Tag Archives: terrorism

International news

Why not call white supremacists ‘terrorists,’ Mr. President?

Hey, Mr. President . . . didn’t you lambaste your predecessor in the White House for declining to use the term “Islamic terrorist” while talking about the nation’s war against international terrorism?

You made a decent point back then, Mr. President. I actually backed you on that one.

Why, though, are you so reluctant to (a) recognize that white supremacist acts of terrorism are on the rise and (b) call it what it is, an act of terrorism?

You offered that tepid, timid and frankly cowardly response the other day to the reporter’s question about the slaughter in New Zealand and whether it represents an increase in white nationalism/supremacy around the world.

Mr. President, acts such as what was perpetrated at those two mosques in Christchurch weren’t simply a result of a “small group” of people with “serious problems.” They seem to symbolize a much broader epidemic that is spreading around the world.

Haven’t you read the papers, Mr. President? These incidents are increasing in Europe, in Australia, oh, and in the United States!

Yet you maintain your virtual silence on this crisis, Mr. President.

You wouldn’t tolerate Barack Obama’s reluctance to use the term “Islamic terrorist” in referencing the fight against the monsters who seek to do us harm. Why should we tolerate your own refusal to refer to white nationalists and white supremacists as terrorists when they seek to do the very same thing?

Count me as an American who wants to call you out for your reluctance to “tell it like it is.” These a**holes are committing acts of terror and you need to call them what they are: terrorists.

International news

That’s why they’re called ‘terrorists’

To be terrorized means that acts of blind hatred can strike anyone, anywhere and in any context.

Such horror has erupted again in what I consider to be a most terribly ironic location.

Gunmen believed to be white supremacists opened fire in two mosques, killing 49 Muslims, in — get ready for it! — Christchurch, New Zealand.

Forty-nine people are dead. Why? Because the people who killed them hate immigrants. They despise non-Christians. They took their vengeance out on people in their houses of worship. Three suspects — two men and a woman — are in custody.

What in the world does one make of this latest spasm of utterly senseless violence? I am shaking my head in mourning and grief this morning as I seek to make sense of something that makes no sense at all.

Expressions of sorrow are pouring into the country from around the world. Donald Trump extended his sympathy and support for New Zealand as it seeks answers to what its leaders call the worst such event in the nation’s history.

The president spoke for his country. Indeed, it is impossible to grasp fully the mayhem that has exploded in a country long believed to among the most peaceful places on Earth.

Terrorists and the acts they commit against unsuspecting victims are, by definition, cowards of the first order.

The world’s heart is broken today.

national news

POTUS seeks to rally the base, ‘er, nation?

Donald Trump wants to go on national TV to rally Americans to his side as he pitches the idea of building The Wall along our southern border.

I believe the networks ought to carry the president’s televised speech Tuesday night. Let the man have his say and let the public debate and decide on the veracity of what he is contending.

Trump is considering whether to declare a national emergency to obtain money for The Wall. Why? Because he contends that terrorists are crossing an “open border.” He is trying to gin up fear, in my view, among Americans.

Oh, but wait. We are now getting reports from other sources that say that a grand total of six suspected terrorists were apprehended along the border in 2018, not the reported 4,000 of them alleged by the Trump administration.

Indeed, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, interviewing White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Sunday, challenged her 4,000-terrorist assertion by declaring that those suspects are being apprehended at our nation’s airports.

So now we’re going to hear from the commander in chief about what looks like a fabricated crisis along our border.

Please . . .

International news

Another terror leader gets ‘justice’

There goes the need for another costly trial.

U.S. military officials have confirmed the death in an air strike of one of the terrorists who planned the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, killing several sailors.

Jamal al-Badawi was killed in a precision strike, according to the Central Command. Al-Badawi was an al-Qaida leader who coordinated the attack on the Cole. The strike that killed him occurred on New Year’s Day in Yemen.

What does this individual’s death mean in the overall war against international terror? Probably not as much as one would hope in the grand scheme. However, the hunt for these monsters goes on and on and on. As it must!

The federal government had indicted al-Badawi on murder charges. Our counter-intelligence officials had been searching for him ever since the attack that occurred in the final weeks of the Clinton administration.

Donald Trump issued a Twitter message saluting the “great military” operation that “delivered justice” to another radical Islamic murderer.

