All those Islamic attacks
Note: this started out as a lighthearted post, but morphed into something much more serious, as you will see in the transition from the first part to the second part of the piece.
The New Media Journal keeps trying to connect dots, but we think that we should wait to see if more compelling evidence emerges of connections among the following random events:
The world stands on the brink of world war and the battle lines could not be more evident: The Munich Olympic Massacres of 1972; the Iranian hostage crisis; the assassination of Anwar Sadat; the bombings of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut; the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight from Athens to Rome; the Achille Lauro hijacking; the 1985 airport attacks in Rome and Vienna; the bombing of TWA flight 840 in Greece; the kidnapping and murder of U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel W. Higgins; the 1991 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; the 1992 Bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina; the initial 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy compound in Islamabad, Pakistan; the bombing of the Khobar Towers; the 1997 Tourist Killings in Egypt; the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya; the attack on the USS Cole; the September 11th 2001 attacks; the train bombings in Spain; the July 11th London train bombings; and most recently the terrorist bombings in India. All of these brutal acts of the cowardice that is unprovoked terrorism have one thing in common; they were all perpetrated in the name of Allah by radical Islamist extremists.
Now that nuclear weapons are fast becoming part of the threat, it is time to reject the idiocy of political correctness. It is time that those of the fifth column, both here in the United States and abroad, start to accept the undeniable fact that the world is facing a global conflict that pits the free world against those who embrace a radical Islamic ideology.
He forgot Bali and the three smallish terrorist attacks in the US since 9-11. Hmmm. Maybe there is a pattern after all. Nah, it’s all George Bush’s fault.
UPDATE
To be serious for a moment, it is instructive to see that these compilations of Islamic terror and violence seem to be more and more common. This is a development of great significance, because it means that a pattern of understanding of the nature of the conflict has broadly formed. In a sense it matters less whether the pattern is true (are Jews really the sons of pigs and apes?) than that people have a means to generalize the conflict and to put events into a context that makes sense to them. Here’s Australian journalist Paul Sheehan via Wretchard:
When historians narrate the beginnings of the third global war, a war already under way with more than 200,000 killed, they may choose the moment on October 12, 2000, when a small fishing skiff sailed up to an American destroyer, the USS Cole, at anchor off Aden harbour in Yemen. … War and murder have been carried out in the name of Allah in Thailand, Bali, Sumatra, the Philippines, Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Bosnia, Albania, Kenya, Tanzania, France, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Russia, the United States and Sudan, where mass murder and mass rape have been the tools of cultural war. … Most disturbingly, jihad is being driven by three separate, distinct and often competing strands of Islam: Sunni, financed by the oil-powered Wahabist fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia, and dominated by the ideology of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden; Shiite, an extension of the theocracy of Iran, and highly active in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories; and Pakistani Muslim nationalism, the wellspring of jihad in Kashmir, support for the Taliban, and terrorist attacks in India and Britain, with its large Pakistani emigre community.
The world was not ready for war on 9-12. Nobody understood what an Islamist was or what the heck they were talking about, save those who lived in the Middle East, or the 1 in 100 in the United States who followed such matters closely. Now everyone understands. Now everyone has a laundry list of their enemy’s crimes — on both sides. In our view, this means, regrettably, that the World is now ready for World War.