Garbanzo Toons

Getting It and Not Getting It

I meant to post this many weeks ago. I meant to do a lot of things weeks ago, but as we all know, sometimes life has other plans. Nothing major happened, except for my wife's appendectomy a week and a half ago, but just a lot of little things. So while the articles I'm referring to are a bit dated, they're still valuable because they still speak for certain portions of our population and distill their thought processes.

Leonard Pitts is an obviously intelligent writer who, along with millions of others in the Western world, find myriad ways to avoid admitting the truth. You know the truth I speak of. It has to do with Islam and terrorism, that unavoidable connection between the two. The connection that can't be admitted if one is a member of the "What, me islamophobe?" community. Here is Pitts' most recent obfuscation.

Even after Oct. 1, 1910, when a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times building and killed 20 men.

And Nov. 24, 1917, when 10 people died in the bombing of a police station in Milwaukee.

And Sept. 16, 1920, when 38 people lost their lives in a bombing on Wall Street.

And May 18, 1927, when 45 people, most of them children, died in a school bombing in Bath Township, Mich.

And Sept. 15, 1963, when four little girls died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

And Feb. 26, 1993, when a bomb in a basement of the World Trade Center left six people dead.

And April 19, 1995 when a truck bomb destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City, claiming 168 lives.

And Sept. 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed by hijackers who used captured jetliners as guided missiles.

Read more: here.

But notice how far back in time Pitts has to travel in order to find his non-Islamic terrorist (or should I say "extremist", or "militant", or "activist"?) attacks. He is unwilling to face the fact that since 9/11, there have been over 15,000 terrorist attacks by "a tiny minority" of members of the Religion of Peace. Does it make a person "islamophobic" to keep track of these attacks? Or even to notice them and point them out? Apparently to Pitts, it does. And it also destroys the moral equivalency argument that so many on the left who don't want to slight the Muslim community for excusing or ignoring the terrorists in their midst.

On the other hand, there's Mark Steyn. He is brave enough to even face Obama.

Like a lot of guys who’ve been told they’re brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn’t always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the “Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act.”

Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.

This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”

Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

But then, Obama gets it about as well as Pitts does. The tragedy of Obama not getting it is that he is the leader of the free world.

Of course, Steyn has paid for being politically incorrect, for pointing out that, not only is the emperor wearing no clothes, but the terrorists are wearing Islamic garb. He was sued by a Canadian Muslim organization and brought up on charges by the misnamed Canadian Human Rights Commission. That's what you get when you refuse to submit, and when you refuse to exchange the truth for lies and then believe the lies and condemn the truth.

But those are the people we need to get us through these troubled times . . . and into the next troubled times.

Labels: Canada, islam, Leonard Pitts, Mark Steyn, terrorism

posted by Harry @ 2:35 PM