Replies

In addition, one of the (at least) two terrorist attacks in NYC on his watch prior to 9/11 was perpetrated by a terrorist who was part of the Brooklyn Islamofascist community -- linked to a hotbed of Brooklyn Islamofascism centered in Bay Ridge. But Giuliani didn’t follow up to see if there was a wider pattern of Islamofascist attacks being planned/supported/funded there - he treated the shooting as an isolated crime, tried to avoid admitting any links to terrorism, and met with leaders of Brooklyn’s Arab community. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but wouldn't it have been nice if Giuliani had had the guts to acknowledge the murders as a terrorist attack and take a much closer look at the entire Islamofascist community there in Brooklyn?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801E2DD113AF936A35750C0A962958260

Key excerpt: The Mayor’s urgency to quash the widespread reports of a link between the shooting suspect and the well-known terrorist organization fit a pattern he established immediately after the Tuesday shootings. From the beginning, he personally took control of all briefings on the matter, often appearing with the Police Commissioner at his side, and took pains to dampen the rumors that might pit one ethnic group against another or raise the city’s level of fear.

Even now, Mr. Giuliani and the Police Department have refused to discuss the question of a motive in the van shootings, which left one student brain-dead, another in poor condition and two others with less serious wounds. Though many Hasidim say they are certain the students were shot because they are Jews, the police say they have not determined the shooting was anti-Semitic.

Yesterday morning, Mr. Giuliani met for 40 minutes with a group of Arab restaurateurs, business owners and community leaders from Brooklyn. He told them that Arabs as a group should not be blamed for the shooting, and the Arab leaders put out a statement expressing condolences to the families of the victims and noting that Arabs were instrumental in contributing information that led to Mr. Baz’s arrest.

BIG RUDY-LAX ON TERRORISM *BUMP*

Thank you FRiend, this ought to be one of the standard questions posed to Giuliani in each and every debate.

I agree — I wish they would ask him about it (but I’m not holding my breath). I just don’t understand this meme that Giuliani would be great at fighting Islamofascists — his only experience is fighting crime...and I thought we discarded the idea of fighting terrorism as a crime after 9/11. He has zero foreign policy experience.

He’s good at staying calm after an attack, but certainly hasn’t any history of preventing attacks, or background in fighting global terrorism. Did you see what Mark Steyn said in April on Laura Ingraham’s radio show?

EXCERPT - STEYN: ‘The one I find actually rather disappointing is Giuliani . . . when you listen to him speak, what worries me is that he has a sort of airport security approach to the war. And he’s not actually very good when he’s talking about the big foreign policy aspects of it and the big geopolitical thing. He’s very good if you want to hunker down and have a security checkpoint. He’s the guy who’d be good for manning that checkpoint.’