The American Spectator

Another Perspective

Terror in Our Midst

By Ben Stein on 3.30.07 @ 2:39AM

On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 fine human beings were killed in New York City, Virginia, and Pennsylvania by Moslem fanatics. So far, there have been no other large-scale attacks by Moslem terrorists on American soil.

However, in the five and a half years since September 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities. Huge swaths of major American cities, especially my home city of Los Angeles, are "no-go" zones for law-abiding people from outside the neighborhoods and even police go into them reluctantly. The innocent women, children, old folks and non-gansgsta men in the communities are living in a nonstop reign of terror.

Every day, some innocent child is shot while sitting on a front stoop or playing basketball. Every day, some motorist who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is shot dead in his car just for being there.

We watch on the national news every day about the killings in Baghdad -- and they are terrible. But the local news in every large city and many medium-sized ones begins with a parade of killings by gangs in the past 24 hours, killings of old people in their living rooms, of little girls heading home from church.

It's just not true that there has been no terrorism n America since 9/11. There is terrorism every day and every hour. It's just not coming from Moslems from countries that hate us so it doesn't get counted. It's coming from our own young people of color and it is simply ignored. We in the suburbs watch it on TV and thank God for our walls and our local police or for our walled communities. But what's life like for the Americans -- just as American as we rich people are -- who live in this horror day by day? Come to think of it, what has it done to all of our daily lives to have to skirt huge areas of our cities out of fear? What's it like to wonder if the young people in the lowered car next to us at the light will open fire on us? There's not much fear in airports these days. There is plenty of fear on the streets of Compton or Van Nuys or Riverside.

Why don't the leaders of this country ever address this problem? How can we conservatives explain how it's a conservative position to simply ignore the loss of law in our cities?

Is it non-PC to even mention it because the killers are almost always non-white? Or, might it be simply convenient to ignore it because the victims are almost always non-white, too?

Terrorism is already here, and we're just pretending it isn't.

This is a disaster that is happening right now, right in front of our eyes...if we ever dared open them.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Law, Africa, Oil