They Do Hate America and We Will All Pay the Price

When President Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs and to protect the Bosnians and also protect the Albanians who were flooding into Kosovo, I supported him although I had reservations. After all weren’t the Serbs on our side in World War II, and weren’t they Christians fighting off Muslims? Didn’t Serbs save Jews from the Holocaust killings carried out by Bosnians? I supported him because I didn’t really understand that the conflict in the former Yugoslavia was really part of the world-wide battle against Islamic jihad. I supported him because he was the President of the United States, and an American citizen should support their president in foreign affairs regardless of party affiliation.

I supported him because I didn’t understand that the American and European left were allies of the Muslim terrorists. I have only come to understand rather late in life just how vicious and dangerous and anti-American the American far left has become.

I never knew there were Americans who hated America until I semi-retired from business and became a college professor. I attribute this to the fact that my circle of friends and acquaintances were people like me – people who worked in or owned businesses and who were mission-oriented. In other words, if they didn’t own the business, they were like Sergeant Killer McCoy*: they focused on accomplishing the goals of the organization they worked for – not on moaning about their lot in life or blaming others for their perceived sense of the unfairness of it all, and they didn’t find joy when things went wrong for their employer.

Of course, back then, I knew the positions of people like Ted Kennedy or John Kerry, but I never took them seriously. I always thought that they were posturing – advancing causes that would get them votes, not causes that they could possibly believe in. Even Kerry’s outrageous slander of American soldiers in Vietnam I took to be political posturing of the worst sort. It was not until I came into close contact with academics that I realized that these Ward Churchills, who owed everything that they had to the sacrifices of others, believed what they were saying: that America was an evil country, and that all other cultures were superior to ours.

The problem we all face is that these people, whom Bill O’Reilly calls ‘secular-progressives’, not only deny the seriousness of Islamic terrorism, but also try in every way to hamstring our attempts to defend ourselves and our culture. 9/11 woke some of them up – people on the left like Christopher Hitchens and Alan Dershowitz and Nick Cohen**, but most of them won’t change their minds about the dangers we face until more horrific terrorist acts take place here.

I have to face the fact that the only realistic hope I can have for the future is that all America will wake up and start pulling together after only a few more mass atrocities like 9/11 happen here, and that my children and my grandchildren will be able to avoid large gatherings in the meantime. This country has always been blessed by good luck and great men at moments of crisis. May God continue to watch over us.

*a main character in many of W.E.B. Griffin’s great books

**”WHY is it, asks British journalist Nick Cohen, that apologies for a militant Islam, which stands for everything the liberal Left is against, come from the liberal Left? Why are you as likely to read about the alleged conspiracy of Jews controlling American foreign policy in a literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? Why, after the bomb attacks in the London underground, did left-leaning British newspapers run pieces excusing the suicide bombers, these same young men who were motivated by "a psychopathic theology from the ultra-Right"?

Why, in short, have Left and Right changed places? Nick Cohen is not the first to write about the unholy alliance between Western liberals and extreme right Islamic fundamentalists, but he does it in a particular and powerful way in his new book What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.” From The Left is onside with hate, The Australian, February 1, 2007