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A sign that America could become a nation again
Fantastic! Adam Gadahn, a.k.a. Azzam the American, the former Orange County resident who is the American spokesman for Al Qaeda, has been indicted for treason—the first such indictment since World War II. As Henry Holzer writes at FrontPage Magazine, for some years there has been the attitude that treason was no longer a viable charge. This, in my view, was based on a loss of belief in America as a nation. To charge a person with betraying the nation, we need first of all to believe in the nation, as a larger entity to which we belong and which has its own value apart from us as individuals. But if the nation is nothing but a collection of the individuals who comprise it, having no function or value other than the protection of their rights and the provision of their needs, then the nation itself has no rights, and the very concept of treason becomes hard to sustain. As Holzer sees it, the treason-free days, when Jane Fonda could mount a gun emplacement in Hanoi with no legal consequences, when the New York Times could release secret government information about the surveillance of our enemies with no legal consequences, may be thankfully coming to an end. In any case, the simple, logical basis of Gadahn’s treason indictment—Al Qaeda is at war with America, Gadahn is a member of Al Qaeda and has given it aid and comfort—would apply to many other individuals besides Gadahn, such as John Walker Lindh, the American Al Qaeda fighter who escaped treason charges.
However, Gadahn’s anti-American statements, quoted abundantly by Holzer, are so explicit, so extreme, and were made so publicly, in video broadcasts, that it’s hard to imagine how he could not have been charged with treason. For example, in his role as Al Qaeda spokesman he said, “Fighting and defeating America is our first priority,” he boasted of “the blessed raids on New York and Washington,” he threatened, “The streets of America shall run red with blood … casualties will be too many to count and the next wave of attacks may come at any moment,” and he warned in the classic Koranic manner, “Escape from the unbelieving army and join the winning side. Time is running out, so make the right choice before it’s too late and you meet the dismal fate of thousands before you.”
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