|
Conservatives’ false choice over terrorist “battleground”
In an otherwise unobjectionable article about the need to profile Muslims, Michael Reagan echoes the recent Bush-Cheney mantra, “We are either going to go after and kill these terrorists on their home grounds or we are going to have to face them here at home.” Am I the only one for whom this sentence makes absolutely no sense? The fact is that the terrorists are already here, in America, in our home. It is for this reason and this reason alone that we have to go through vastly expensive, time-consuming, silly, and humiliating security checks every time we get on an airplane. It is for this reason and this reason alone that we undergo continual terror alerts and fears of terrorist attacks. What does our half-hearted military engagement with the terrorist insurgents in Iraq have to do with lessening the terrorist threat here in America? And even if, as Reagan warns against, we failed to “go after and kill these terrorists on their home grounds,” how would that put us in more danger here, unless we let the terrorists into our country? Isn’t it obvious that if we want to defeat the jihadists we have to defeat them abroad and at home?
For mainstream conservatives, the inability even to think about immigration and travel restrictions on Muslims remains a blind spot as big as the Western skies. Email entry |