of the left such as Van Jones, Noam Chomsky, and others almost immediately blamed us for what happened that day and neither the media nor the Democratic Party who treated such men as respected thinkers attempted to stomp out their idiocy. Indeed, they encourage the use of 9/11 as a tool to amass greater political power and feel no shame when they proclaim our military’s defeat at the hands of a bunch of ragtag terrorists. We treat 9/11 today as if some horrible random event struck our nation. Our leaders host “diversity” celebrations of “hope” and “compassion” at which they will not talk about the Islamists who continue to wage war against us. The Mayor of New York will not invite first responders to the tenth anniversary ceremony because there’s “not enough room”. Why would he want us to remember what their fellows gave when the Islamists attacked us? That, folks, would make us angry, would it not?

In all of this, I can hear the voice of Walter Cronkite in the background saying, “We are mired in a stalemate that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory”. Ten years after 9/11, I am reminded of the Tet Offensive, the turning point of the Vietnam War. That, too, was a massive tactical defeat for the enemies of America and of free people everywhere. The North Vietnamese launched simultaneous attacks against targets all over South Vietnam, all of which failed. In fact, the Tet Offensive failed so badly that the Viet Cong ceased to exist as a fighting force and the North Vietnamese Army never mounted even a remotely-serious challenge to the South Vietnamese or American forces. However, the propaganda victory they won, thanks to people like Walter Cronkite and the political progressives who turned what was in every meaningful way a victory for us into a cry for negotiation and eventual retreat. After Tet, America’s opinion turned drastically, moved largely by media coverage of the offensive as a repudiation of the administration’s (correct) claims that we were, in fact, beating the North Vietnamese.

Then, as now, the MSM took the narrative built by the left and spread it to millions of Americans many of whom eventually believed it as if it were true. The message that we ordinary Americans were both wicked oppressor of Muslims and victims of a horrible “tragedy” did not spread far originally. America’s dander was up. We were attacked without provocation and the guilty had to pay. But as the years went on, the propaganda began to sink in. September 11 was a day for grief, for “service”, for “healing”, for examination and introspection (of what? Why our lifestyles that goad the poor and oppressed Muslims into such a rage that they attack us!). If we were not helpless victims of a “tragedy”, we were villains. Piers Morgan, who now hosts a nationally-televised talk show on CNN, was fired from the editorship of the UK’s Daily Mirror after the paper ran faked photos that purposted to show British soldiers abusing Iraqi civilians. Newsweek ran a fake story that accused American soldiers of flushing a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. The New York Times ran a different story about the Abu Ghraib abuses — used by the left to attempt to indict the entire command structure of our military in Iraq — on its front page for 32 straight days. Michael Moore, who sat in the Presidential Box at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, has spread 9/11 Truther conspiracies not because he believes them but because he’s “just asking question”, which you and I know is code for “hey, anything to make Republicans look bad, even if it’s completely insane”.

All that has had an effect. We no longer remember 9/11 as an attack by a determined enemy but as a thing that happened, possibly by accident and possibly because we had it coming to us. We submit to security measures that steal our dignity and treat us as criminals while would-be killers waltz through undetected because we can not summon the righteous fury to demand that the authorities look for our enemies where they are mostly likely to be found. We allowed an Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, to inspire a new set of Islamist soldiers to attack us from inside our own country. One of those men, Major Nidal Hassan, killed 13 people and wounded almost 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas. Another one, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, killed one soldier and wounded another at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is the new bin Laden, but have you heard very much about him, even though he has sworn to wage war against us?

Of course you haven’t, because the MSM has already declared, in word and deed, that the War on Terror is at best a stalemate that can only end with negotiation, “healing”, “compassion”, and “service”. Or work in Iraq is long done, they say, and Afghanistan is a loss. Anyone who says otherwise is a warmonger and an imperialist (nope, that word hasn’t changed in 40 years). If that sounds a lot like the media narrative from Vietnam, well, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The left’s intentions for us have not changed since 1968 nor have their methods. They will have their utopia and if that means turning a dastardly act of war that must be answered conclusively into a national tragedy to be picked at once a year like an old wound, well, so be it.

But I still know what happened, and so do you. Our job is to make sure everyone else remembers as well.