Editor’s note: This is the last of three commentaries by Paul Sperry on Washington’s inability to protect its citizens.
WASHINGTON – Every act of compassion in President Bush’s “Kill ‘Em With Kindness” campaign has backfired.
The Taliban has heisted much of the more than 1 million Koran-correct food rations – all free of pork and pork byproducts – which we’ve dropped so far in Afghanistan. And now the holy clerics are poisoning them.
But that waste of time and money didn’t convince Bush to stop. We’re dropping more provisions – this time in pretty blue packages.
Turns out the yellow packets look like yellow cluster bomblets. So now we’ll drop rations in blue, so Afghan kids don’t mistake unspent bombs for food.
Wait a minute. Shouldn’t we leave them yellow if the Taliban is picking them up? No, that wouldn’t be nice.
Bush also has airlifted in radios and humanitarian love-letters. Next he’ll be sending in VCRs and beverages to our enemy.
Bush had American kiddos send their allowance money to the White House to help starving Afghan orphans (never mind the poor American kids who lost parents in the World Trade Center attacks ordered from Afghanistan). More than 90,000 letters have arrived, but the money’s just sitting there – held hostage by the anthrax scare.
Bush wasn’t discouraged. He then came up with the bright idea to encourage American kids to pick an Islamic world pen pal. Sure, send a junior jihader your home address, kiddies, so he can send you a seed packet to start your own little anthrax garden.
Meantime, the enemy isn’t fooling around with pen pals and care packages. It’s scouting our nuke plants here, and lining up suicide teams to hit our ground troops over there.
As commander in chief, you’d think Bush would know the enemy, the first canon of war. But he has no idea what’s driving these nuts.
At bottom, it’s a little book, shorter than the New Testament, called the Koran.
Islamic terrorists are essentially carrying out edicts passed down by their prophet, Mohammed. They will not tire of hating and battling American infidels any more than Catholics will tire of hailing Mary.
“Islam is peace,” Bush insists.
Sorry, Mr. President, but I’ve just read the Koran, cover to cover, and it reads like a manual of war.
My favorite verse: “Kill those who join other gods with God (Christians) wherever ye shall find them; and seize them, besiege them, and lay in wait for them with every kind of ambush.”
My favorite sura: “The Troops.”
Any intellectually honest Muslim who has actually read the entire Koran (many in America have not) will tell you – privately, of course – that Osama bin Laden is actually a good Muslim who is just carrying out the holy edict of Mohammed to fight the infidels, defined in no uncertain terms throughout the Koran as the Jews and Christians (“the friends of Satan”), until they and their nations submit to the will of Allah.
“Verily, the infidels are your undoubted enemies,” Mohammed says.
“Take therefore none of them for friends,” he commands all Muslims. “And slay them wherever ye find them.”
I’m not cherry-picking verses. The text is replete with such violent and hateful commands. You can hardly turn a page of the Koran without seeing the words “punish” and “infidel.” Try it.
Bush has assured us that he will stamp out the enemy threatening us in our homes, while at the same time assuring the friends of our enemy that we will not offend them – or their faith.
In fact, he appears more concerned with protecting the feelings of Arab Muslims in America, many of whom are here illegally, than protecting the lives of American citizens.
Despite getting credible warnings that Islamic terrorists are going to attack us again, Bush still refuses to order the INS and FBI to at least detain Middle Eastern men flying here from terrorist-sponsoring nations – in the middle of a war on terrorism in the Middle East. Go figure.
The young, clean-shaven Syrian men he’s let in to train at flight schools since Sept. 11, for example, may be up to nothing more than learning how to fly.
But why take the chance after seeing what the 19 hijackers pulled off just two months earlier? They also came here legally to attend flight schools – and most of them were from Saudi Arabia, a supposed ally, not Syria, which is on the State Department’s blacklist and can’t even land its jets here.
Bush argues that we shouldn’t fear Muslims, because they practice a “great” and “peace-loving” religion. What’s more, he demands that we “respect” and “value” them, along with their faith.
But practically in the same breath, he says we should be wary of suspicious-looking “people” until the terrorist threat passes.
You mean, people who look like the 19 hijackers?
