Weakness in the Face of Terrorism

An Ohio State University student named Mackenzie was well placed to observe her campus’s response to the terrorist act committed by Abdul Razak Ali Artan.

She was also well placed to compare the reaction to terrorism with student and faculty reaction to the election of Donald Trump.

Last week she called in to Sean Hannity’s radio program to explain what she saw. Her testimony is nothing less than breathtaking. The report comes from PJ Media via Maggie’s Farm.

First, the campus reacted to Trump’s election with an outpouring of hysteria. Sad to say, no other word describes it as well. You would have thought that the world had come to an end and that the Nazis had just taken over America. One also notes that they don’t make professors like they used to. The dumbing down of American university faculties continues apace.

In Mackenzie’s words:

After the election, my professors went crazy. I remember calling my mom and saying, 'You would think Hitler just got elected and massacred half the country.' It was ridiculous. Trump was called a Nazi, a rapist, a white supremacist, one of my professors actually said we should be terrified because Mike Pence believes women don't have the right to exist, or deserve to exist is actually what she said.

Under the aegis of their professors college students are not being taught to exercise their rational faculties. They are being taught to indulge in irrational and histrionic displays.

Mackenzie continued:

People were crying, my classes were canceled, massive protests on campus ... emails from professors about staying strong and how we are all going to lose our rights but it's going to be O.K. And it was crazy — I just couldn't believe it.

When the terrorist attack occurred on the same campus, some classes were canceled for safety reasons. Some students held a candlelight vigil. And yet, the lesson that was imparted to students was: we must all become more sympathetic and compassionate toward Islam.

Mackenzie explained:

I've heard things about how we need to understand Islam, the vibrant Somali community we have here, how we need to embrace them even though this is the third attack by a Somali in the last year here in Columbus, and all this stuff about, you know, Muslim sensitivity.

That's all they care about. They are more scared of the right and Trump than they are of this terrorist attack that just happened on our campus. It's sickening to me because I feel like they are gambling with my life in order to reach this multiculturalism lie that they worship in all of my classes — and it's crazy.

What does this tell us?

For one, it tells us that terrorism works. Terrorists want to produce a specific effect. They want to intimidate the population while gaining respect for their cause. The Obama administration has done just what the terrorists want: it has refused to call Islamist terrorism by its name—lest people feel less respect for Islam—and it has gone on the attack against Islamophobia.

The more people respond to Islamic terrorism by showing respect for Islam, the more terrorism we will see. The more Americans submit to Islam the more the terrorists believe that their strategy is working.

In another context it’s called appeasement. Obviously, it is cowardly. It has designated its enemies as those who would fight terrorism with force of arms. Obviously, George W. Bush is high on the list.

Those who want to appease terrorists insist that the fault for 9/11 lies with the Bush administration. And yet, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attack saw things differently.

Writing in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen—a former Bush administration official—recounted the results of the enhanced interrogation of KSM. The interrogator, James Mitchell, has just written a book about it, so Thiessen is reporting the results from the book.

In Thiessen’s words:

But perhaps the most riveting part of the book is what KSM told Mitchell about what inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States — and the U.S. response he expected. Today, some on both the left and the right argue that al-Qaeda wanted to draw us into a quagmire in Afghanistan — and now the Islamic State wants to do the same in Iraq and Syria. KSM said this is dead wrong. Far from trying to draw us in, KSM said that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as we had the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut — when, KSM told Mitchell, the United States “turned tail and ran.” He also said he thought we would treat 9/11 as a law enforcement matter, just as we had the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole in Yemen — arresting some operatives and firing a few missiles into empty tents, but otherwise leaving him free to plan the next attack.

For the pusillanimous left any military response is necessarily wrong. The left is, as the saying goes, “too proud to fight.”

But note that the first evidence of American weakness was shown by… none other than Ronald Reagan. When the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut in1983, killing nearly 300 marines, the Reagan administration did not respond vigorously. It did not hunt down the killers. It “turned tail and ran.”

Denizens of the American right like to pin this all on liberal Democrats, but the first American president to show of weakness in the face of terror was Ronald Reagan.

The next was Bill Clinton. Having seen the way a weak and decadent Clinton responded to terrorism, KSM planned his next attack, confident that a helpless America would not respond.

He was in for a surprise. Thiessen reports KSM’s words:

“Then he looked at me [Mitchell] and said, ‘How was I supposed to know that cowboy George Bush would announce he wanted us ‘dead or alive’ and then invade Afghanistan to hunt us down?’” Mitchell writes. “KSM explained that if the United States had treated 9/11 like a law enforcement matter, he would have had time to launch a second wave of attacks.” He was not able to do so because al-Qaeda was stunned “by the ferocity and swiftness of George W. Bush’s response.”

The next time you ask yourself about what deters terrorism, you might consider KSM’s thoughts. Those who treat terrorism like a law enforcement matter invite terrorism. Apparently, the cowboy Bush’s response had a deterrent effect, even more than if he had called for an attack on Islamophobia.

KSM’s purpose is to convert America to Islam, to see Shariah Law as the law of the American land. He cannot defeat America by force of arms but he can help America to defeat itself. America—and other European nations—invite terrorism by showing weakness and submission in the face of terrorism:

But KSM said something else that was prophetic. In the end, he told Mitchell, “We will win because Americans don’t realize . . . we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.”

KSM explained that large-scale attacks such as 9/11 were “nice, but not necessary” and that a series of “low-tech attacks could bring down America the same way ‘enough disease-infected fleas can fell an elephant.’ ” KSM “said jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States” and “wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws” until they were strong enough to rise up and attack us. “He said the brothers would relentlessly continue their attacks and the American people would eventually become so tired, so frightened, and so weary of war that they would just want it to end.”

“Eventually,” KSM said, “America will expose her neck for us to slaughter.”

Already American universities and the Democratic Party have succumbed. It remains to be seen whether the rest of the nation follows.

One notes that Mackenzie could not divulge her last name. So much for free expression and the first amendment.