Herb Denenberg
America Needs To Wake Up Or We'll Perish
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
George Orwell, a great fighter and writer for freedom, captured the essence of the totalitarian mind by satirizing its use of language, and gave us the famous Orwellian inversions of the totalitarian mind — war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is strength.
Although such linguistic lunacy may not always reflect a totalitarian mind, it does reflect the kind of thinking that is dangerous in a democracy or any other place. And we now find one of the practitioners of the distorted thinking of Orwellian inversions is our president, Barack “The Apologizer and Appeaser” Obama and his administration.
His director of the Department of Homeland Security avoids the war on terror and transforms a terror attack to an Orwellian inversion of mammoth proportions calling it a “man-caused catastrophe.” And the Obama administration chokes on the phrase “war on terror” so it sanitizes it by transformation to “overseas contingency operation.”
If leadership can’t even call its mortal enemy by its right name and sanitizes and euphemizes it by converting it to a more palatable Orwellian inversion you can be sure of two things: First, they can’t win a war against an enemy that they are afraid to correctly name; second, they lack the will to battle such enemy they are afraid to correctly name.
This is no small matter, and the fact that it has not become a bigger issue than it is suggests we are starting down the path taken by the British and the rest of Europe toward surrender to the cultural invasion by Islam spearheaded by the Islamofascists, Islamists, Islamo-Nazis or whatever you choose to call them.
We are not as far gone as Britain, where a top government official decreed that Islamist terrorist acts can’t be so called, apparently out of fear of offending the Muslims. So they will be called anti-Islamic activity, thus suggesting that the 10,000 terror attacks since 9/11 by Islamofascists have nothing to do with Islam. When political leaders do that kind of semantic somersaults, you can be sure they have virtually surrendered. And that is the conclusion reached in Mark Steyn’s classic book, America Alone: The End of the Word as We Know It.
The Obama administration’s linguistic lunacy suggests it is unaware that we face an existential threat from Islamist extremists. They are unaware of what Brigitte Gabriel calls the Islamist cultural invasion. In her book, They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, she writes,
“A seditious culture is advancing worldwide. Its seeds have been implanted in the fabric of countries all over the globe. It is creating a crisis and laying a foundation that has the potential to change the future of people and cultures worldwide. No nation is exempt.”
Ms. Gabriel gives examples of America’s slow piece-by-piece surrender in this war:
“Universities in the United States and Europe are extending olive branches to our enemies in the name of education and intellectual exchange, while refusing to allow others to express their opinions on campuses.
“Fortune 500 companies are setting aside their standing policies in order to accommodate Muslim prayer schedules and religious observances, while refusing the same privilege to those of other faiths. Retail giants are trying to take in higher profits by devising new strategies to add Muslim markets to their demographics. While Americans accept and accommodate niquans, burqas, and foot-washing basins, all in the spirit of political correctness, our culture escalates into crisis.”
Europe went down the same path, notes Ms. Gabriel, and now it is confronted with an extremist agenda that involves murder, rape, riots, beatings and burnings, running native citizens out of their homes. And Europe provides a blueprint for what Islamists intend to accomplish in the U.S. and everywhere in the world.
The loss of balance and perspective in making these concessions and accommodations to Muslim pressure groups is obvious when it is realized these accommodations and concessions are not even made in Muslim countries. But we are bamboozled into making them. For example, Ms. Gabriel cites the case of the Kansas City Airport and University of Michigan campus, where they have installed foot-washing basins for Muslims to prepare for their five daily prayers.
But she asks, “If footbaths are so important to Muslims, how come they don’t have them in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon.” And these concessions and accommodations are made to Muslims but not other groups.
For example, Ms. Gabriel cites Disney World, where they provide special scheduling to accommodate Muslim prayers and set up special prayer rooms. Ms. Gabriel asks, “I wonder how many rooms they have on the premises for their evangelical and Catholic employees who also wish to pray.”
