No Apolgies Required

Children (Peretz, Kristoff, Obama, etc.) offer needless and inappropriate apologies; adults, writes contentions' Abe Greenwald, look reality square in the eye without flinching:

The day before the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President Obama was asked why there seemed to be a recent uptick in American distress about Islam. “At a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then, you know, fears can surface; suspicions, divisions can surface in a society,” he said. “We have to make sure that we don’t start turning on each other.”

What is not blamed on George W. Bush is blamed on us all. The Bible-clutching, gun-toting xenophobes Barack Obama referenced during his presidential campaign are now taking out their financial woes on innocent Muslims. Shame on them.

On the same day that the president gave his academic instruction on the roots of religious scapegoating among the American working class, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a report titled “Assessing the Terrorist Threat,” which stated, “Last year was a watershed in terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, with a record total of 11 jihadist attacks, jihadist-inspired plots, or efforts by Americans to travel overseas to obtain terrorist training.” Most gruesome among them was the attack at Fort Hood, Texas, which killed 13 people.

The BPC report is an adult answer to the question that was posed to the president. Recently, Americans have witnessed a terrorism parade. For the first time since 9/11, multiple threats and attacks on the homeland came across our TV screens. For our anguish over the loss of American lives, we were told the system worked; admonished not to jump to conclusions about the perpetrators; and, while we absorbed the blows of Islamist terrorism, told there was no such thing.

The crowning surreality was Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s plan to build a community center and mosque blocks from Ground Zero. For our misgivings about that, Americans were labeled bigots.

But according to our president, the problem lies with Americans who, as he once put it, “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” not with those who get homicidal and fire their guns in the name of religion and hatred of people who are not like them.

The declarations of President Obama and of the Bipartisan Policy Center are the poles between which American national security now vacillates. We go from the real world, where gunmen scream “Allahu Akbar” and kill Americans, to the classroom, where Islamist terrorism does not exist and all conflict can be explained as a function of economic struggle...