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Posted on 09/25/2001 8:04:00 PM PDT by ppaul
Just as America must fight a "new kind of war," so it must deal with a new kind of peace movement, one that blames American foreign policy for the recent terrorist attack. Blame the hateful mass murderers seeking martyrdom in their radical holy war against America? Not the new peace movement -- it's a part of a global war against America.
Those who opposed U.S. military action in the past questioned the right of America to protect its interests in other countries. That questioning centered on two issues: the definition of American interests and our right to impose our interests on others. These have always been reasonable questions, whatever one's view in particular cases.
The new peace movement has nothing to do with reasonable questions. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" So asks Susan Sontag in The New Yorker.
Never before have so many Americans been killed on American soil. But the new self-proclaimed peaceniks are anti-American cultural warriors willing to sink to unimaginable moral equivalencies.
Whereas the old peace movement questioned America's right to kill people in other countries when no attack on American soil had occurred, the new peace movement defends the brutal killing of thousands of Americans on the grounds that America got what it had coming.
The new peace movement doubtless recalls the old. The latter began with communist sympathizers who excused the Soviet Union its innumerable crimes against humanity, seeing capitalism as the world's great evil. Having adjusted to the end of the Cold War, the new peace movement hates America for being the world's sole remaining superpower. And it wants that power eviscerated.
Unmoved to anger against the perpetrators of the atrocious violence of September 11th, the new peaceniks merely heat up their longstanding anger against America.
Deplorably, they turn the death of thousands of innocent lives into an opportunity to point a cold ideological finger at America.
In its extremism, the new peace movement has something in common with Jerry Falwell: the refusal to blame those responsible for the September 11th atrocity, choosing instead to blame America.
Falwell blames America for harboring heretics. The peaceniks blame America for harboring Americans. Put the two together and you get the holy war of Osama bin Laden, the jihad declared against the U.S. by the Taliban.
So far the percentage of Americans who blame America is small. But those who do blame America congregate in places that shape the future of American culture: our nation's college and university campuses.
Anyone who thought that the loss of more than 6,000 lives on American soil might have led to unanimous patriotic compassion even at America's campuses was too hopeful. The Sontag sentiment is highly audible on campus.
The day after the September 11th attack, one of my Columbia students voiced this representative reaction: "I hope it will cause America to examine its foreign policy decisions."
Like the old one, the new peace movement is rooted in our universities. Thus, it is ruled by political correctness, which, after expunging America's virtues and exaggerating its crimes, credits America's most vicious enemies with political and moral validity.
As part of its anti-American campaign, political correctness teaches young Americans to identify their country as a global oppressor and to regard the rest of the world as blameless victims.
It not only urges identification with such victims but also encourages students to see themselves as victims too.
Thus they can simultaneously identify with the victims of the September 11th attack and blame the oppressive U.S.
Off campus, Americans are united, and their present unity is a beauty to behold. A New York Times/CBS poll shows 85 percent supporting military action against whoever is responsible for the recent attacks.
But once America starts fighting, opposition will grow. The same poll shows there is already less support for a protracted war than for a short one. And this "new kind of war" is likely to be a very long one.
If we are to win this long war against terrorism, the next generation will have to be another great generation. Lines at recruitment offices for America's armed forces suggest it just might be exactly that.
But courageous, patriotic young Americans will find their peers using the cloak of a new "peace" movement to make a war against them.
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Bill
Many individuals do not want Americans killed, they warned for years that our meddling overseas was a contributing cause to terrorism [See: Cato Handbook for the 105th Congress (1998)], and now the terrorism we were warned about has come to pass.
Of course those responsible need to be hunted down. Of course we cannot accept the killing of innocent Americans under any circumstances. Neither can we continue to screw other people and expect no repercussions.
After we have stopped screwing people, after our foreign policy reflects the true heart of America rather than the interests of Big Business, after all this, if we are attacked again, let's take their damn heads off.
We have a right to defend ourselves. We do not have the right to be bullies and cry "attack on freedom based on envy."
My prayers are with the families of those who perished or were injured on September 11. My anger lies with those warmongers on all sides who use innocent blood to keep score.
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Just for the sake of argument what would the Catholic Church think if troops from Saudi Arabia were stationed in the Vatican?
I am afraid that is what these people are thinking about us. That they are angry because our troops are occupying their Holy land in Saudi Arabia. Remove our troops from the region and bring them home to protect America not the oil routes through the Middle East.
AMERICA and our freedom FIRST!!!
If they attacked us on our shores with troops I would be the first to take up arms! If someone is attacking me directly I will defend myself but I would not send a good portion of my military power off to the middle east. We have to make a decision do we want to run an empire or do we want a free republic?
While I agree that revenge is wrong, any terrorist attack that goes unanswered, is an open invitation to any and all other terrorist group to come to America and do more of the same.
Amber obviously missed the UN forum on Racism, the joke that it was.
Can you say "counterprotest"?
Better yet - Now that MOST of the country is unified, the differences between the radical left college campuses and the rest of the country will be more obvious than ever to average Americans who haven't been paying attention to exactly WHAT IT IS their tax dollars are funding in the name of "Higher Education".
Maybe some changes will come out of this. Maybe the "political fairness" doctrine that applies to "equal access to the airwaves" will eventually get applied to how our tax dollars are spent on Higher Education as well. Maybe people will ask themselves, "Is it fair to spend massive amounts of tax $$$ funding just one political point of view? And a rabidly extremist point of view at that!!"
Perhaps a WISER use of our tax dollars would be to just withdraw all support from U.S. universities and send that money to all those radical Muslim boys' schools in the Middle East decorated with shrines to Osama that we've been reading about the last week. I mean, hey! If we're going to earmark Billions of our dollars for the purpose of creating enemies of the U.S., we might as well create enemies thousands of miles from here who will have little chance of ever traveling to the U.S. on their own to inflict damage, as opposed to creating enemies in our own midst. Doesn't this make more sense?
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