May 01, 2004

Norman Mineta: It’s Better to Be Politically Correct than to Fight Terrorists.

It is beyond question that the primary practitioners of terrorism worldwide are the subset of Arabs known as Islamo-Fascists.

Anyone not blinded by political correctness knows that you have to therefore be extra careful when screening people of Arabic descent at airports. Yes, that is unfortunate for the people of Arabic descent who are law-abiding. But it’s for their own safety. They’re in as much danger as anyone else if the plane is crashed into a building.

I’d be much more impressed with law-abiding people of Arabic descent if they would make an outcry against terrorism, rather than against the policies that seek to prevent terrorists from killing people.

Ann Coulter has the shocking story about how, in the name of political correctness, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta has actually sued airlines for trying to keep us from getting blown up:

In June 2001, as Mohamed Atta completed his final “to do” list before the 9-11 attacks….. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta was conducting a major study on whether airport security was improperly screening passengers based on ethnicity. As Mineta explained: “We must protect the civil rights of airline passengers.” Protecting airline passengers from sudden death has never made it onto Mineta’s radar screen.

Amazingly, Mineta continues this practice after 9-11 and to this day:

Flush with praise from the ACLU, Mineta set to work suing airlines for removing passengers perceived to be of Arab, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian descent, and/or Muslim.

...Despite Mineta’s clearly worded letter immediately after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and another follow-up letter in October, the Department of Transportation found that in the weeks after the 9-11 terrorist attacks carried out by Middle Eastern men, the airlines were targeting passengers who appeared to be Middle Eastern. To his horror, Mineta discovered that the airlines were using logic and deductive reasoning to safeguard their passengers in direct violation of his just-issued guidelines on racial profiling!

Mineta has caused the same airlines that were targeted by terrorists on 9-11, to pay millions to settle lawsuits.

This is infuriating. The terrorists are counting on this sort of behavior on our part to permit them to get in here and nuke us. Mineta must be made to understand that this kind of brain-dead political correctness is a relic of the past.

Victor Davis Hanson Foresees the End of Terrorism.

VDH proposes strategies for pursuing the war on terrorists.

On an End to Terrorism

Remember at one time most of us asked how we could defeat those as powerful and wicked as the Nazis when by July 1941 their terrible rule stretched from the English Channel to the outskirts of Moscow, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert, with millions more impressed by the power of their hateful ideology and fearful of its reach. And yet four years later not a Nazi activist and open adherent was to be found, so completely had the United States and its allies destroyed the power and refuted the ideas of Hitler.

So it will be too when Islamist terrorist cells are rounded up in Europe and in the United States; when their havens in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq are completely eradicated; when their sponsors in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon abandon their cause; and when freedom and prosperity are offered to millions as an alternative to both Islamic fascism and autocracy under which it can alone thrive.

Encouraging words. He continues with these proposed strategies:

Energy Policy

More concretely, we must wean ourselves from the imported petroleum of the Persian Gulf, whose dollars so often fuel and subsidize the fundamentalists who have killed thousands and wish to kill still thousands more Americans. ...Meanwhile, we must enter on a new Manhattan project, a similar wartime effort to find new sources of energy to fuel our transportation, homes, and commerce, so that never again can agents of destruction and barbarism seek to hold the United States hostage, and use the fruits of our own commerce from which to buy the very weapons to destroy us.

Economic Policy

But if our economy is to remain strong as it must to provide for our soldiers in battle then Congress must accept compromises on both spending and taxation. We can neither spend nor tax our way out of our present difficulty, so let us agree that no Democrat shall propose another dollar of spending without providing for an addition dollar of revenue; no Republican shall cut another dollar of taxes without guarantees of a like reduction in spending. This war is not entirely one of ideas or bullets, but also one of money and influence. To win, the United States must reestablish its reputation as not only the most powerful and richest country in the world, but also the most financially sober and prudent. We owe our soldiers in the field no less.

Finally, this is not just a struggle to defeat the Islamic fundamentalists, but to establish the principle that the United States in a moment of its greatest success, material wealth, and power can still make terrible sacrifices that throughout the ages have always been the cost for the freedom and security of its citizens and friends abroad. What Osama bin Laden, and those who actively support him, have started, we in the United States most surely will finish.

Read the whole thing.

Kerry States Publicly He Wants to Get Our Troops Out of Iraq.

Associated Press reports that Kerry made this statement to voters in Ohio this week:

“I’ll tell you this—if you’ll trust me with the presidency of the United States, I will pursue a policy that I know can get our troops down in number, *reduced, out of Iraq*. We can change the entire dynamics of what is happening there.”

So Kerry plans to emulate Spain, which cut and ran, pulling it’s troops out of Iraq, acting in fear of terrorists. This is yet another blatant case of Kerry claiming different things to different people. Kerry has no plans to keep us safe from terrorists. His plan is to give the terrorists just what they want.