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Derailing Terrorists Barry Farber There was a bone marrow-curdling scene in the movie "The Counterfeit Traitor" made all the more terrifying because — unlike the girl's head revolving 360 degrees in "The Exorcist" — this one was true. Actress Lilli Palmer played the role of a woman in Hamburg, Germany during the war who realized Hitler was a monster and Germany was all wrong and agreed to supply vital information to American spy Eric Erickson played by William Holden. The Gestapo eventually suspected her and shadowed her. The day after a particularly devastating British-American air raid that destroyed an oil refinery and killed a great many civilians, she felt gored with guilt. The timing of that raid was based on information she had supplied and she felt the need to go to a Catholic church for confession. When the Nazi police saw her preparing to enter the church they quickly went to the rectory and took the priest for a walk.
A few minutes later she entered the confessional and spilled everything she had done to the "priest;" except he wasn't a priest. He was one of the Gestapo thugs who'd borrowed the priestly garments from the rectory and heard the confession constantly muttering, "Tell me more, my child. Tell me everything." Drama did not have to be invented when she learned a few seconds later who she was really confessing to. She was executed by firing squad in a prison courtyard. I experienced a token touch of what she must have felt when it turned out the suspects in the London-Glasgow episode turned out to be a medical cell. Seven of the eight men implicated are doctors; the other a lab technician. By "doctors" I don‘t mean Ph.D.s in Quranic studies from a university in Saudi Arabia. These are M.D.s; medical doctors, plotting with other men of medicine how to maximize the number of innocent people they might succeed in killing if they could ramp up their terror skills to match their medical skills. (This is written under the admittedly premature assumption that they are indeed guilty.)
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When the Nazis took Warsaw there was a brief wave of almost giddy optimism in the early days of the Jewish Ghetto there. The Jews were telling each other, "The League of Nations won't stand for this." "The Pope won't stand for this." "President Roosevelt won't stand for this." Those hopes died the same horrible death as the ones who embraced them. I always bathed in that same rosy optimism about medical doctors. Sure, we knew there was a Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz who committed satanic "experiments" on living concentration camp inmates, but we somehow allowed ourselves to believe he was the only one. Doctors are healers. Doctors take an oath to heal, not kill. I always figured the sheer body of knowledge doctors need would somehow shove any notion of "kill-the-infidels" all the way out of their heads. I even had sappy notions that when a terrorist's bomb goes off in his own workshop or when a terrorist is wounded in a killing operation the Arab doctor attending him, insofar as he can do it without having his own head removed, urges the terrorist in the name of safety and sanity if not humanity to find a new and less violent activity. Naïve, sure, but I demand you excuse me. I was raised in an America where the doctors in the battlefield hospital tent treated the wounded according to the urgency of their injuries and the likelihood that the treatment might save them regardless of whether those wounded troops were American or enemy. And the American public never, to my knowledge, ever complained about that policy. Nature has a "bottom," the Mindinao Deep near the Philippines is the lowest spot on earth. Apparently human nature has no bottom. Using women and children as human shields in combat areas struck us as pretty low when we first heard about it.
Then we learned that Muslim children were importuned to become suicide bomber in order to enshrine themselves forever in the pantheon of martyrs. That was even lower.