But the concessions and accommodations are only one-third of the picture and the problem. The Islamofascists want the U.S. to be transformed into a Muslim nation governed by Muslim law (Shariah). Here is what the co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations had to say on that matter:
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
Perhaps most frightening, there’s the final third of the picture. The Islamofascists have infiltrated America with terror cells ready to do battle and inflict terror in the homeland. Ms. Gabriel writes,
“Islamic groups have their own compounds spread throughout the country, where they live and practice military training with live ammunition. The largest such group, Jamaat ul-Fuqua, has 45 paramilitary training groups in North America. Its founder is a radical Islamists who is closely associated with terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah and leaders such as Osama bin Laden. He has trained jjihadists for fighting in Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia…
“[T]he group has committed attacks, staged robberies, acquired contraband arms, engaged in counterfeiting, and proselytized effectively among African-American prison inmates. Its members predicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.”
Despite all that, Jamaat ul-Fuqua has still not been considered a terrorist group and the IRS has not taken its nonprofit status away.
Ms. Gabriel has many more specifics on the inroads of Islamofascists in the homeland, but we still seem asleep to the threat. If we don’t wake up, we’ll soon be in Europe’s shoes, having in effect surrendered to the Islamofascists and on the ways to losing its form of government, its values and its freedom and liberty.
We better wake up, as the tipping point is closer than we think and it won’t be easy to save the nation. For your wake-up treatment, I recommend the following books and Web sites:
• Ms. Gabriel, They Must Be Stopped, and her Web site, www.actforamerica.org.
• Robert Spencer, The Stealth Jihad, and his Web site, www.jihadwatch.org. This Web site is a project of David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.
• Steven Emerson, Jihad Inc., and his Web site, www.the
investigativeproject.org.
I’ll leave you with two final bits of information to wake up anyone still slumbering as the noose is tightened around America’s neck. First are the words of Warner MacKenzie, an Australian writer and author of It’s The Ideology, Stupid! He wrote,
“The West’s propensity for ignorance is nothing short of astounding when one considers that, in this first decade of the 21st century, a veritable gold mine of information, on any topic, is available at one’s fingertips via the Internet. Never before have books on the subject of Islamic history and terrorism been so prolific, yet the same old dangerously erroneous opinions on the causes of Islamic violence remains as popular, uninformed and widespread as ever.”
Finally, listen to the words of a founder of a Pakistani terrorist group, Jamaat-e-Islami:
“Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man. Islam doesn’t look for a nation to be in a better condition than another nation. Islam doesn’t’ care about the land or who owns the land. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam.
“Any nation or power that gets in the way of that goal, Islam will fight and destroy. In order to fulfill that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is jihad.”
America, awake or perish.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
Although such linguistic lunacy may not always reflect a totalitarian mind, it does reflect the kind of thinking that is dangerous in a democracy or any other place. And we now find one of the practitioners of the distorted thinking of Orwellian inversions is our president, Barack “The Apologizer and Appeaser” Obama and his administration.
His director of the Department of Homeland Security avoids the war on terror and transforms a terror attack to an Orwellian inversion of mammoth proportions calling it a “man-caused catastrophe.” And the Obama administration chokes on the phrase “war on terror” so it sanitizes it by transformation to “overseas contingency operation.”
If leadership can’t even call its mortal enemy by its right name and sanitizes and euphemizes it by converting it to a more palatable Orwellian inversion you can be sure of two things: First, they can’t win a war against an enemy that they are afraid to correctly name; second, they lack the will to battle such enemy they are afraid to correctly name.
This is no small matter, and the fact that it has not become a bigger issue than it is suggests we are starting down the path taken by the British and the rest of Europe toward surrender to the cultural invasion by Islam spearheaded by the Islamofascists, Islamists, Islamo-Nazis or whatever you choose to call them.
We are not as far gone as Britain, where a top government official decreed that Islamist terrorist acts can’t be so called, apparently out of fear of offending the Muslims. So they will be called anti-Islamic activity, thus suggesting that the 10,000 terror attacks since 9/11 by Islamofascists have nothing to do with Islam. When political leaders do that kind of semantic somersaults, you can be sure they have virtually surrendered. And that is the conclusion reached in Mark Steyn’s classic book, America Alone: The End of the Word as We Know It.
The Obama administration’s linguistic lunacy suggests it is unaware that we face an existential threat from Islamist extremists. They are unaware of what Brigitte Gabriel calls the Islamist cultural invasion. In her book, They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, she writes,
“A seditious culture is advancing worldwide. Its seeds have been implanted in the fabric of countries all over the globe. It is creating a crisis and laying a foundation that has the potential to change the future of people and cultures worldwide. No nation is exempt.”
