An end to enabling

The Year: 1977

The Location: Washington DC

The Event: 12 armed Islamic terrorists storm into 3 buildings, seize control of all three and take 134 people hostage, of which 109 are Jews. During the course of the 39 hour siege the hostages are beaten with fists, rifle buts and one man – Marion Barry, future cokehead DC Mayor – is shot. The incident comes to an end without the loss of life when the terrorists surrendered at the behest of ambassadors from 3 Islamic nations that the FBI had brought in help.

The Motive: The leader of the group, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, was seeking revenge against American Jews for the murder of members of his family, even though they had been murdered by other Muslims. Khaalis also demanded that United Artists to pull the distribution of the movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God.

Eye-Witness Account: A terrorist pointed his gun at one man and said, "If the Lord gives me permission, I'll kill you."

Does anyone in the US, aside from Marion Barry who even in a coked up stupor most likely remembers getting shot, even remember that this happened? Everyday the cry that Iraq is the cause of terrorist acts grows, but what of events that preceded it?

The sad fact is that we in the West have a suicidal narrow minded centrism that only allows for the events in the world to be caused by our own actions, and a furtherance of guilt that requires taking blame for all the ills in the world. It’s a bloody mindedness that borders on racism that simply can’t comprehend the notion that someone non-Western could have motives and desires that don’t conform to Western norms or is at the least influenced by the inherent evils of Western actions.

Thus we have the continued calls for the creation of a world wide caliphate where all four corners of the globe would be put under the boot heel of Islamic law and demands for superstition to be put before science that come from the very mouths of the Mullahs, Imams and terrorist we are fighting completely ignored. All the while we bend over backwards to find the ethereal “root cause” in items that can only be fully blamed on the West.

But regardless of our own tortured self-examination there is a root cause. There is a tether, cord, a certain similarity, a commonality that binds the blind Imam, the billionaire warmonger, the middle class gunman, the well educated student who flies the plane, the illiterate bomber on an Israeli bus, the normal looking bloke on a London tube and all the others out there for whom the killing 20 children to get at one infidel is a fair trade. Deep down in our guts I feel most of us know exactly what the binder is, but we dare not speak its name. Some in the West come close but invariably use an endless supply of qualifiers like, extremist, radical, militant and other invented ist’s and ism’s to muddy the waters while appearing to take a stand.

There is a gorilla in the neighbor’s yard that is snatching kids from the sidewalk and devouring their souls and I for one am done enabling the neighbor to live in denial of the monster in the hope that it will one day just wander back off into the hills.

I will stand in the mirror and say Candyman three times. I will call it by its name, and its name is Islam.