Holding to the acquiescent Bush line?

After the London bombings last Thursday, I was wondering if my editors at FrontPage Magazine still believed that the way to protect ourselves from domestic terrorism is to fight terrorists in Iraq. The first, discouraging answer I found was in Friday’s lead editorial by Ben Johnson. The piece continued FrontPage’s too-often myopic focus on the left and on the war in Iraq, with the added, secondary point that Britain needs to engage in Patriot Act-style prosecutions of a handful of the worst jihadists. Meanwhile, Johnson had not a word of criticism against President Bush for saying that the cause of terrorism is “hopelessness,” which we can combat by “spreading an ideology of hope and compassion.” Somehow, Johnson doesn’t seem to think that Bush’s liberal interpretation of the threat against us is as dangerous as the left’s.

In today’s FrontPage, David Horowitz seems at first to be following the same uncertain line when he writes: “It is time for the West to begin to set limits to the suicidal softness it considers its soul.” He doesn’t say say we must end the suicidal softness, so that we can survive. He says we must set limits to the suicidal softness. Let’s be a little less suicidal!

However, Horowitz’s specific recommendations on what to do are much more encouraging:

The Imams of hate and their followers and their secular defenders in the West are self-declared enemies who need to be watched closely by all of us from now on. They need to be watched in their Mosques, and in their civil liberties fronts to defend their captured, and in the political groups that have declared we are the enemy and they are the victims. When these domestics step over the line, they need to be prosecuted. If they are aliens who hate us, they need to be deported.

Deport all aliens who hate us. What that really means is deporting all non-citizens who support jihadism. In Britain alone, that would mean deporting hundreds of thousands of Moslems. Now Horowitz is speaking the language of Western survival!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 11, 2005 09:50 AM | Send