Ms. Gabriel gives examples of America’s slow piece-by-piece surrender in this war:
“Universities in the United States and Europe are extending olive branches to our enemies in the name of education and intellectual exchange, while refusing to allow others to express their opinions on campuses.
“Fortune 500 companies are setting aside their standing policies in order to accommodate Muslim prayer schedules and religious observances, while refusing the same privilege to those of other faiths. Retail giants are trying to take in higher profits by devising new strategies to add Muslim markets to their demographics. While Americans accept and accommodate niquans, burqas, and foot-washing basins, all in the spirit of political correctness, our culture escalates into crisis.”
Europe went down the same path, notes Ms. Gabriel, and now it is confronted with an extremist agenda that involves murder, rape, riots, beatings and burnings, running native citizens out of their homes. And Europe provides a blueprint for what Islamists intend to accomplish in the U.S. and everywhere in the world.
The loss of balance and perspective in making these concessions and accommodations to Muslim pressure groups is obvious when it is realized these accommodations and concessions are not even made in Muslim countries. But we are bamboozled into making them. For example, Ms. Gabriel cites the case of the Kansas City Airport and University of Michigan campus, where they have installed foot-washing basins for Muslims to prepare for their five daily prayers.
But she asks, “If footbaths are so important to Muslims, how come they don’t have them in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon.” And these concessions and accommodations are made to Muslims but not other groups.
For example, Ms. Gabriel cites Disney World, where they provide special scheduling to accommodate Muslim prayers and set up special prayer rooms. Ms. Gabriel asks, “I wonder how many rooms they have on the premises for their evangelical and Catholic employees who also wish to pray.”
But the concessions and accommodations are only one-third of the picture and the problem. The Islamofascists want the U.S. to be transformed into a Muslim nation governed by Muslim law (Shariah). Here is what the co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations had to say on that matter:
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
Perhaps most frightening, there’s the final third of the picture. The Islamofascists have infiltrated America with terror cells ready to do battle and inflict terror in the homeland. Ms. Gabriel writes,
“Islamic groups have their own compounds spread throughout the country, where they live and practice military training with live ammunition. The largest such group, Jamaat ul-Fuqua, has 45 paramilitary training groups in North America. Its founder is a radical Islamists who is closely associated with terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah and leaders such as Osama bin Laden. He has trained jjihadists for fighting in Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia…
“[T]he group has committed attacks, staged robberies, acquired contraband arms, engaged in counterfeiting, and proselytized effectively among African-American prison inmates. Its members predicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.”
Despite all that, Jamaat ul-Fuqua has still not been considered a terrorist group and the IRS has not taken its nonprofit status away.
Ms. Gabriel has many more specifics on the inroads of Islamofascists in the homeland, but we still seem asleep to the threat. If we don’t wake up, we’ll soon be in Europe’s shoes, having in effect surrendered to the Islamofascists and on the ways to losing its form of government, its values and its freedom and liberty.
We better wake up, as the tipping point is closer than we think and it won’t be easy to save the nation. For your wake-up treatment, I recommend the following books and Web sites:
• Ms. Gabriel, They Must Be Stopped, and her Web site, www.actforamerica.org.
• Robert Spencer, The Stealth Jihad, and his Web site, www.jihadwatch.org. This Web site is a project of David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.
• Steven Emerson, Jihad Inc., and his Web site, www.the
investigativeproject.org.
I’ll leave you with two final bits of information to wake up anyone still slumbering as the noose is tightened around America’s neck. First are the words of Warner MacKenzie, an Australian writer and author of It’s The Ideology, Stupid! He wrote,
“The West’s propensity for ignorance is nothing short of astounding when one considers that, in this first decade of the 21st century, a veritable gold mine of information, on any topic, is available at one’s fingertips via the Internet. Never before have books on the subject of Islamic history and terrorism been so prolific, yet the same old dangerously erroneous opinions on the causes of Islamic violence remains as popular, uninformed and widespread as ever.”
Finally, listen to the words of a founder of a Pakistani terrorist group, Jamaat-e-Islami:
“Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man. Islam doesn’t look for a nation to be in a better condition than another nation. Islam doesn’t’ care about the land or who owns the land. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam.
“Any nation or power that gets in the way of that goal, Islam will fight and destroy. In order to fulfill that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is jihad.”
America, awake or perish.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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