Attacking Ourselves Instead of Defending Each Other

Last week’s peaking hullabaloo over the Koranflagration and the Hamasque prompted Maxed Out Mama to step outside of her usual economic territory:

[B]y making, quite literally, a federal case of it, they have all conveyed the global message that rioting, burning, stabbing and any other type of barbaric Islamic behavior justify the suspension of the US Constitution when it comes to Muslims. In short, very prominent members of our executive are attempting to, de facto, suspend the constitution in such a way that it must inevitably have given the greatest surge of joy to violent Islamic factions since 9/11.

In 2003, Osama bin Laden wrote:

America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy, but all this is built on an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If America is hit in one hundredth of these weak spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.

ObL’s strategy is working. I hold the Constitution to be an excellent foundation for a nation. But if we’re using an architectural metaphor, it is only the blueprint. The foundation is built of The People and is perpetually renewed. And we’re not really following the blueprint anymore.

Maxed Out Mama continues:

It's clear that none of these people are speaking out of principle. If they were, they'd be having fits over chocolate Jesuses, Piss Christ, and all that sort of thing.

We rearrange our national foundation in reaction to momentary circumstances instead of abiding by plan and principle.

And we should all be astounded and appalled at the theory that the actions of some podunk little church are going to provide more of a recruiting tool to violent Islamic terrorists than the bombings in Yemen, Pakistan and the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fact that these witless examples of a tragic inability to reason could make that argument in public scares me almost as much as the rest of it.

Big Media leveraged the power of Reverend Jones. Even so, nothing motivates better than success. Mussulmen who want to be mad will always find justification. But succesfully blowing people up is more than motivation. It is inspiration.

Certainly the events of last week have gone a long way toward justifying the belief of a surprisingly large minority of the US population that Obama is Muslim. If you look just as his actions, it would appear that he is not on our side.

If it is accurate to say that Islamic and Arabic culture is shame-based, then public perspective is what shapes and defines that society. When the current President takes such pains to respect factions of Islam, it is a success for the Mussulmen. And if there is an irreconcilable conflict between those factions and the ideals outlined in the U.S. Constitution, success for them is failure for us. Politics is zero-sum.

There is another less obvious implication. The implied disrespect to the vast majority of American Muslims, who do support the Constitution, should not be blinked at. When the FBI warned the podunk pastor that his congregation could be subject to attack, it clearly was implying that Muslim attacks on our soil could not be stopped.

Emphasis added. That’s a damning conclusion. Under the current administration, the United States government cannot defend its people. We are losing.

I see a parallel to the argument about a woman in a short dress being responsible for being raped. Reverend Jones was “asking for it”. But if the cops knew the woman would be looking fine and walking alone on a dangerous street at a particular time, they could stop a potential rapist. The FBI and Obama would rather have the woman in a burka than fulfill their responsibility to protect her provocative expression.