The enemy within

When Jane Fonda visited North Vietnamese army troops while our GIs were being killed by those she was comforting, we tagged her “Hanoi Jane.”

Now she and other Vietnam-era war protesters are back at their divisive, feckless game. They and their latest recruits apparently can’t compute that our country has just been assaulted by madmen as bad as Hitler’s worst.

Self-appointed geo-strategist Fonda, commenting about the attack that killed more than 6,000 civilians in New York City alone, has already concluded, “It would be a mistake for America to retaliate militarily.”

Fonda, a born-again loose cannon concerned about “the saber rattling and calls for vengeance,” is urging people to “try to understand the underlying cause of the crime.”

Right – and while we’re turning the other cheek, terrorists will be taking out the Statue of Liberty.

Where do we get such wrongheaded, solipsistic Looney Tunes?

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Self-anointed Saint Madonna – not exactly known for her vows of poverty, chastity or acts of humility – is praying for peace while paraphrasing her apparent role model, Mother Teresa. “Violence,” she says, “begets violence.”

Try that one from the Material Girl out on the families whose loved ones didn’t come home from work on Sept. 11. Or the orphans who want their moms and dads to hold them and tell them it’s all been a bad dream.

Phil Donahue remained true to his hippy roots when he argued on television that “the memory” of those killed in the attacks wouldn’t “be honored by going out and killing other civilians.”

Bill Maher put the icing on the appeasement cake for all his pacifist pals when he announced: “We have been cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying on the airplane when it hits the building, say what [you] want about it, [is] not cowardly.”

Mr. Maher, check out how that message went down with the rescue crews digging through smoking ruins with their bare hands, searching for survivors, while you were pontificating on prime time. Ask the widows of the firemen and policemen who paid the ultimate price about who’s cowardly and who’s brave.

Besides big mouths, what these celebrities have in common is that they all live in secure palaces where even their servants have access to gas masks. They’re about as connected to the American people and the enormity of this tragedy as the terrorists themselves.

My wife, the former flower child, supposes that they might be so into denial they can’t accept the hard truths that on Sept. 11, American civilians suffered almost three times the deaths inflicted upon our soldiers and sailors at Pearl Harbor, and that our very survival is at stake.

Whatever their hang-ups, one would think that even these high-profile yo-yos would get their acts together enough to support protecting their fellow Americans from clear and present danger. But the clueless celebs keep compulsively stirring the peace protest pot – even though their calls for pacification amount to providing aid to an implacable enemy whose publicly avowed purpose is to destroy our land of the free.

For sure, lots of rats are rolling in the aisles in Kabul and Baghdad while watching these clowns rant and rave on the tube. And the word from many who fought to preserve the Constitution, which gives these wonders the right to make fools of themselves, is that their treachery is over-the-top. That now, more than ever, we need to be a country united – not torn apart as we were over Vietnam, when protests aimed at the troops caused far more deaths by destroying our soldiers’ will to fight.

Our privileged betrayers should ask what the world would be like had the USA not stood tall in the 20th century. Then, if they like the answer, they can go visit the Taliban – as Fonda did the NVA.

David Horowitz, a Vietnam-era peacenik, said, “If I have one regret from my radical years, it is that this country was too tolerant towards the treason of its enemies from within.”

We can and should dissent when it’s appropriate – but our first priority must be to secure Fort America from future strikes. Until then, we need to rally round the flag and practice unity, not division.

And, as we used to say in Vietnam: “Stay alert, stay alive.”