« Remember remember the fifth of November | Main | Humor in Uniform »
February 21, 2006
Bullets or barristers?
Mark Steyn published an opinion piece yesterday on the trial of Abu Hamza, the Captain Hook of London's radical Mullah crowd. Near the end, Steyn turns to my favorite topic of the day, lawyers and lawsuits or battalions and bodybags.
Go back four years. On September 11th, the Bush Administration had to choose whether to regard the events of that morning as a matter for law enforcement or an act of war. At one o’clock that afternoon, as the Pentagon still burned and after he’d helped pull the injured from the rubble, Donald Rumsfeld told the President, “This is not a criminal action. This is war.”
That’s still the distinction that matters: Part of the reason John Kerry lost in 2004 and why the Democrats will lose again this November is that they view this business as a law-enforcement matter – all warrants and due process. And, as we see in almost every case that comes up, to fight the jihad in the courtroom means you’ll lose.
Imagine if, during the London Blitz, you’d had Germans with British passports giving speeches advocating the United Kingdom’s incorporation within the Third Reich and demanding the Swastika fly over Buckingham Palace and you had to prosecute them individually and most Nazis were acquitted on technicalities but a few got 18 months-to-two-years.
To be sure, one can argue (as many British and Americans do) that the jihad does not pose the same kind of existential threat, but at what point do you cross the line? Three hundred dead in a Tube blast? Six thousand in a skyscraper bombing? Why aren’t the dead of September 11th and July 7th already enough?
More Americans were killed on 9/11 than on December 7. The latter, a "Date which will live in infamy," generated a war-fighting desire for revenge in 99 percent of the populace. Apparently the former created a war-fighting desire for revenge in about 50 percent of today's America, the balance preferring some combination of reading terrorists their Miranda rights, apologizing to them, understanding their rage, and surrenduring.
Posted by Mike Lief at February 21, 2006 07:41 AM