Death By A Thousand Cuts

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- Lt. Colonel John McCrae, Canadian Army Medical Corps(1872-1918)



The poem above is a product of World War One, the great scar of history that changed the world and differentiated between ages. As with most such times, many of the men and women involved were aware of this as much as those who came after them and looked backwards.

We live in such times today, and we were given a reminder a few short days ago.

For all our protestations and manipulation to avoid war,to forget, to appear humane and civilized, to allow our leaders to label it as something other than what it is, the war has come to us. In fact, it's been coming to us for eight years and many of us have yet to admit it.

When I first found out about Major Malik Nadal Hasan gunning down his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akbar" on November 5th, I immediately recognized this as the jihad attack it was and wrote that that when the dots were connected, there would be a Saudi funded mosque and a radical imam in the picture. There always is.

I was right. And yet, the obvious questions remain floating in the wind, unsaid, like a foul odor polite society avoids mentioning.

Fort Hood makes me angry,because it was totally unnecessary. Those thirteen men and women need not have died, and the wounded should have remained whole. The dead were slain by fear, not in themselves but in us.

That climate of fear was generated by our consistent refusal to look at what we fight in the face or to give it its proper name. Our current president won't even admit that we are in a war at all or that jihadists are any danger to us , and has his attorney general busily working on legally prosecuting some of the men who successfully interrogated and prosecuted jihadis during the last eight years and at least kept them mostly at bay.

And the only thing President Obama's been willing to say to the nation about what happened at Fort Hood is to avoid mentioning 'Muslim' or 'Islam' and to tell us that even though we had a Muslim army officer with violent, jihadist views that were apparently well known to both the FBI and the military shooting up a military facility, 'we don't know all the facts.'

He operates in exactly the same way with Iran, avoiding the unpleasant choices of dealing with a nation in the process of obtaining nuclear weapons that openly states it is at war with The Great Satan, kills our warriors whenever it can,supports and nurtures jihad and Islamic fascism.

This is denial writ large.

With that sort of direction from the top down, is it any wonder that our FBI looked the other way? That our military establishment covered for Hassan even though he expressed blatantly disloyal sentiments in violation of his oath of service and openly let them know where his loyalties lie?

And it still goes on. Both Army chief of Staff General George Casey and head of the grossly misnamed Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano fell all over themselves to let us and the Muslim world know that they are primarily concerned with a 'backlash' against Muslims and avoiding any connection of the events at Fort Hood with Islamism rather than getting to the root causes of what happened to prevent it from occuring again.

As I write this,our military and our CIA are involved in a major push to seek translators for Farsi and Arabic and recruits in Dearborn, Michigan, also known as Dearbornistan. The area is filled with Shi'ite Hezbollah supporters of questionable loyalties,yet the CIA and the military concentrate their efforts here and refuse to seek out or hire loyal Chaldean Christians, Armenians or Jews in places like Los Angeles or New York who speak and write Farsi and Arabic perfectly and would be more than willing to serve their country. Diversity uber alles, but some flavors of diversity apparently trump others.

This kind of suicidal refusal to look at reality was aided and abetted by a president who lied to us eight years ago when he told us we were fighting 'terror' and a handful of fanatics rather than an established ideology adhered to by a significant part of the Muslim world, the ummah. That ideology was and is nurtured and promoted by certain nation states, some of whom who were otherwise nice to do business with and especially generous to politicians and government figures when they retired, provided they were willing to look the other way on certain matters.

And it is nurtured in our country, given legitimacy by the very people we trust to lead and protect the nation.

Because jihad's ideology now has a home in many mosques here and around the world, major outside involvement is no longer necessary. Tools like Hasan can be warped and nurtured in place like land mines set to go off. It's no accident that al-Qaeda and The Muslim Brotherhood both advise their adherents to infiltrate the military and law enforcement. It is part of their strategy to destroy us from within, and even a cursory study of Islamist literature on the subject will tell you that.

We've decide to be like Gulliver, tied down by a bunch of 7th century lilliputian savages as they inflict the death of a thousand cuts on us. Except unlike Gulliver,we seem committed to ignore the problem and remain tied down by choice.

I wonder how long this can continue, and how much more blood will have to be spilled before we realize it.

Will we break faith with the men and women who died at Fort Hood, in Kandahar, in Falujah, in Little Rock,at the World Trade Center, at a thousand battlefields in this war and others through the ages? Will we pick up the torch?

Will we be as singleminded and unequivocal in defending our freedom and our posterity as those who think it their holy purpose to take it away? Or will we remain mired in illusion?

Something to ponder this Veteran's Day, as we sit in the crosshairs.

-selah-