What Political Correctness Has Wrought

When Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder chastised the U.S. as a "nation of cowards", he was speaking about our collective reluctance to honestly discuss our attitudes over skin color. While I disagree with his take on that subject, I do believe that America has become cowards to another fashion; political correctness. The pursuit of political correctness has continued to blind us all to certain realities. The latest reality, one that has been building for quite some time now, is that religious extremists of the Muslim variety live and flourish among us and continually work to destroy this country from within.

Paranoid xenophobic you say? Ask Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, now that he has regained consciousness, recuperating from his killing spree that took the lives of thirteen and wounded another 29 at Ft. Hood. Ask him if he should have been permitted to remain in the United States Army while the nation is at war against Islamic terrorists. Ask the white haired grandmother, or the young mother with a baby, why they have to remove their shoes or take a drink of the formula before proceeding to board an airplane. Ask the President of the United States why he feels compelled to throw our nation's Judeo-Christian heritage under the bus in a speech to a Muslim audience in Cairo. These are all examples of bending over backwards to accommodate and dismiss what we all know to be true. Practitioners and followers of the Islamic faith are solely responsible for 99.999% of terrorists acts against this country.

Why are we surprised then when we learn, once arrested or killed, that terrorists like Hasan, or Denver's Najibullah Zazi who is suspected of plotting to bomb New York city subways, or even the 9/11 hijackers, frequented American mosques where violent jihad was both condoned and encouraged? We fight and rail against the madrassas in middle eastern countries where intolerance is practiced and preached everyday, yet under our very noses, just down the street, that same anti-American garbage is continuously distributed and ingested.

Yet political correctness warns us not to be too judgmental of our Muslim neighbors. Just last month, U.S. Airways settled a lawsuit brought by six imams, or Islamic religious leaders, who were arrested and removed from a flight in 2006. Terrified passengers and crew members reported suspicious behavior by the imams prior to boarding and once seated on the plane. This included speaking loudly in Arabic, refusing to sit in their assigned seats and instead sitting in pairs on aisle seats, ordering lap belts that went unused, saying disparaging things about President Bush and the Iraq war, and mentioning al Quaeda and Osama bin Laden. A Minnesota judge who sided with the imams in the case noted that they were subjected to "extreme fear and humiliation of being falsely identified as dangerous terrorists" and said "similar behavior by Russian Orthodox priests or Franciscan monks would likely have not elicited this response." Quite right your Honor, because Fr. Molotov and Brother Beretta, while having dangerous sounding names, have no history of flying planes into buildings, bombing embassies, trying to sink our ships or gunning down our soldiers.