People who have names like Mohamed Atta, Wail Alshehri, Waleed Alshehri, Abdulaziz Alomari, Satam Al Suqami, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Ahmed Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Hamza Alghamdi, Fayez Rahsid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad, Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami, Saeed Alghamdi, Hani Hanjour, Salem Alhazmi, Nawaf Alhazmi, Majed Moqed, Khalid Almihdhar?
People who attend the same mosques as they did in New Jersey, Maryland and Florida?
People who cite the same holy book as they did to justify the slaughter of 5,000 American infidels?
Those people?
Stop mincing words. The profile of our enemy is:
- Male;
- Middle Eastern; and
- Muslim.
The 3 M’s. Will Bush let federal law enforcement, including the INS, finally profile people matching this description, and stop confederates of our enemy from streaming across our borders?
I don’t think Bush has the guts.
He’s so angst-ridden by Arab hatred of the U.S., as if anything could soften it, that he’s reportedly hired a Madison Avenue firm to run “Please Love America” ads on the Arabic-language al-Jazeera network, the Arab world’s version of CNN (and just as biased in sugar-coating the Islamic threat).
Earth to Bush: We don’t need to win the PR battle in this war. Our justification for hitting back is axiomatic, contained in the video of the hijacked jumbo jet crashing into the WTC.
Unfortunately, TV networks, including Fox, have colluded in blacking out the WTC footage. They say it’s too horrific to keep showing the public.
Yeah, well, we need to stay horrified until the enemy is defeated. Complacency is our worst enemy right now. It seems each day we’re being talked out of our rage.
If Bush were ruthlessly smart he’d turn that footage into a public service ad and run it on all the major TV networks until bin Laden and his henchmen are extinguished. You know that bin Laden is probably using it right now – as a recruiting video.
Instead, the former Yale cheerleader keeps painting little, yellow smiley faces on everything, like some sentimental fool. Feeding the enemy and mouthing pleasant platitudes about Islam may please the bleeding hearts out there, but they may also be giving Americans a false sense of security and putting lives at risk.
It took Bush’s war rhetoric, ironically enough, to convince liberals like Rosie O’Donnell and Heather Mills, Paul McCartney’s fiance, that he’s not the
flint-hearted right-wing troglodyte they suspected.
He’s shown himself to be “very human,” Mills remarked – which, in war, translates to very ineffectual.
Don’t get me wrong. George the Compassionate, like his father, is a nice and decent guy.
But nice and decent guys don’t win wars, and they barely win elections. (George the Kinder, Gentler’s “victory” in the Gulf was, in fact, hollow – and one of the main reasons we’re in the crosshairs of Middle Eastern terrorists right now. We had to stay on holy Saudi soil to police Saddam Hussein, triggering bin Laden’s anti-American fatwahs.)
Many Republicans like to compare Bush to President Reagan. Both are warm, gregarious men who tend to stay focused on the big picture and not get bogged down in details.
But the comparison stops there.
Reagan led with a velvet fist. On the outside, he was pleasant and non-threatening. But underneath that soft exterior was a wall of steel.
“A warmly ruthless man,” recalled Reagan adviser Martin Anderson. “One of the toughest men I have ever known.”
Once Reagan determined what he thought to be right, and what was important to do, then he pursued that goal relentlessly, Anderson says in his book, “Revolution: The Reagan Legacy.”
Bush is the inverse.
Outside, he’s all Texas rawhide, like a pair of weathered work gloves. But those gloves mask the tender life of a privileged son.
Bush has lived so long among the elites, insulated from the way the world really works, that he seems emotionally detached from the dangerous reality facing the rest of us. Where’s the sense of urgency in capturing the terrorists still menacing us at home and abroad? Does he not understand that we can’t go down into a hardened bunker, or run to Camp David, or hop on Air Force One, or hide behind a Secret Service detail? We’re the ones who are really vulnerable to terrorist attacks every day.
Yet our Pollyannaish president seems content to just go on giving us daily pep talks, clinging to the notion that Arab Muslims will eventually respect our culture if we just respect theirs.
How naive.
Bush is prosecuting this war as if we were guilty of something, as if we did something to deserve the heinous attacks on our people. It’s insulting.
Quit blowing kisses and take care of business.
Related columns:
Washington can’t protect you, Part 1
The compassionate war flops, Part 2
Please, Mr. Bush, no Basrah this time
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