Were You Aware?

Radical Islam Awareness Week was last week. Apparently it comes earlier every year. In an opinion piece in the Michigan Daily, the "Young Americans for Freedom" write:

National Islam Awareness Week is a way to educate students about the genocidal agendas of the global jihadists and the fact that these radical ideas are far more mainstream in the Muslim world today than most Americans are willing to believe. It is also to remind students not to forget about Sept. 11, to remember what our troops are fighting for: Our freedom, the same freedom that allows you to learn at this university without the fear of attack because of who you are.

Our group, the Young Americans for Freedom, is expecting and has had protests against our views. However, we are familiar with the way the Left wages its political wars on conservative students. If someone happens to disagree with its position on racial issues - if one believes, for example, that government-enforced racial preferences are misguided or immoral - the Left will denounce that person as a "racist." The Left's only logic is emotional, and the character of that emotion is hatred - hatred for those who want to raise awareness of the threats we face from radical Islam. This hatred has only one purpose: to silence those who oppose the jihad.

We see members of our generation ready to put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms. We know that this war is being waged at home as well, and we will not let our brothers and sisters in uniform shoulder the burden alone.

First of all, nobody has forgotten September 11 and nobody ever will. People will remember where they were when they first found out about the attacks, much like the MLK or JFK assassinations or Pearl Harbor. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: What people did forget was the shock and the fear that was so easily taken advantage of in order to begin an unnecessary war and expand the reach of the Executive Branch. But apparently trying to ignore any feelings of terror to ponder reasonable solutions to the problem is "emotional logic," and opposing Bush's decisions to invade Iraq and to erode our civil liberties is supporting jihad.

And I'm sorry if the remarks David Horowitz made while visiting Michigan struck me as racist. His insistence that "the Muslim Students' Association is not an ethnic group. It is not a religious group. It is not a cultural group. It is a political organization created by the Muslim brotherhood," and use of the word 'Islamofascism' paints all Muslims as, if not bona fide terrorists, part of a community that unanimously and passionately hates the United States and all things Western. Don't believe that 'Islamofascism' is offensive to Muslims? What if I call Hitler, Mussolini and Franco 'Christo-fascists'? "But they weren't real Christians," you might say. The same argument can be made for Muslims, who, despite what Horowitz thinks, do not universally hate the U.S. This line of thought is particularly damning because victory over the terrorists ultimately depends on supporting moderate Muslims, to which the Sunni Awakening Councils' practical removal of al-Qaeda in Iraq can attest.

The letter to the editor from Aaron Bailey, an Afghanistan veteran and B-school student, which appeared in Monday's Daily, is so good that I have to share it with you in its entirety:

I read Wednesday's viewpoint by the University's chapter of Young Americans for Freedom with both surprise and disgust (The war at home, 04/09/2008). The one clear idea that resonated throughout the viewpoint was YAF's gung-ho, pro-war, chicken-hawk agenda and its contempt for the soldiers who are actually fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While YAF used the typical neo-conservative tactics of mentioning the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (which our own government has determined had no links to Iraq), discussing the suppression of minority rights (although the Bush administration continues to support the Saudi Royal Family's despotic regime) and continually using words like "freedom" to describe its agenda, this group did not speak for me as a veteran.

War, unfortunately, is a complex and occasionally necessary way to confront the greed, corruption and evil in our world. But chastising an entire region by calling mainstream Middle Easterners "jihadists," many of whom I served with, only serves to unnecessarily enflame the disaffected population I worked to assist. If YAF really wants to help our country, I encourage its members to visit www.goarmy.com and join the "brothers and sisters" the group claims to support. In lieu of that, perhaps YAF will advocate deploying troops with proper equipment, a clear mission and veteran's benefits when they return from war, something the group's fellow neo-cons forgot.

Make no mistake, the people who attacked us were, and still are, in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But for reasons unclear to me, my commander-in-chief has decided to ignore these threats. YAF's members continue to cover for our incompetent leaders, who place America's military at risk to further their own self-interests, all the while advocating others to fight and die in their places.

Also: Were you aware that "[i]f the President were the longest recorded flight by chicken, he would be thirteen seconds?" (Stewart 36)