“Clad in her trademark butch safari suits (one kaki; another red), Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, took off “in the footsteps of Bin Laden.” In the eponymous documentary, Amanpour proves to be a good track dog, digging up everything from bin Laden’s English teacher in Saudi Arabia, circa 1968, to the minutes of the first al-Qaida meetings. A trailblazer she is not. “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden” is ultimately a dhimmi documentary. Amanpour cleaves dogmatically to the permissible narrative: bin Laden has hijacked, not heeded, Islam. Whenever a Muslim commits odious acts in the name of his faith, these must be deemedpost haste and post hoca manifestation of the inauthentic Islam.” The excerpt is from my new column, “Amanpour’s Dhimmi Documentary.” Read it here.
Category Archives: Terrorism
‘Remembering the World Trade Center’
Every year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was gracious enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:
“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:
Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.
‘Remembering the World Trade Center’
Every year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was gracious enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:
“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:
Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.
Adam Yahiye Gadahn Pearlman?
The individual I mentioned in “Lunatic Government Occupies Airports” has surfaced again. Adam Yahiye Gadahn, now a propagandist for Al-Qaida in Pakistan, is originally a Pearlman from California.
Gadahn has called on Americans and other unbelievers to convert to Islam. You can read more about it here. I mentioned him in that column in the context of rational profiling at airports. I said that,
“If young Jews were as well-represented among suicide bombers and airline hijackers as Muslims are, I’d want the TSA’s canine teams to sniff them out instead of being sicced on Joe Scarborough’s baby girl. Remember Adam Yahiye Gadahn of Al-Qaida, Pakistan? He turned out to be a Pearlman from California. Had Gadahn, aka Pearlman, represented the tip of a Jewish Jihadist iceberg, I’d recommend that young Jews be frisked. So far, this (partly) Jewish John Walker Lindh has proven to be an extreme exception to the rule, like the Tamils.â€?
A few readers wrote to correct me. For the purpose of the column, I had treated Gadahn as a Jew. But, they said, only his grandfather (and father too, until conversion, it would appear) were Jewish. That’s perfectly true: By rabbinical law, Gadahn was not Jewish. By Hitlerian law, he was and still is Jewish.
Although his Jewish lineage is indeed weak, had I not introduced him in the context of profiling, I’d have been accused of conveniently ignoring the possibility that young Jews, especially members of the left-liberal faith, could join a terrorist group and might need to be profiled. As I suggested to a law professor from the “Volokh Conspiracy,” I needed to rule out that eventuality.