You might remember award winning reporter Lara Logan, who experienced the wonder of the Arab Spring first hand when she was abducted and subjected to a horrifying gang rape in Tahrir Square while the mob screamed, 'Jew, Jew'.
This incredibly courageous woman was the keynote speaker at the Better Government Association annual luncheon in Chicago this week to 1,100 influential figures from government, politics, media, and the legal and corporate arenas.And for the record, she's no mere talking head but a highly experienced foreign correspondent with first hand, on the scene knowledge.
What she had to say was a welcome blast of truth:
Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.
Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.
“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.
The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.
“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”
Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.
She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”
Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.
Logan even suggested that the U.S. take revenge for the murder of its citizens in Libya, the penultimate in non PC discourse.
The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”
What Ms. Logan is talking about is a real life version of that well known old Arab proverb about the camel's nose.
An Arab realizes that his camels' nose is protruding into his tent, but figures its nothing much to be worry about. Next day, the camel is putting his head and entire forequarters into the tent, but the Arab still figures it's no great matter of concern. Eventually,over a period of a few days, the camel is entirely inside the tent, the Arab is crowded inside with no easy way to escape and no way to get the camel out, but by then of course, it's too late to do anything about it.
That's what we face in the Muslim world, and what we've been essentially ignoring since the first World Trade Center bombing.
And the more we twist into dhimmi pretzels trying to appease them, adapt to their cultural norms instead of championing our own and allow them to slaughter our people with impunity while rationalizing that its about the latest Muslim outrage over a book, a YouTube video or whatever handy excuse comes up, the worse it's going to get.
As Ms. Logan said, it's time we stopped lying to ourselves, and certainly way past time our government stopped doing it.