Let us applaud the efforts that have eliminated another terrorist monster from planet Earth. Let’s not relax in our effort to find the cowards.

As the great heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis used to say: “They can run but they can’t hide.”

national news

Just pick up the phone, Mr. POTUS, and call ’em

It must be true, that Donald Trump refuses to join the Presidents Club, the exclusive organization reserved only for commanders in chief and their predecessors.

Two of his immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have been targeted by someone who wants to terrorize them by sending them pipe bombs in the mail. There’s also a former vice president, Joe Biden, who’s been targeted with two of those devices. Oh, yes, and how about Hillary Clinton, wife of the 42nd president and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign opponent?

The president hasn’t called them. He hasn’t offered them comfort. Nor has he told them how sorry he is about the acts that have been perpetrated against them — and against other Democratic political figures and CNN, the cable news outfit.

Hey, Trump doesn’t even have to do any of this for public consumption. He could just pick up a phone at the White House — preferably a “secure phone” — to call the men who preceded him as head of state. He could talk to them privately.

He won’t do that. He appears incapable of doing the right thing where they are involved.

Trump has taken the criticism leveled against intensely personally. It has come from the former presidents, the ex-vice president, his former 2016 campaign foe, two intelligence leaders, a campaign donor, a U.S. senator and a member of the U.S. House, a New York governor.

Then there’s CNN, the outlet he calls “fake news,” the embodiment in Trump’s view that the media are the “enemy of the people.” He can’t call CNN’s execs to offer a word of comfort to them, either.

The Presidents Club traditionally has been a chummy group. Former foes become good friends. They team up to work on humanitarian causes. The spend time recalling their time in the hot seat in front of crowds. They joke with each other.

What’s more, and this is critical, they make themselves available to the current president who might wonder: What would any of them do when faced with a particular problem?

Donald Trump is having none of that.

Two former presidents and a former vice president have been identified as victims of what appears to be a terrorist. A phone call from their successor would provide some level — maybe only a tiny level — of comfort during this highly stressful time.

national news

Is this the result of the toxic political climate?

Dear reader, we have a profoundly frightening development unfolding at this very moment.

Secret Service officials have intercepted explosive devices that were sent to the homes of former President and Mrs. Bill Clinton, former President and Mrs. Barack Obama, liberal political megadonor George Soros, CNN headquarters in New York and — this likely confuses the casual observer — the White House.

None of the individuals targeted by the bomber was in danger.

It would be easy to label whoever did this as someone — or several people — associated with a right-wing group, given that Donald Trump has targeted CNN as a purveyor of “fake news” and, of course, has pilloried the Clintons, former President Obama and Soros.

But the White House also was by someone intent on doing damage to the president’s home and those who live and work inside it.

Good grief! Is this what we’ve come to?

Thank goodness the authorities were able to intercept the packages, which reportedly have been ID’d as containing explosives.

Let us all hope and pray the FBI, the Secret Service and local police authorities are able to arrest whoever is responsible.

I am now frightened.

national news

‘You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard’

Of all the words written in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attack, which struck us 17 years ago, one essay stands out.

I want to share it here. It came from Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald.

I was proud to publish it in real time on the pages of the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News, where I was working on that day in 2001.

I feel the need to show it to you once again. Pitts captured fully our sense of rage, fear, pain once it became known that terrorists had plunged the weapon deeply in our national heart.

Read the essay here.

The war against international terrorism continues. Yes, we were able to “bring justice” to the mastermind, Osama bin Laden, thanks to the bravery and immense skill and precision of the SEALs and the CIA commandos who carried out the dangerous mission in May 2011. More evil men have stepped up.

I hope you get as much from Pitts’s essay as I did then … and as I continue to do to this day.

International news

Will we stand alone at the next big attack?

A commonly held notion in the wake of the 9/11 attack was that we shouldn’t concern ourselves over if another attack would occur, but we need to focus on when it would take place.

It’s good to remember at this point that when we collected ourselves after the horror of that event and went after the terrorists who did the deed, we had much of the world rally with us. Our friends in Europe and the Middle East were there. So were our allies in the Far East and in South Asia.

