While we weren’t watching
Bookworm on Apr 17 2006 at 2:41 pm | Filed under: Arabs, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Islam, Muslim violence
Those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome like to claim that the increase in Muslim vs. everyone attacks are all George Bush's fault, because he had the temerity to strike back. Certainly, we're more aware of Muslim vs. the world attacks, because 9/11 got our antennae up. It's useful, though, to remember that the real crescendo started in the 1990s on Clinton's watch (and, no, I haven't forgotten the Iranian embassy or the Marines killed in Beirut — those were just throat clearings). At American Thinker, Alan Fraser compiles a useful list of the things Clinton managed to ignore and pass on to his successor:
Here is a short list of Islamist hits occurring on his watch while “he waited for tomorrow”
1992 Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina; 29 die.
1993 February 26 World Trade Center bombing kills 6 and injures over 1000 people
1994 Bombing of Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina kills 86 and wounds 300. Eight days later the Israeli Embassy in London and a Jewish charity are car-bombed. 20 are wounded. All three incidents are blamed on Hezbollah.
1994 July 19 Alas Chiricanas bombing kills 21 people
1994 Air France Flight 8969 is hijacked by GIA members who planned to crash the plane on Paris but didn’t succeed.
1994 A small bomb explodes on board Philippine Airlines flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman. Authorities found out that Ramzi Yousef planted the bomb to test it for his planned terrorist attack.
1995 Islamist terror bombings in France by a GIA unit (Khaled Kelkal being one of the operational leaders). These attacks killed 8 and injured more than 100.
1995 Bombing of military compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
1996 A series of four suicide bombings in Israel leave 60 dead and 284 wounded within 10 days.
1996 Khobar Towers bombing. 19 U.S. servicemen and one Saudi were killed and 372 wounded.
1997 Islamic terrorists attack tourists in Luxor, Egypt, killing 71 people, most of them European and Japanese vacationers.
1997 A terrorist opened fire on tourists at an observation deck atop the Empire State Building, killing a Danish national and wounding visitors from the United States, Argentina, Switzerland and France. A handwritten note carried by the gunman claimed this was a punishment attack against the “enemies of Palestine”.
1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 225 people and injuring more than 4,000.
1999 Gunmen opened fire on Shi’a Muslims worshipping in an Islamabad mosque killing 16 people injuring 25.
1999 Indian Airlines Flight 814, is hijacked, one passenger is killed and some hostages are released.
1999 August 31 – September 22 Russian Apartment Bombings kills about 300 people.
2000 USS Cole bombing kills 17 US sailors
Anyone in the West who continues to believe that we are not at war with Islam is so deep in self-delusion that he (or she) may never see daylight again. The fact that this thinking is delusional, though, doesn't seem to prevent it from dominating either public discourse or the West's invariable response to repeated Islamic attacks.
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3 Responses to “While we weren’t watching”
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Those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome like to claim that the increase in Muslim vs. everyone attacks are all George Bush’s fault, because he had the temerity to strike back. — Bookworm
First of all, it seems that the entire nation suffers from Bush derangement syndrome as latest polls how that sixty percent disapprove of the President’s performance.
I also dont think anyone faults Bush for “striking back” at those responsible for attacking us.
Most would love to see Osama bin Laden captured “dead or alive,” but have trouble with Bush’s invasion and handling of Iraq. And most have good reasons for such concerns.
You dont have to agree with them. Hell, you dont even have to acknowledge them. But between this list, and the depiction of Bush’s actions and people’s “deranged” concerns, you misrepresent them.
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are far bigger breeding grounds for Islamic terrorism, and yet, despite ties to the 9/11 attacks, they are our “allies” in the war on terror.
T.S. apparently hasn’t been reading the early translations of the some of the massive pile of material from the Iraqi intelligence services……
What is your suggestion for how we ought to be dealing with Saudi Arabia, T.S.?
Or Pakistan? Don’t just throw stones – let’s hear a rational alternative. Otherwise, you’re showing a really significant symptom of BDS.
What is your suggestion for how we ought to be dealing with Saudi Arabia, T.S.?
Or Pakistan? Don’t just throw stones – let’s hear a rational alternative. Otherwise, you’re showing a really significant symptom of BDS.” -Earl
The US government made a “deal with the devil” (i.e. Saudi Arabia) long before Bush came along. We told them, keep the oil flowing and we’ll watch your back.
The solution is to do what Brazil has done — seriously and aggressively develop an alternative energy source. The problem is that due to the entrenched interests of the oil and arms industries, America will never ever do that.
What do we do about Pakistan? For one, we can get real about the threat posed by both it and Saudi Arabia.
My objection to Bookworm’s post stems from the way Bush’s critics are portrayed – as lunatics who dismiss the idea that there is a terrorist threat. That is simply not true.
But I would like to know why few have been discussing any of this:
The head of the Pakistani ISS, Gen. Mahmud Ahmed reportedly wired $100,000 to Moahmmed Atta days before the 9/11 attacks and those responsible for kidnapping and killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl have been also been linked to the 911 terrorists.
Author Bernard-Henri Lévy said that Daniel Pearl was killed because he knew about “the great taboo” — that Pakistan’s atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who are hell bent on using it. “Everyone knows that Pakistan is a nuclear power but Daniel discovered that the nuclear weapons were less controlled than Mr. Musharraf pretends and less under control than the secret services of occidental powers believe,” Levy told the BBC.
In a New Yorker article, he elaborated even further. “I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I’d seen in Pakistan,” Lévy said. “Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher-an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical-he’s just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon.”
Former conspiracy debunker Gerald Posner also pointed towards Pakistan, thanks to confessions of captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah. When faced with the staged threat of Saudi imprisonment and torture, Zubaydah didn’t recoil in fear as expected, but rather acted relieved. Saying that he got his information from “two government sources” who are “in a position to know,” Posner made startling claims about Zubaydah’s “work for senior Saudi and Pakistani officials” on MSNBC’s Hardball:
“So after three days, they move [Zubaydah] to a center in Afghanistan, where they decide to put him into a room where they will make it look as though he’s in a Saudi jail. And the reasoning is the Saudis technically want al Qaeda and Abu Zubaydah. If he thinks he’s being held by the Saudis, who use torture all the time, they’re going to say, “Ah, they’re going to torture me and they might behead me soon,” he might be willing to come back to the Americans and talk.
Instead, when the Saudi investigators walked in and they’re really special American forces, pretending to be Saudis, and they added an IV to Zubaydah’s arm that’s a truth serum to sort of loosen him up a little bit. He sees them and says, “Great, I’m so happy it’s you guys. Here’s a telephone number. Cell phone and office number. Call this man up and he’ll tell you what to do.” And the name he gives is Prince Ahmed, the owner of the biggest media company in all Saudi Arabia and the nephew of King Fahd.”
Not only did the phone numbers check out, but three Saudi princes who were implicated in Zubaydah’s confession died within days of each other. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed suffered from a heart attack, one day later, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud was killed in a car crash, while Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir “died of thirst” afterwards. Seven months later, Mushaf Ali Mir, the Pakistani Air Marshal who was also implicated, died in a plane crash. And according to Posner, Zubaydah also claimed that “9/11 changed nothing” as the unholy alliance between terrorism and Saudi and Pakistani interests remains intact.