On Feb. 5, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda is regrouping, not retreating — and boosting its capacities to launch another attack inside the United States. So how does the war on terrorism look these days through our enemies’ eyes? Here’s an informed — albeit fictional — guess.
Continue reading “Reading bin Laden’s mind: The State of the Jihad, as he might see it”Year: 2008
George Weigel’s anti-American jeremiad
What, one wonders, can possibly inspire the neoconservatives’ hate for Americans, their history, their traditions, and their ideas? In the context of this question, George Weigel’s new book, Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism: A Call to Action, is more troubling than Norman Podhoretz’s viciously anti-American World War IV. The Long War Against Islamofacism because of Mr. Weigel’s reputation as a brilliant Catholic scholar, confidant of popes, and commentator on Catholicism’s role in America. In Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, however, Mr. Weigel reveals himself as just one more America-hating neoconservative; he is a clone of Mr. Podhoretz and his acolytes, and, like them, can barely constrain his contempt for his countrymen, saying, for example, that it is the “sovereign prerogative” of these fools to elect non-neoconservative candidates who are incompetent, naive, and clueless. [p. 142] The book’s one redeeming feature is the validation it gives to Sister Mary Lawrence’s frequent admonition to my third grade class that “evil can be a contamination caught from evil companions” and that “you shall be known by the company you keep.” The dust-jacket on Mr. Weigel’s book is endorsed by: R. James Woolsey, Fouad Adjami, William Kristol, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and — of course — Norman Podhoretz. If she was still alive, and may God rest her soul, Sister Mary Lawrence could use the dust-jacket as irrefutable evidence that she knows of what she speaks in regard to the threat posed by keeping evil companions.