The European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization both rallied behind us in our retaliatory strikes against the terrorists. Their fighting men and women died alongside ours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

OK, so let’s fast-forward to the present day.

Two previous presidents — George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama — have come and gone. We have a new one at the helm, Donald J. Trump.

Whereas Presidents Bush and Obama courted our allies and sought to ensure they would be there when the chips were down, we now have a president who has decided to call the EU a “foe,” he has denigrated NATO’s value in today’s world, while excoriating its members for failing to pay more for their shared defense.

All the while, Donald Trump has thrown himself at the feet of Vladimir Putin, the Russian strongman, and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean despot. He calls them “strong leaders,” “intelligent,” and people he “trusts.”

This leads me to the question that is lurking in the back of many observers’ minds. When the next terror attack occurs — and while none of us wants it to happen, we must be mindful that it very well could — are we going to be able to call on the very allies the president has insulted time and again?

My fear is that we’ll fight the next war alone.

You can take this to the bank: Never mind that Trump says that

“I, alone” can repair the nation’s ills, not even the greatest nation on Earth can fight wage this international fight all by itself.

Thus, we might be forced to reap what Donald Trump has sown.

International news

Look out, ‘radical Islam’

President George W. Bush told us in clear and unequivocal terms while the nation grieved over the 9/11 attack: We are not at war with Islam.

President Barack H. Obama followed that message to the letter. On the night he announced the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the president told us that bin Laden was not a “Muslim leader,” but that he was a “mass murderer of Muslims.”

A new president has taken over. Donald J. Trump has just nominated Mike Pompeo to be secretary of state and has appointed John Bolton to be the new national security adviser.

These two men — not to mention the president — seem intent on changing the narrative. They want to take direct aim at “radical Islam,” as if the terrorists with whom we are at war represent a great world religion. They do not. They have perverted Islam to fit some ruthless ideology.

As Politico has reported: Both Bolton and Pompeo will now be working for a president who has alleged, with no evidence, that American Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks, and who has proposed banning all foreign Muslims from U.S. shores. Critics say the personnel moves suggest Trump’s worst instincts on how to approach the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims will find receptive ears among his foreign policy aides.

Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster, who will be leaving the State Department and the National Security Council, respectively, were thought to have some sort of moderating influence on Trump. But the president has shoved them aside, elevating two more fiery confidants to help formulate U.S. foreign policy. They are likely to seek to steer the president toward a position that mainstream Muslims might interpret to be more hostile to their religious faith.

That, I suggest, is a dangerous trend.

The killers with whom we have been at war since 9/11 need damn little pretext to recruit new militants to follow their perverted cause.

national news

Recalling the last time we were truly ‘united’

I heard a cable news talking head make an interesting point the other day. He spoke of the issues that drive wedges between the political parties — and between Americans. He was speaking of the intense divisions existing today.

The United States has been “truly united” just twice in the past century or so, he said. The first time was after the Pearl Harbor attack by Japanese aviators, the act that pulled us into World War II. The second time? It was 9/11, when those terrorists flew hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Oh, how those of us old enough to remember that day can recall the rage we all felt at the monsters who committed that dastardly act.

Today I saw through a two-hour film that transported me back to that time of unity. It’s called “12 Strong.” It tells the true story of a dozen U.S. Army Green Berets who were sent into Afghanistan a month after the terrorist attacks. Their mission was to destroy a Taliban military operation. They rode into battle … on horseback!

The film speaks of their loyalty to each other and of the commitment the unit’s commanding officer made, that all of them would survive their mission of extreme danger.

The mission only was recently declassified. Indeed, after these Special Forces returned home from their mission, they weren’t given anything like the heroes’ welcome they deserved. Their mission was kept super-secret. No one outside those who were involved directly knew what they did.

The film is intense to the max.

But I sat through it, cheering the bravery of our soldiers — and the bravery of the Northern Alliance Afghan fighters with whom they were teamed to fight the Taliban.

The film does remind us that this country is able to unite. Americans are able to coalesce behind a common cause. The 9/11 horror produced our nation’s most recent sense of unity.

I pray, however, that we can join together without having to endure the tragedy and misery through which we have suffered. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were unique events in our nation’s history.

I am left to wonder whether the unity those events produced must be attached uniquely to such heartache. I hope that’s not the case. I fear, though, that it is.