photo by OTAVIO1981
President Bush, the Younger, made the observation that conducting American foreign policy in the brand new war-torn 21st century was as difficult as playing chess in three dimensions. Now with the escalation of tensions between Iran’s Mullahs and the rational world and the probability of an Israeli strike on the regime’s nuclear sites continuing to mount, so too are fears for the American homeland. A case in point:
On Bridgette Gabriel’s website, www.ActForAmerica.org, was posted an extremely well-researched story about a 37-year-old well-educated Muslim American, father of four, from an upscale neighborhood in Plano Texas (From US Private School Student to al Qaida Agent, January 18, 2012). Late last year, Moeed Abdul Salam was killed by Pakistani paramilitary troops who burst through the flimsy door of his third floor apartment in Karachi, Pakistan and riddled him with bullets while his terrified children cowered in an adjacent room.
Decades earlier, Salam’s parents had emigrated from Pakistan and received their US citizenship in 1986. His father was a pilot for the Saudi airline. He was sent to prep school at the Suffield Academy where tuition and board is $46,500 a year. He graduated from the University of Texas and moved to Saudi Arabia, finding work as a writer and editor for Islamic websites.
After 9/11, both his parents, especially his mother, were active in Islamic outreach organizations whose mission it was to correct American misconceptions about Muslims. Meanwhile Moeed traveled to tribal areas of Pakistan, met with senior al-Qaida and Taliban leaders, and was assigned the duties of handling money and logistics for operatives inside Karachi. After his execution, a resident of his apartment complex reported that his estranged Pakistani wife and his father-in-law came to collect the children.
Mohammad Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, was the son of a middle class Egyptian family who could afford to send him to Hamburg, Germany for an open ended luxurious sabbatical in the West. Moeed Salam was a child of the West, by birth, afforded the freedom and opportunity nearly unparalleled in the Muslim Middle East. Yet they both gave their lives to make war on the West.
Recently, Bret Stevens of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Israel’s only alternative to action (bombing Iran) is to accept a nuclear Iran and then stand by as the rest of its neighbors acquire nuclear weapons of their own. That scenario is the probable end of Israel.” (How Should Israel Bomb Iran? WSJ, February 7, 2012).
Catherine Herridge is the Fox News national correspondent and the network’s expert on domestic terrorism. In her new book, The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits, she makes it abundantly clear that the next wave of terrorists will be homegrown Muslim Americans. She ends her book by quoting a 2011 internal Justice Department report, “A new homegrown plot with links to international terrorism was documented, on average, every two weeks.”
As I read Stevens’ piece quoted above, I was stunned, not simply because I realized that he was correct—that a nuclear armed Muslim Middle East will likely be the death knell for Israel—but that, if it occurs, it will ultimately also be a harbinger of the destruction of the West. I realized that we in the West have very little time to act decisively. As H.G. Wells put it, “History has always been a race between knowledge and catastrophe.”
