Where Has This Been?

In yesterday’s New York Post, I found this remarkable bit of commentary, excerpted below. The problem is that it is remarkable, whereas it should be commonplace:

September 12, 2006 — WELL, here it is, five years late, but here just the same: an apology from an Arab-American for 9/11. No, I didn’t help organize the killers or contribute in any way to their terrible cause. However, I was one of millions of Arab-Americans who did the unspeakable on 9/11: nothing.

The only time I raised my voice in protest against these men who killed thousands of innocents in the name of Allah was behind closed doors, among the safety of friends and family. I did at one point write a very vitriolic essay condemning their actions, but fear of becoming another Salman Rushdie kept me from ever trying to publish it.

Well, I’m sick of saying the truth only in private - that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated on the world at large.

Yes, our extremists and our culture.

Every single 9/11 hijacker was Arab and a Muslim. The apologists (including President Bush) tried to reassure us that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, but was a twisting of a great and noble religion. With all due respect, read the Koran, Mr. President. There’s enough there for someone of extreme tendencies to find their way to a global jihad.

We need much more of this from the Islamic world. Faster, please.

I suspect that this sort of awakening in the Islamic community is the only thing that stands a chance of avoiding a horrible, prolonged, and very costly war that will inevitably result in the defeat of the Islamic world. The course the world is on now (think of Iran) will see escalating provocations from the radical Islamic fundamentalists, which eventually will awaken even the French surrender-monkeys from their mindless slumber. That is, if the high birthrate amongst Muslim immigrants doesn’t hand them France earlier in a more, er, entertaining sort of war. Once the Western world is united against radical Islam — and this will happen if enough Europeans are killed — then a much more conventional war will be fought. It will be costly to both sides, but much more so to the Islamic world. I cannot imagine any action of the United Nations (in its current form) preventing this outcome, nor can I imagine any action on America’s part — though I think George W. Bush’s foreign policies are about as good as we’re likely to get in that direction (and I shudder to think what 2008 might bring us in the way of a replacement). But recognition within the broader Islamic community that their brothers are the problem just might provide the path to a less violent solution.

Trouble is, I don’t think there’s much of a chance of that happening. But I can always hope…