Skip to comments.

Posted on 09/26/2001 7:22:02 PM PDT by Keyes For President

After the World Trade Center was bombed by Islamic fundamentalists in 1993, the country quickly chalked it up to a zany one-time attack and five minutes later decided we were all safe again. We weren't. We aren't now. They will strike again. Perhaps they will wait another eight years. But perhaps not.

The enemy is in this country right now. And any terrorists who are not already here are free to immigrate. The government has been doing an excellent job rounding up suspects from the last two attacks. But what about the next attack? We thought there was only one murderous Islamic cell in America the last time, too.

Congress has authority to pass a law tomorrow requiring aliens from suspect countries to leave. As far as the Constitution is concerned, aliens, which is to say non-citizens, are here at this country's pleasure. They have no constitutional right to be here.

Congress has it within its power to prevent the next attack, but it won't. When the Sears Tower is attacked, the president is assassinated, St. Patrick's Cathedral is vaporized, anthrax is released in the subway systems or Disneyland is nuked, remember: Congress could have stopped it, but didn't.

Pious invocations of the Japanese internment are absurd. For one thing, those were U.S. citizens. Citizens can't be deported. So far -- thank God -- almost all the mass murderers of Americans have been aliens.

But even more blindingly obvious: There was no evidence that the attack on Pearl Harbor was staged by Japanese saboteurs living in California. The Japanese internment was a pure land grab implemented by liberal politicians -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt and California Gov. Earl Warren (later the namesake of the infamous Warren Court). The internment was vigorously opposed by J. Edgar Hoover.

This time, the very nature of the enemy is that they have infiltrated this country and pass themselves off as law-abiding, quiet immigrants. The entire modus operandi of this enemy is to smuggle mass murderers to our shores.

But the country refuses to respond rationally. Rather, Congress is busily contemplating a series of "anti-terrorism" measures most notable for their utter irrelevance to the threat. What precisely would a national ID card accomplish? The hijackers were in this country legally! A few may have overstayed their visas by a few days -- a minor bureaucratic oversight that they surely would have remedied had they not been about to commit suicide in a monstrous attack.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., has bravely proposed that we take the aggressive step of asking aliens in the country to register periodically with the government so we know where they are. That's already the law in Germany. Several of the hijackers in this attack lived in Hamburg; they obediently complied. The mastermind of the most vicious terrorist attack in the history of the world, Mohammed Atta, was in Florida on a "vocational status" visa (in order to attend flight school). Let's say Atta had registered. Now what, Joe?

As the entire country has been repeatedly lectured, most Muslims are amazingly peaceful, deeply religious, wouldn't hurt a fly. Indeed, endless invocations of the pacific nature of most Muslims is the only free speech it is safe to engage in these days.

This is a preposterous irrelevancy. Fine, we get it. The New York Times can rest assured that every last American has now heard the news that not all Muslims are terrorists. That's not the point. Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims -- at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours.

How are we to distinguish the peaceful Muslims from the fanatical, homicidal Muslims about to murder thousands of our fellow citizens? Are the good Muslims the ones who live quiet lives, pray a lot and obey the law? So did the architects of Bloody Tuesday's mass murder. Are the peaceful Muslims the ones who loudly proclaim their hatred of Osama Bin Laden? Mohammed Atta did that, too.

The only thing we know about them -- other than that they live among us -- is that they are foreign-born and they are Muslims. The government has been remarkably tight-lipped about precisely how many Muslim visitors we are currently accommodating, but from unofficial estimates, there appear to be more than a million. Even if the attorney general instigated latter-day Palmer raids, it will take years and years to investigate and infiltrate every potential terrorist cell operating on our shores. The investigations should not be conducted while the enemy continues residing here, plotting the next attack.

It's an extreme measure, but we face an extreme threat. It is suicidal naivete to think we can simply seal off every water supply, air vent, food supply and crop duster from now until the end of time. We cannot search every truck, every passenger, every shopper, every subway, every person entering every building -- every American every day.

It is impossible to stop Islamic fundamentalists who believe that slaughtering thousands of innocent Americans will send them straight to Allah. All we can do is politely ask aliens from suspect nations to leave -- with the full expectation of readmittance -- while we sort the peace-loving immigrants from the murderous fanatics.

More benefits of the plan next week, but the beauty part of the Terrorist Deportation Plan can't wait. There will be two fail-safes: (1) Muslim immigrants who agree to spy on the millions of Muslim citizens unaffected by the deportation order can stay; and (2) any Muslim immigrant who gets a U.S. senator to waive his deportation -- by name -- gets to stay.

This is brutally unfair to the Muslim immigrants who do not want to kill us. But it's not our fault. It is the fault of the terrorists who are using their fellow Muslims as human shields. So far, America's response to a calculating cold-blooded enemy has been to say, "Excuse me, you seem to have dropped your box-cutter."

:

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.