Knowing The Enemy: The anti-war left hates the Bush administration with such a passion it refuses to recognize how dangerous our enemies in the Muslim world are. Now they hate the TV show «24» because it dares to remind us.
In fact, liberal outlets are calling it right-wing White House propaganda. «Dick Cheney is a big fan,» snorts Time magazine, ignoring that the executive producer of «24» is a registered Democrat. It also breathlessly notes that Rush Limbaugh likes the show, so much so he planted «a full-on mouth kiss» on one of its star actresses at a Heritage Foundation forum on terror. That seals it for the left.
It’s serious. Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s liberal poster boy, actually suggested that the producers of «24» are conspiring with Cheney to keep the public alarmed so they can keep torturing and spying on Muslims.
He and a recent guest who wrote a book bashing Fox, the network that airs «24,» dismissed its apocalyptic new season as far-fetched. As if Muslim terrorists would ever blow up buses or subways or attack cities with radiological weapons.
What really sent them over the edge, however, was last week’s episode showing Muslim terrorists incinerating Los Angeles with a suitcase nuke. No Muslims living in America would ever do that, scoff Islamic apologists. A mushroom cloud? Sounds like more Bush-Cheney fear-mongering!
But if anyone’s divorced from reality, it’s these apologists. Even their own favorite analysts warn that al-Qaida is preparing to carry out nuclear terrorism here. One of them, Michael Scheuer, works for CBS News. The former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit penned a book, «Imperial Hubris,» that slams Bush over Iraq. He writes columns for such venues as AntiWar.com.
Yet even Scheuer is sure bin Laden is plotting a nuclear attack against us. The first step, he said, was getting a green light from Saudi clerics to kill up to 10 million Americans with such weapons. Then bin Laden offered the U.S. a truce and even recently invited President Bush to convert to Islam — all in keeping with jihadi military doctrine. And on at least two occasions he has directly warned the American people.
As absurd as such moves may sound to Islamic apologists on the left, they are necessary to satisfy any theological concerns among Muslim clerics, Scheuer explains.
Another terror expert trusted and booked regularly by liberal cable outlets is Ron Suskind. He is the author of «The One Percent Doctrine,» which also heaps scorn on Bush. Nonetheless, he reveals in his book that bin Laden and his deputies met with Pakistani nuclear scientists in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in August 2001 to discuss developing nuclear weapons. Bin Laden suggested he already possessed «enriched uranium.»
If Michael Moore groupies are still skeptical, they can read al-Qaida documents seized by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. They reveal that the terror group’s military committee has a special «Nuclear Weapons Section.» CIA operatives even found diagrams of nuclear weapons in an al-Qaida safe house in Afghanistan.
Time thinks Fox should use «24» to «improve America’s image in the Muslim world.» Instead of, what, depicting reality? The terrorists’ religious ideas already have been sheltered enough from criticism. (So much so that the new Democratic chairman of House intelligence doesn’t even know whether bin Laden is a Shiite or Sunni Muslim.)
If Fox is shocking or scaring the public, good. That’s part of informing the public in wartime about the larger Islamic threat — not just abroad but at home, from sleeper cells hellbent on nuking us and martyring themselves so, yes, they can please Allah and redeem their heavenly virgins.
Too bad Hollywood didn’t air shows before 9/11 that depicted Muslim men at flight schools interested only in learning to fly planes and not land them.
Someone has to think outside the box, unrestrained by political correctness. Kudos to Fox for doing what even the supposedly Islamophobic Bush administration doesn’t have the nerve to do.
After Pearl Harbor, it was a Democratic administration that plastered cartoonish posters of the enemy — portrayed as evil-looking Japanese with buck teeth — all over the country to remind people with whom we were at war. Have you seen even one U.S. government war poster of Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri? (If you don’t know who al-Zawahri is, you make our point.)
The threat from Muslim terrorists is real. Even an avowed atheist can see that. Listen to Sam Harris, author of «The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason»:
«Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.»
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.