FROM 9/11 TO BENGHAZI

What Have We Learned About the War on Terror? Anything?

Our U.N. amba.s.sador, Obama buddy Susan Rice, recently crowed that the United States has "decimated" al Qaeda worldwide. (Misusing the original meaning of the word-look it up!-she evidently meant something like "destroyed".)

Really, Madam Rice?

It seems that many in government still are unable to read the handwriting on the wall. Like a virus, terrorist beliefs, goals, and actions have spread from the Middle East into other parts of the world. Attacks here at home-so far foiled-are no longer infrequent.

Have we learned anything at all?

The secular-progressive movement opposes coerced interrogation-not torture, but harsh treatment-of captured terror suspects. They object to detention of them at U.S. military prisons like Guantanamo Bay. In addition, the ACLU opposes military tribunals (rather than civilian trials) to determine the guilt or innocence of suspected terrorists, floating wiretaps (already in use in U.S. criminal investigations), telephone surveillance of overseas calls by U.S. spy agencies, airport profiling, the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and random bag searches on subway or ma.s.s-transit systems.

In short, the ACLU opposes making life more difficult for terrorists but proposes absolutely nothing to make Americans safer. Osama has got to love it.

And for too many years, he did.

But the debate about the usefulness of harsh interrogation techniques rages on. Have you seen Zero Dark Thirty? Brilliant drama, but it is not going to change the minds of those on either side of the argument.

A very peculiar response to the terrorism on 9/11 crossed into the field of religious controversy.

If you haven"t heard about a certain required reading list at the University of North Carolina that erred in the interest of "diversity," you"re going to be shocked, puzzled, or both.

I was distressed to hear that in the fall of 2002, the administration at UNC was going to require all incoming freshmen to read a book ent.i.tled Approaching the Koran: The Early Revelations. The book is a sanitized version of Koranic philosophy, concentrating on lyrical stories and poetic lore. It"s a very interesting book, but there"s no way it should be mandatory reading in any public school.

Just imagine the outcry if any school demanded that students read Bible Highlights or Nice Stuff from the Torah. I mean, the ACLU would be setting itself on fire in protest-figuratively speaking, of course. But the ACLU was strangely mute when UNC issued its reading list.

So what was really going on here? Well, the backlash from 9/11 was hurting many law-abiding Islamic Americans, and the philosophy of "diversity" was taking some hits. So the University of North Carolina decided to set a proactive example and require students to read a book that is favorable to Islam. The intent was good, but it was a direct violation of the separation concept because it required students to learn about the positive aspects of a specific religion while ignoring the negative aspects. That"s religious advocacy, not intellectual discipline. And that"s not allowed in a publicly funded university in the USA.

The force behind the Islamic reading selection was UNC professor Dr. Robert Kirkpatrick. On July 10, 2002, he entered the No Spin Zone on The O"Reilly Factor. I"ve condensed some of our debate, but the main points are these:

O"REILLY: The problem here is that this is indoctrination of religion.

KIRKPATRICK: No, it has nothing to do with that. It"s a text that studies the poetic structure of the Koran and seeks to explain why it has such an effect on two billion people in the world.

O"REILLY: UNC never gave incoming freshmen a book on the Bible to read.

KIRKPATRICK: We a.s.sume that most people coming to the University of North Carolina are already familiar with both the Old and New Testaments.

O"REILLY: But if you did do that, there"d be an outcry all over the country.

The professor had no answer for that. Soon after, under pressure from the North Carolina legislature, UNC dropped the book from its required reading list. Approaching the Koran became an optional reading a.s.signment, as it should have been all along. I"ll go one step further: If the book was mandatory reading in a theology or history cla.s.s, I would have had no problem with it. But forcing all incoming freshmen to read any book praising a specific religion does violate the mandate that public universities have to live by in order to receive tax dollars.

There"s an interesting side note to the controversy. As I said, the ACLU was MIA during the UNC brouhaha (I love all those initials). Also, most other media did not cover the story as aggressively as we did. As part of our a.n.a.lysis, we rejected the idea that reading the Koran book would help us get to know the world that the 9/11 killers inhabited. Number one, I don"t think the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad have anything to do with homicide and terrorism. And second, I reject the argument that you have to digest a book of poetry and religious interpretation in order to "know" your enemy.

I said this to Professor Kirkpatrick: "[As a UNC freshman] I wouldn"t read the book. And if I were going to the university in 1941, I wouldn"t have read Mein Kampf either."

Kirkpatrick asked why. "Because it"s tripe," I answered.

The next day a number of Muslim websites wrote that I compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, the usual vile propaganda some of these sites spew out. What can you do?

Here"s the key question: How can terrorism exist if rational human beings know that murdering innocent women and children is the most cowardly act on earth? The answer is complicated, but, in the end, it comes down to untreatable mental illness. Osama bin Laden and his crew are not discernibly different from Hitler, Mao, or Stalin. Shrinks define them as sociopaths, but that is a clinical term for the hospital or cla.s.sroom. In the everyday world, these men are simply evil and must be isolated or killed so that innocent people can be protected from their treachery.

But, Lord, there are so many of these barbarians. There are millions of human beings who have killed or will kill people because they believe some G.o.d or the fuhrer or whoever has ordered that. If you still resist the idea of active evil in the world today, just picture the nineteen 9/11 hijackers killing three thousand people for absolutely no reason. Time after time, history has shown us that this kind of murderous conduct is part of the human condition. But still, some on this earth refuse to believe that evil exists and that terrorism is the epitome of it. Getting people to understand that truth is central to the struggle of our times.

Bottom line: Terrorist killers and those who support them are evil. Period.

State of Yourself

" "Tis himself!"

-Traditional greeting when a flamboyant

individual enters an Irish pub

CHAPTER SIX

WHAT"S MINE?

Americans Just Want More Stuff, and That"s a Problem