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"America At Risk: The War With No Name"
By Mike McManus
Sept. 16, 2010
I attended two events on 9/11/10 to commemorate the attack nine years ago. One was comforting - prayers by leading pastors at the Pentagon where 184 died.
"We remember the families whose lives were forever changed by the loss by husbands, wives, grandparents," said Dr. David Ferguson, President of Intimate Life Ministries, which has helped save many marriages.
The other event was very disturbing, a film by Citizens United called "America At Risk: The War with No Name," a searing indictment of what President Bush called a "Global War on Terror," which the Obama Administration calls the "Overseas Contingency Operation."
It is a war without a name.
"The elites of this country are determined to avoid the truth," said Newt Gingrich, co-host of the film, speaking before it began. "It starts an argument as profound as the argument over Communism between 1945 and 1950 on whether there is a coherent enemy and whether there is a coherent strategy to deal with it."
"We are at war with Radical Islamists, and it is a war we are losing" asserts this powerful film. The Obama Administration has removed the words "Islamic extremism" and "jihad" from its national security documents.
One of the film's most unforgettable moments is an exchange between Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Attorney General Eric Holder. Smith asked Holder what motivated the "Detroit Christmas Day Bomber."
Holder said he did not know.
"Was it Radical Islam?" asked Smith. Holder said he may have had "a variety of motivations."
"But was Radical Islam one of them?" Holder refused to answer.
Gingrich asks, "If we can't understand and accurately describe our enemies, how can we develop a strategy to defeat them? Furthermore, how can we mobilize the American people and our allies around the world to implement a strategy of victory?"
The film says the war began when Iran held 532 Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy in October, 1979 for 444 days. In 1983 220 Marines were killed in Beirut by a suicide bomber of Islamic Jihad, funded by Iran. It was the highest death toll of Marines since Iwo Jima. There was an attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, followed by an attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, killing16 sailors, for which Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.
All of that was before Al-Qaeda inspired Radical Islamists to seize and crash four planes on 9/11, killing nearly 3,000 Americans - the most lethal day on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
Khalid Shaik Mohammed has pled guilty to being the mastermind of 9/11 and his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, was found guilty of the 1993 WTC attempt.
What's frightening in recent years is that some American Muslims have become radicalized. A New Mexico man became Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam who led a mosque attended by two of the 9/11 bombers. He moved to Yemen where his emailed sermons inspired an American major to kill 13 soldiers at Fort Hood and wound 33 more. The Times Square bomber owned a home in Connecticut.
Fortunately, intelligence thwarted 19 different attempts by Radical Islamists who planned to blow up the Sears Tower, the LA airport, a New York subway station, a natural gas refinery, ten planes flying from England and Fort Dix. However, the Detroit Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded, though his father warned the CIA about him.
"America at Risk" notes that "the overwhelming majority of Muslims want to live in peace," and many came to America to flee Radical Islam. The film features Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician, a moderate who created the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. "I pray five times a day...I worry about my kids and what they will learn about Islam. The vast majority of Islamic literature teaches about the supremacy of Islam. It does not teach you can protect your faith better in America than in any Muslim country. I believe in separation of mosque and state."
One American mobilized by 9/11 was Deborah Burlingame, whose brother piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. "I became so enraged," she says in the film. "The next attack can be far more catastrophic because they aim to take down this country."
What could happen?
Iran is developing nuclear weapons that could instantly obliterate Israel. A suitcase-sized nuclear weapon could be smuggled into America and blow up a city.
Yet Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, says she is fighting "man caused disaster," not Radical Islam or even terrorists.
Go to CitizensUnited.com to see clips of a film that will educate, motivate and arouse you to oppose Radical Islam.
---Michael J. McManus is a syndicated columnist writing on "Ethics & Religion". He is President & Co-Chair of Marriage Savers. He lives with hsi wife in Potomac, MD.
