Scott Spiegel

What have we learned in the 10 years since Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?  Several lessons spring to mind:

1. There is nothing President George W. Bush could have done to prevent terrorist acts in his first eight months in office, of which his post-9/11 critics would have approved.  Even after 9/11, liberals have loudly disapproved of profiling at airports, surreptitiously monitoring terrorist communications, and fighting al-Qaeda militarily abroad.  Imagine how they would have reacted if Bush had attempted any of these strategies pre-9/11.

2. Poverty does not cause terrorism; it is both unnecessary and insufficient to the task.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253, was the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker.  American Taliban John Walker Lindh went to high school at a “California Distinguished School” in SoCal.  In contrast, poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India—do not rise up en masse to wreak havoc in suicide bombings.  Modern-day terrorism is caused by individuals’ adherence to an ideology that encourages terrorist acts against innocent civilians—an ideology that usually happens to be Islamist.  Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all modern-day terrorists are Muslims.

3. Liberals have amassed a formidable glossary of imprecations they invoke whenever commentators scrutinize the radical nature of Islam: alienating Muslims, being at war with Islam, being Islamophobic, demonizing the other, engaging in inflammatory rhetoric, hijacking a peaceful religion, singling out people because of their religion.  None of these terms is objective enough to mean anything.

4. The criticism that the U.S. shouldn’t be vocal in our support of Israel is specious.  In supporting Israel, our anti-terror stance gains consistency and moral credence to reformists in hostile regimes who are potentially open to our ideas.  Israel is also the U.S.’s front line in the war on terror, and, if supported, may have the guts to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if we don’t get around to doing it.

5. Announcing that we are at war with Islam does not constitute recruitment propaganda for the enemy.  Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House, declared, “I don’t want [al-Qaeda] to be able to stand up and claim… ‘America is at war with Islam.’  That’s one of their main recruiting arguments.”  Actually, one of al-Qaeda’s main recruiting arguments is, “The infidel is wicked, and his weakness and inability to stand up to us prove that our cause is just.”  An argument that would hurt recruiting would be, “America is at war with Islam, and you are going to get blown to smithereens if you fight for us.”

6. Waterboarding isn’t torture—it’s a resistance training technique routinely carried out on U.S. special operations forces, and leaves no permanent physical or psychological damage.  Waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques have been spectacularly successful in uncovering imminent terrorist plots and killing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

7. Troop surges are a winning strategy, as demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Libya.  As John McCain noted in his support for the second Afghanistan surge, half-measures in war “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support.”  We should never again fail to send an adequate number of troops to get the job done, as soon as they are needed.

8. Bush had to withhold from the public reams of documents about chilling terrorist threats we faced; when newly sworn-in President Obama was briefed on this intelligence, he suddenly did an about-face on almost every campaign promise he had made to reverse his predecessor’s policies.  In just his first 100 days in office, Obama implemented a surge in Afghanistan (followed by a larger surge later that year), asked Congress for $83 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan without funding benchmarks, stepped up Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan, supported renewal of the Patriot Act, invoked the state secrets doctrine, reversed his opposition to rendition, rejected Democrats’ call for a Truth Commission, filed a brief claiming the U.S. can indefinitely hold anyone who supports Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, supported denial of habeas corpus to Bagram prisoners, revived military tribunals at Gitmo, opposed release of Abu Ghraib photos, and failed to do anything to close Gitmo.  It seems as though Commander-in-Chief Bush knew better than Alinskyite community organizer Obama did after all.

9. War is less expensive than Democrats’ wasteful domestic social programs.  Eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the 2003 invasion—cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless stimulus bill ($787 billion).  U.S. involvement in the Libyan conflict cost the same ($1 billion) as the first 48 hours of Obama’s failed Cash-for-Clunkers program.  Defense spending constitutes 20% of the federal budget, and foreign aid just 1%, whereas entitlement spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up 43%.

10. Liberals have learned absolutely nothing since 9/11, except that Islam is much more peaceful, tolerant, and pro-U.S. than they’d ever dreamed; KSM should be tried in the same court as people who eat trans fats while drinking Four Loko and smoking in bars; and Muslims were the real victims of 9/11.

