The real enemies

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's passionate speech on terrorism to the House Government Reform Committee last week was extremely well-received.

Both sides of the aisle agreed emphatically with Netanyahu's assertions about the nature of the terrorist threat and how it must be fought.

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Yet, the way the United States is addressing this threat leaves me wondering if congressional members actually heard what Netanyahu said.

"What is at stake is nothing less than the survival of our civilization," Netanyahu said. "There may be some who would have thought a week ago that to talk in these apocalyptic terms about the battle against international terrorism was to engage in reckless exaggeration. No longer."

What's the secret to winning the war? Netanyahu clearly enunciated the answer over and over throughout his address.

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The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states," he said. "Terrorists are not suspended in mid-air. They train, arm and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens on territory provided by terrorist states. Often these regimes provide the terrorists with intelligence, money and operational assistance, dispatching them to serve as deadly proxies to wage a hidden war against more powerful enemies. These regimes mount a worldwide propaganda campaign to legitimize terror, besmirching its victims and exculpating its practitioners. … Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into the dust.

He's right. And which terrorist states must be held accountable for this worldwide scourge?

"The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and several other Arab regimes such as the Sudan," he said.

Not one member of the committee had a critical word about Netanyahu's speech. Everyone agreed he hit the nail on the head. Yet, this understanding of the problem is not translated into American policy.

Now, I'm all for giving President Bush some latitude in leading us in this war. But, Congress does have a responsibility. It is the war-making authority under the Constitution. And it is perfectly appropriate for it to make its will known and understood within the administration.

It's not inappropriate for us as a nation to recognize that the Sept. 11 attacks have provided America with an opportunity to eliminate the kind of terrorism that killed more than 6,000 Americans on American soil.

We've been asleep at the switch – observing terrorist attacks on our friends, ignoring smaller terrorist attacks on our own nation and hoping that this disease would somehow cure itself. It hasn't and it won't. It's a cancer that must be properly diagnosed, cut out and destroyed.

I fear that our desire to build coalitions is stronger than our desire to win the war.

The terrorism that plagues Israel every day of the year is the same terrorism that hit the U.S. on Sept. 11. I believe it is the same terror that earlier resulted in the shoot-down of TWA Flight 800 over New York and destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City. The U.S. government has deliberately covered up the overwhelming evidence of the Islamic terror connection in earlier attacks on our country, probably because of the impact it might have on the phony, so-called "peace process" in the Middle East.

It's time to be realistic. It's time to be straight with the American people. It's time to recognize who our true enemies are. It's time to go after them – all of them. It's time to fight back. It's time to unshackle our true allies in their fight – our mutual fight. It's time to stop pretending that Iran, Syria, Arafat and others of their ilk are actually going to be of some help in this long-term battle.

It's time to take on this evil ideology head-on – like we did with previous evil ideologies of the 20th century. President Bush singled out some of those in his brilliant speech – fascism, Nazism, totalitarianism. He forgot one specific Evil Empire, though: He forgot to name Communism.

How did we fight it? We fought it by calling it what it was. We fought it with military force. We fought it with effective propaganda. We fought it by rallying Americans against it.

And that's the only way we will prevail in our war against radical Islam.

Don't miss Joseph Farah's exclusive report "Jihad in America" in the November issue of Whistleblower magazine, WorldNetDaily's monthly offline publication. Order your subscription now.