Where are all of these hordes of jihadists wishing to harm America?
How many active Taliban are there? How many of them would become inactive….if we uninvaded their country?
How many active Al Qaeda are there? And where are they?
And how would they get here to harm America? Where is their Navy and Airforce?
What resources does the jihadi threat possess to harm America with?
Why aren’t they using those WMD’s that would threaten real harm against us in Iraq or AfPak?
Cheney said torture foiled plots. Everybody else says, uh, no. So there have been no real threats of harm to the “Homeland” since 9/11?
Our fearsome enemies are armed with rifles, improvised bombs, and RPG’s. The most effective weapon they have ever wielded to harm America has been…..box cutters.
Hell they don’t even have missiles to shoot down our helicopters, apparently.
They can only, it seems, attack us when we invade their countries. Or perhaps, once in a blue moon, when we have a president that ignores the threat. And a confluence of circumstance that can easily be ascribed to luck occurs. We haven’t been attacked, and I am NOT crediting Cheney for this, in eight years
Yet we have changed our entire way of life and are fighting two wars and our politics are still full of fear of the terrorists and our national psyche is still obsessed with the events of nearly eight years ago, is still bent on demonizing and inflating this relatively tiny group of people and we are still making policy and reacting as if hordes of Brown People are swimming to America with curved knives clenched in their teeth even as we speak, to kill us in our beds and make our wimmens wear burkhas.
Can someone tell me how these folks are able to harm America to the point where we have to live our lives and conduct our politics in fear of them?
Please?
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Can we overcome at least SOME of the propaganda of the Bush years and talk about perspective and proportion a bit here?
They’re nothing but low life criminals.
And we elevate them to the level “warrior”.
blah…
several countries, killing millions, I really do suspect there are folks that will always hate the US. Always. Staying further just makes this worse.
The reasons we’re there haven’t changed since Jan 18: oil and resources, and an out of control military sector–which Obama wants to expand.
And yes, there are people that want to make our women wear burkas or something: they’re called Christians.
people on another site who are convinced the war on terrorism and the Af-Pak whateveryoucallitbecauseIrefusetocallitawar, is absolutely necessary because they are gonna kill us. I can only think back to the cold war days when we practice hiding under our school desks in case of nuclear attack. I aint hiding no more.
what people read, and what they don’t read. Personally, I read alot, and I read alot of antiwar stuff, Common Dreams, etc., and history. Based on what I read, I say bullshit to the GWOT. Others may be reading different things, or simply not educating themselves and going on instinct based on the successful fear mongering of the government.
of a threatening administration. We should end these wars. Our troops should be extracted back to the homeland.
There’s plenty of evidence Bin Laden was positively surprised by the success of 9/11 (which does not diminish either his culpability or the horror of the event in any way – my point is a different one).
Al Qaeda realised that that threat to the US is not in the event, it’s in the fear of the event; that is the definition of “terror”. After all, the 9/11 deaths numbers are much lower than the road deaths or deaths by gunshot in the US, and there’s no panic about those.
With 9/11, al Qaeda succeeded in totally stampeding the American government into hamstringing travel and movement, ditching the Constitution, and load on layers of costs to doing business (while doing little to add to security).
Granted, US airport security was a joke before 9/11, even more so compared to what was normal in Europe and Asia, so there was a need to catch up. But there is a tedious tendency to mistake motion for action, and it’s us who are inconvenienced by it and pay for it.
is hardly box cutters. It is unadulterated fear. We are seven and a half years removed from 9/11 and there is a segment of our citizenry that insists on living in perpetual fear of “the next 9/11.” Moreover, there is a segment of our political leadership (ahem, Neo-Cons) that finds it expedient to play on those fears for political gain. And then there is the security and surveillance industry that is making a tidy profit on the whole thing. Metal detectors, surveillance cameras and security guards don’t come cheap.
Hell, I live in the Nation’s Capital and I am far more concerned about random street crime than a terror attack.
Easy.
With all the help they get from the foreign policy/corpocrat establishment and from mainstream media manipulating the public into believing that they are evil terrorists to invent justifications to keep invading their countries and bombing and killing them and their children and women and undermining and overthrowing and corrupting their governments and turning them into puppet dictators to piss them off enough to want to retaliate with things like 9/11 so that the foreign policy/corpocrat establishment with help from mainstream media can do it all over again like they’ve been doing for the past 60 odd years.
How in the hell can we have a war OF terror without doing everything possible to create
retaliationterrorism?Eh?
Besides, they’re sitting on our oil and mineral resources, and they far enough away that nobody has to watch them bleed and die on TV, so they aren’t real people anyway.
Creating Thousands Of New Recruits For al-Qaeda
Surely, our nation’s peril in the face of such a formidable enemy is without precedent. Adolf Hitler, your miserable Third Reich has now dropped to second place among the greatest threats in our nation’s history.
Although the rise of the Third Reich was in its infancy at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words, referencing the Great Depression, provide an interesting reference point:
than any foreign enemies. The corporatists are poisoning us by the millions through negligence and sometimes malicious manipulation of the truthiness.
It is time to grow up and stop collectively fearing the brown boogy man under the bed. The white guy with the Italian suit and the American flag lapel pin is far more dangerous to far more of us. Cheney of course is in a class of his own. I don’t fear him, I simply despise him and wish him to be served with a nice plate of justice.
My question for a long time has been along the same lines.
It goes something like:
When is the last time some group from an oppressed “third world” nation blew the top off of an American mountain?
When is the last time some crazy jihadists caused thousands of Americans to become homeless and without work?
And where are those “crazy Muslims” that are poisoning America’s water supply and blowing toxins into the air that we breathe?
When will America wake up and discover that brown people struggling to survive while living in stone hovels in the middle of nowhere are not the enemy here.
The enemy is the corporatist multinationals that have sold our jobs overseas in a race to the bottom, the corporatist polluters that put their profit over our ability to have a sustainable environmental policy, and the corporatist nutcases that think it’s ok to gamble with everyone’s mortgages.
The list could go on and on but that’s the basic point. The people who we should really be worried about aren’t the oppressed people in third world countries. The people we should be worried about are those in the entitled class that does whatever it takes to maintain their entitlements while screwing over everyone else.
Weren’t the German people fearful after the burning of the Reichstag and relieved when a strong leader (Adolf Hitler) stepped in to address their fears?
As they say, the rest is history.
Except to say that in my opinion the harm we’re expected to attribute to “terrorists” has instead been done by fearmongering American politicians of both parties and by a “news” media that taught us fear makes us loyal Americans.
This enslavement of the mind is exactly as absurd and horrible as you say it is here:
Without intending to put words in your mouth, it looks to me like you don’t believe what you’ve been told.
Speaking strictly for myself, I think the entire 7 1/2 year terrorism schtick is bullshit, invented out of whole cloth. All of it, beginning with their laughable, impossible-to-be-true 9/11 story and running right through to this instant. It has worked so well and become so lucrative that they’ve decided never to give it up.