Another powerful (although in parts, elliptical) article in The American Thinker, this time by Jonathan David Carson, offers a sharp warning to America that it is fighting two wars – one against global terror and one against its own appeasement-minded tendency to sanitise that terror and attack itself instead:

‘As has been documented scores of times by The American Thinker, the homeland battle of ideas is an attempt by the mainstream media, the academic world, government schools, textbook publishers, establishment churches, wealthy foundations, city governments, Hollywood liberals, State Department bureaucrats, the Ivy League playpen at the CIA, pop stars, rap artists, civil libertarians, and other assorted noisemakers to mislead the public about the nature of the enemy, an attempt repeatedly frustrated by the enemy himself, who reveals his nature with every attack.

'The “war on terrorism” is thus a shooting war with Islamofascist terrorists and a battle of ideas with respectable society, which, for its own truly perverse reasons, at best exhibits a dull-witted indifference to the terrorist threat to our lives and way of life…
‘Twenty Marines die in Iraq; Cece Connely says their deaths pose a big problem for Bush. One might think that the deaths are first of all a problem for the dead Marines and second for their loved ones, that Zarqawi’s car bombs are a problem for the United States and the rest of the world, that they are, in other words, a serious problem. But if they are Bush’s problem, and Bush is evil, they must in some sense be good, or if a problem not a serious one...

‘It should be obvious even to intellectuals that George Bush’s neck did not bleed when terrorists beheaded Daniel Pearl, so respectable society must have a more fundamental interest in deluding itself and the rest of us than mere contempt for Mr. Bush. This interest must be an exceedingly powerful one to overcome the fear and anger that people naturally feel when skyscrapers are toppled and subways bombed and to overcome the horror and revulsion that, to be fair, even respectable people feel when adulterers and homosexuals are stoned, thieves punished with amputation, girls sold into polygamous marriages, priceless works of religious art dynamited, black Africans murdered by the millions or held as slaves, women summarily executed for dress code violations, and so on, and on, and on.

‘So what is this powerful interest? What do reporters, academics, artists, intellectuals, mainline Christians, government functionaries, liberal politicians, and the rest of the defenders of the sorry status quo share? Hostility to Christians who seem actually to believe in Christ. And what is the reason for this hostility? A guilty conscience.’

As Carson warns, the war against Islamofascism may well be lost if the elites of America – and, although he doesn’t say so, Britain – don’t wake up to the fact that President Bush is not the enemy and start training their rhetorical guns on the people who actually threaten the life of their nation rather than the person who is trying to defend it. Never has the capacity of the intellectual class for national immolation been more evident, and more lethal, that at this present difficult time.