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The landing gear of the American Airlines plane that terrorists flew into 1 World Trade Center on 9/11 smashed through an unoccupied building two blocks away at 45 Park Place where Muslims now wish to build a monument to Allah.  The engine of the plane landed in the street behind the building.

Presumably Islamist hijackers wouldn’t attack the rebuilt World Trade Center if the new mosque might be damaged in the process.  Will Obama thus be endorsing the building of the mosque as a creative, Islam-sensitive, preventive security measure in the war on terror?

It’s true that those who wish to build Cordoba House—now the swanky- and Manhattan-sounding Park51—technically have the freedom to do so, since they are purchasing the land and have the right to build whatever they want on it if they adhere to zoning regulations.

This right is contingent on the mosque’s funders not being supported by sponsors of terror from Middle Eastern countries with which we are at war—an assumption that is highly suspect and should be investigated vigorously and precipitously.  We already know, for example, that the chief sponsor of the Cordoba Initiative, which is providing $100,000 in funding for the mosque, is the radical Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has refused to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization.  We also know that President Obama sent Rauf, using taxpayer money, on a Middle East “good will” tour on which he will be hitting up Islamist leaders for donations for the mosque.

(Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced her preference to investigate, not the funders of the mosque, but the funders of opponents of the mosque, which leads us to the logical conclusion that she will soon be snooping around Harry Reid’s e-mails.)

Given that Muslims traditionally build mosques on territory they have conquered, a mosque near Ground Zero would be an incontrovertible statement of conquest regarding the terror attacks on 9/11.

Opponents of the mosque have attempted to prevent its construction through eminent domain laws by declaring the site a city landmark, but the New York City Council rejected that argument and allowed the project to proceed.

Mayor Bloomberg announced that building the mosque is an expression of the noblest principles of this country and that anyone who objects should keep quiet.

Last weekend, Barack Obama came out forcefully for the construction of the mosque in front of a bunch of Muslims at a White House-sponsored Ramadan dinner: “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.  That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.”

Someone evidently told Obama that his instinctive loyalty to anything anti-American, especially Islamist, would probably not go over well with the rest of the country, so he backtracked the next day and announced that his strong desire to have the Ground Zero mosque built was not an “endorsement” but rather a general statement about the religious liberty of property owners.  Next Obama will be claiming that he didn’t say property owners have religious liberty—only that people have the right to express their opinions about whether property owners have religious liberty.

Hamas cofounder Mahmoud al-Zahar expressed solidarity with his ideological buds Obama and Bloomberg, claiming that Muslims absolutely, simply “have to build” the mosque there.

Members of the Cordoba Initiative may have the legal right to build, but those who justifiably oppose a mosque near Ground Zero have rights, too:

•    Construction workers and unions have the right to boycott work on the project, as New York resident Andrew Sullivan recently committed to doing (no, not that Andrew Sullivan—the patriotic one).  In the extreme, this could prevent the mosque from being built; at a minimum, it could drive up the costs of building the mosque, perhaps prohibitively, by awarding the work to higher bidding contractors.

•    Muslims who oppose the mosque have the right to boycott and refuse to attend or contribute financially to it; if enough do so, it could be driven out of business.

•    Private citizens have the right to open businesses close to the mosque that are offensive to Islamists—not to be jerks, but to make the point that Muslims are not as tolerant when we stick them in the eye by planting something culturally odious near a sacred site as we are when they do it to us.  See, for example, Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld’s plan to build a gay bar that caters to Islamic men a couple of doors from the mosque.  I also propose the following businesses: non-halal butcheries, lingerie shops, and liquor stores.

(Hey—let’s open a day care center right near the mosque, because surely Islamists oppose the notion that women might have careers and not stay home all day caring for their infants.  Whoops—Park51 is slated to include a day care center among its amenities!)

Just because those who wish to build the mosque have the legal right to do so does not mean the majority of Americans who oppose it have no legal recourse in preventing it from existing.  Call my suggestions the libertarian approach to preventing the Ground Zero mosque from fulfilling its planners’ intentions.



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