Ya Think?

May 5, 2010
Is There a Pattern Here or What?
by Victor Davis Hanson

The jihadist symptoms of Major Hasan were ignored; General Casey lamented the possible ramifications of Hasan's killings to the army's diversity program; the warnings of Mr. Mutallab's father about his son's jihadist tendencies were ignored but the latter's Miranda rights were not; and the Times Square would-be bomber was quite rashly and on little evidence falsely equated with a "white" bomber with perhaps domestic-terrorism overtones (when it looks like there is a Pakistani radical-Islamist connection) — a sort of pattern has been established, one both implicit and explicit.

One, we are doing our darnedest to playact that radical Muslims who are trying to kill us are not trying to kill us; and two, we are not seeing a lot of peaceful blowback from the virtual closing of Guantanamo, the virtual trial of KSM, the reach out in the Al Arabiya interview, the "reset" rhetoric, the Cairo speech, and the apology tour — 2009 saw the most terrorism attempts since 2001.

And that, of course, is the charitable take: that these near-miss (and not-so-near-miss) radical-Islamist incidents are incidental to, rather than a symptom of, our new de facto policy of suggesting that the problem with our "contingency operations" against "man-caused disasters" is with us rather than with hostile Muslim terrorists.

FWIW, there was a fair amount of Islamic butt kissing under Bush. He wasn't as enthusiastic as B.O. by a long shot. But he did it. I've always wondered why?