My moral altimeter got busted by Islamofascism a long time ago. Is a "doctors' plot" against innnocent civilians lower — or not quite as low — as putting children in the back seat of a bomb-laden suicide car in Iraq so the American soldiers would be more likely to wave the car on through a checkpoint whereupon it would detonate killing all the occupants and everybody else around? Norwegian diplomat and later foreign minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg, writes of the unbelievable kindness the victorious Nigerian federal troops showed their surrendered foes from breakaway Biafra after their civil war in the 1960s. Stoltenberg commented how much those supposedly more primitive Africans could teach "us highly advanced Europeans." Indeed, and how much more they could teach the fighters of Hamas who took their Fatah prisoners and threw them off the tops of tall buildings in Gaza. At least the London-Glasgow episodes are flushing some toxic thinking out of the minds of liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. Many were always loud and quick to ridicule the break-up of terror plots against America (most recently Fort Dix and JFK Airport) as clumsy attempts by the American administration to scare the public into backing the president. Since London-Glasgow they seem to have gone refreshingly silent. Nobody is accusing brand-new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of presenting President Bush with a phony terror plot as a July-the-Fourth goodwill gift. Those who feel so bubblingly self-righteous reminding us that Islam is a religion of peace and only a miniscule oercentage of Muslim miscreants are giving the faith a bad name seem to be slowly realizing, "My God, what am I doing and who am I doing it for?" There were sociological speed bumps caused by every new wave of immigration to America; Irish, Jewish, Italian, Korean, Russian, etc. And they all melted in. We've been asked by those of impeccable good will to back off and give the Moslem immigrants a chance to melt in, too. The following question is not ready to be asked out loud yet, so keep it to yourself. Is it possible that too big a portion of our Muslim population is defying that American history and refusing to melt? Assimilation itself is not as important as its reputation suggests. Not all pre-Muslim Americans are assimilated. The Amish of Pennsylvania, the Mennonites of the Midwest, the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn and Monsey, New York, live in completely unassimilated cuccoons. They are, however, well-behaved. Every group that came to American up to now has been either assimilated or well-behaved.
So, what do we do about a non-assimilating group whose behavior may include aiding and abetting terrorism? Do we move to a policy of expulsion, mass deportation? Do we tell American Muslims, "We've changed out minds about you. Get outta here!?" I say, none of that; but what I do say will be almost equally distressing to the left. I would issue what amounts to an "internal White Paper" to our Muslim population. I would tell them, "Up to now we've gone to exaggerated lengths to comfort our Muslim population. We've instructed our airport security personnel to select seven or eight passengers who look Scandinavian for special screening for every Middle-Easterner. Experience now prompts us to reevaluate. It's true that few Muslims are terrorists. It is equally true that almost all today's terrorists are Muslims. "We are now going to treat Muslims like every other American. Understand what that means! When organized crime came to America with our Italian immigrants, law enforcement went relentlessly after, not Italians, but after criminals who happened to be mostly in the Italian community. When our Jewish immigrants in disturbing numbers crossed the line from tax avoidance into tax evasion we again went after, not Jews, but criminals. When young black and Puerto Rican men brought the term "mugging" into the language and caused fear in the streets of many neighborhoods, we went after, not blacks and Puerto Ricans, but street thugs. "So when we now say we're going to treat American Muslims like every other American we mean we now intend to use every available technique of counterterrorism including the latest in electronic surveillance and infiltration to ascertain who the trouble-makers are. The full weight of the law will decend upon them. "We hope the rest of you will understand the need for these measures and show us forbearance. We hope you will do more than that. We hope you will help us. The power of the Mafia in New York was broken by a young federal prosecutor named Giuliani. The nemesis of Jewish white-collar criminals was a prosecutor named Morgenthau. Black and Hispanic cops have done a disproportionate job in removing fear caused by black and Hispanic youth from our streets. There have already been important cases of Muslims informing the authorities of nefarious activities of other Muslims leading to arrests, convictions, and the removal of danger. We applaud the members of the Buffalo mosque who tipped off the FBI. Let that cooperation proliferate. "We harbor no motive beyond self-defense." Americans can at least enjoy the small comfort of knowing that the Moslem population of America is vastly less of a problem than those in Britain, France, Sweden, and Germany. It's not enough to keep repeating that "Islam is a religion of peace." and taking care not to give Muslims the impression that somehow we're keeping a special eye on them. America's most famous bank robber Willy Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. He replied, "Because that's where the money is!" So, where are the terrorists? Not in the Norwegian Seamens' Church or the Jewish Home for the Round-Shouldered. America has the choice of maintaining politically-correctness or getting real. It is obvious what must be done. If it's not done now by those of decency and discipline it will be done later by barbarians.
Editor's note:
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