Seven years have passed since the mujahedin murdered nearly 3,000 office workers in what was a clear declaration of war against the United States, and the situation is more muddled than ever.
Some think, as I noted yesterday, that the “war on terror” is in its final stages: Al-Qaeda is in disarray, with even its foremost theorists questioning its methodology. Unfortunately, there is less to that than meets the eye.
Some think that the “war on terror” never existed at all, but was and is merely a concoction of the Bush Administration that would enable it to carry out its imperialist designs.
Neither view can comprehend the prospect of a man in Britain plotting mass murder and explaining: “We are doing this in order to gain the pleasure of our Lord and Allah loves us to die and kill in his path.”
Both major political parties in America — and, indeed, virtually all national political figures — as well as all the principal spokesmen of both the liberal and conservative mainstream media remain firmly and unquestioningly committed to the proposition that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists.
Holding this view does not preclude, as George W. Bush has demonstrated, fighting energetically against jihadists in some arenas, but it does create blind spots. It means that the stealth jihad is advancing almost completely unnoticed and unimpeded. It means that organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations continue to be treated by both government and media as benign groups that wholeheartedly and unconditionally accept American Constitutional republicanism and pluralism, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It means that jihadists have been able to infiltrate American government and law enforcement, due to the anxiety of officials not to appear “anti-Muslim.”
It also means that there has still never been a full and comprehensive discussion of the jihad threat in the American public square. Maybe television news is no place for a full and comprehensive discussion of anything, but it is worth noting that seven years after 9/11 there has not been a single documentary aired on a major network that explains the full magnitude of the threat. (Obsession is superb as far as it goes, but it does not explain the provenance of the jihad ideology, or the extent to which Muslims in America and around the world may adhere to that ideology.) Most of the media (again, both liberal and conservative) is completely in the bag for CAIR and Co., having swallowed whole the ridiculous claim that to speak honestly about Islamic supremacism amounts to “bigotry” and “racism.” Other don’t care to discuss it because it’s low ratings material.
Meanwhile, those cries of “bigotry” and “racism” coalesce neatly with the worldwide effort by Muslim groups to criminalize criticism of Islam — which would effectively muzzle the West, preventing Western non-Muslims from publicly discussing or strategizing about how to defeat the jihad threat. And that, of course, is just the point of such efforts, which the Western media has unwittingly abetted by accepting, for years now, the Muslim claim that such discussion is out of bounds.
So seven years after the Towers went down and the Pentagon was wounded, the jihadists have every reason to smell victory — not in Iraq, where they are indeed on the run, but in their efforts to cow and intimidate the West into giving up all resistance to Islamization. It’s happening, but no one notices or cares, because it is happening in small steps.
Maybe the next seven years will bring better news.