“Two weeks ago
today, two brothers are alleged to have set off a bomb at the finish
line of the Boston Marathon that left three dead — including an
8-year-old boy — and injured 282. At least 14 lost limbs. Our
president implored us not to “jump to conclusions” and thus end up
stereotyping his favorite faith. ... In the interim, a friend sent
me a link to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists website. With one
exception (a convert named Adam), all had names like Ibrahim, Abdul,
Omar, Jamal, Abdullah, Ramadan, Hasan, Mohammed and Muhammad. Just a
coincidence, I’m sure.”
— Don Feder, “It’s
the Islam, Stupid”
Don Feder was my boss,
from 1978-1980, until he left Citizens for Limited Taxation and I
eventually took over his job as executive director. Back then, he
was a libertarian, now is far more a traditional conservative;
though we keep in touch, we have had our differences over the years.
Ascribing blame for the Boston terrorist attack isn’t one of them.
Sometimes I’m
uncomfortable, expressing outrage over things that have not directly
affected me as they have more justifiably outraged people. No one I
know was killed in the twin towers or injured in Boston. My son
called to check on me last week; he also wanted to note that while I
fretted about his taking my grandchildren to Mexico for spring
break, he could have brought them here to visit me and then to view
the marathon instead.
I get the point: There
is no safe place, no reason to spend my life worrying, so I
shouldn’t have called his cellphone in Baja because I read about
revolutionaries battling the drug cartel in a town on the Mexican
mainland, “on the other side of the Sea of Cortez, Mother!”
Grandmothers will worry
as long as there’s evil in the world. So even if we haven’t suffered
a terrible loss ourselves, one of the things that make us human
gives us empathy with other people: Our imagination easily places us
where they are, in a hospital, at a funeral. We even have empathy
with people very different from us, as we send contributions for
disaster relief to faraway countries.
And those who have no
empathy, the terrorists who kill and maim innocent children? We need
to define “human,” leaving them out. Somewhere, evolution failed
them and would have flunked our entire species if they had passed on
their evil indifference over the centuries as a dominant gene.
Being Jewish, Don has
long had “standing” for outrage, with Islamic jihadists targeting
him and the Jewish homeland Israel for destruction. Today, we
realize all Americans have standing.
I remember almost with
nostalgia when our greatest fear was nuclear war with the Russians.
Now the Russians try to warn us that we have a terrorist in our
midst.
Wait for it: The
government agencies that failed to communicate with each other,
again, will quickly respond that Putin can’t be trusted. Oh, spare
me; just admit you screwed up. I know that Russia has been harsh in
its resistance to Chechnya independence, but the Chechen rebels held
hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002 and armed Islamic separatists
took more than 700 Russian schoolchildren hostage in the North
Caucuses in 2004; hundreds died.
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Telegram & Gazette
Apr. 28, 2013
Editorial Cartoon By David Hitch |
There are other rebels
fighting dictators, but in some cases wanting a new government that
is fundamentalist Islamic; we can only hope both sides lose. It’s
too bad about the good people who just want a decent country like
ours, but we can’t fight everyone’s battles around the world. Our
role as Americans is what was intended by our Founding Fathers, to
create a nation that other nations can aspire to become, and which
will welcome immigrants who want to assimilate into this kind of
country. We are starting to lose our exceptionalism, and if we do,
the entire world’s humanity is threatened.
So much that is going
wrong here has been spotlighted by recent events. There’s the
political correctness that assaults the First Amendment,
discouraging negative comment about a religion that doesn’t allow
freedom of religion in the countries it controls. How can Islamists
who don’t believe in our Bill of Rights, or equal rights for women,
become legal immigrants, then American citizens?
What’s with the welfare
benefits for an able-bodied immigrant who becomes a terrorist? Why
are we allowing any immigrants to come here just to get on welfare?
And here’s the zenith
of absurdity: We have a governor who insists that a dead Islamic
terrorist has a “right to privacy” so we taxpayers can’t be told how
much he and his terrorist brother received in government benefits
before they killed and maimed Americans. With the insistence of the
media, the Patrick administration has released some information to a
legislative oversight committee, where it will remain secret because
apparently the legislators are not allowed to share it with the
public.
Gov. Patrick says he
understands that people are curious, but the records are private.
Understand this, Governor: I want to know if I helped fund the
terrorists, and why, and what has gone wrong with this commonwealth,
and this country.
