“Experts fear ‘dirty bomb’ attack in U.S., Europe.” Thus spake a
story
featured Sunday in the Los Angeles Times and headlined on
Yahoo News, where I spotted it.
While a dirty bomb “would not cause the death and destruction of
a nuclear weapon,” experts say it would “produce some fatalities,
radiation sickness, mass panic and enormous economic damage.”
The story goes on to say that three known Al Qaeda operatives,
one of them a son of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman of 1993 World Trade
Center fame, “probably would carry out planning for the attack,”
and that the threat is so high that “a senior European intelligence
official said it is ‘not a matter of if there is a nuclear-related
attack by Al Qaeda, but when it occurs.’”
You’d think this would be big news. Not that it would be healthy
to react with panic and demoralization, but that such reports would
concentrate the mind wonderfully on the seriousness of the war
effort.
But that, of course, is not the case at all. Instead, Abu Ghraib
is all the rage. It’s a wild circus, 24/7, the images from the
prison as sordid and obscene as the faces of the leftist moralists
are righteous and haughty.
It’s been claimed that liberals can’t cope with the reality of
evil, hence deny the necessity to fight it. But the existence of
evil isn’t really liberals’ problem; it’s that they see it in the
wrong places.
Whether it was Vietnam, the Cold War, or now the War on Terror,
liberals always shine the spotlight on alleged sins of U.S.
presidents or the U.S. military. The names Nixon, Reagan, and Bush
are actually talismans of evil for them, but not the savage regimes
and movements that they fight.
In fact, liberals will accuse Republican presidents of any evil
imaginable. Nixon’s 1972 “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam was,
for Anthony Lewis, “the most destructive single episode of
international violence in recent history … a policy that many
must know history will judge a crime against humanity.” Back in the
eighties, I had parlor arguments with liberals who explained
Reagan’s nuclear policy as a desire “to nuke us all.” Now, in Iraq,
liberals see a war “to make the world safe for Halliburton.”
And when America really does screw up — as in My Lai, or Abu
Ghraib — that’s when liberals go wild. At such times you find out
how very little they’re impressed by things like dirty bombs,
Iranian nukes, or Saddam’s mass graves. With America and the world
facing unprecedented, apocalyptic threats, liberals lust only to
topple an admired, experienced U.S. defense secretary of proven
effectiveness. Liberals don’t believe in evil? No, they believe in
it; but they see it in us.
Aliens watching earthly media over the past year or so would
conclude that America is a monster waging war on a peaceful,
innocent planet. Whether it’s the supposed lack of Iraqi WMD, the
supposed revelations of Richard Clarke, or now — for once — some
real abuses of Iraqi prisoners which, however, the army was already
taking care of, liberals hound, harry, and harass the Bush
administration with committees, hearings, and tribunals. It becomes
hard, finally, to believe that they’re on our side — and by “our”
I mean, as an American Israeli, not only America but everyone who
understands that Islamic fanaticism puts the future in jeopardy and
American power and resolve is what stands between the world and
catastrophe.
But liberals don’t see it that way. The same liberal media that
censored the Fallujah atrocities, the Danny Pearl video, and —
soon after the 9/11 attack — the images of people jumping to their
death from the World Trade Center, now floods the world with Abu
Ghraib images so relentlessly as to pollute both the public space
and our minds. And not for any whistle-blowing purpose, since,
again, the abuses had already been investigated and stopped and the
perpetrators charged, but to keep driving home liberals’ demented
conviction that America is evil, its army should be brought home
from wherever it is deployed, and its goals and values are best
represented by leering louts humiliating prisoners.
And so the Left keeps distorting the public agenda, keeps
stoking anti-American hatred, keeps flailing away at those trying
to defend us. When Lenin made his famous remark about useful
idiots, he couldn’t imagine the destructive power of useful idiots
armed with 21st-century media technology. But his totalitarian
descendants among the Islamists understand it well, and know that
they can build their weapons in secret while liberals unleash
another dirty bomb of anti-American calumny.
