Whom Are We at War With?
Camilo Rodriguez /
On the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, a new documentary accuses the Obama administration of not facing reality when it comes to terrorism.
“America at Risk: The War With No Name,” presented by Citizens United and hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich, asserts that current U.S. policy and government officials refuse to acknowledge that radical Islam drives terrorist attacks such as the Fort Hood Massacre, Christmas Day bomber and Times Square bomber.
Examples include two top Obama administration figures: White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan and Attorney General Eric Holder.
“Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic,” said Brennan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Aug. 6, 2009.
Brennan believes moderates in Hezbollah, the terrorist organization responsible for the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 service members, can help reform the organization; he refers to Jerusalem as al-Quds, the Islamist preferred terminology; and he imagines any American backlash against Muslims to be “scapegoating and fear mongering.”
Holder, meanwhile, explains last year’s terrorist attacks this way: “There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions.” When asked directly if radical Islam might have been one of these reasons, Holder said, “I don’t want to say anything negative about a religion.”
All references to “radical Islamism,” and the “war on terror” have been sanitized from our national security documents, abandoned for vague terms like “extremism” and “overseas contingencies operations” to describe our current conflict.
After the premier of “America at Risk,” Gingrich told a reporter, “If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.”
The former House speaker is correct. How can we face an enemy whose character and driving ideology we refuse to identify?