The Enemy In The Mirror--- Repost

Once again I am digging into the vaults here at Radarsite and pulling out an old article written by Roger.  This one was originally published on Dec. 9, 2007 and addresses the issue of the Muhammad Cartoons. A topic that has been in the news these last few months.


The original article, along with the comments of readers can be found here.


---Findalis

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"...we all need to apologize to future generations for living a life of comfortable ignorance".
-- Faultline USA
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In a recent article in Pajamas Media, Danish PM contributer and Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose revealed the disturbing news that he had been targeted in 2006 for a possible terrorist bomb attack. Mr. Rose, it will be remembered, is the courageous editor who first published those highly-volatile Mohammed cartoons in September 2005. This is just the latest in a long series of threats made since then against the newspaper in general and Mr. Rose in particular.

To date, unlike Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Michelle Malkin et al, Mr. Rose and his family have not yet been forced to relocate and go into hiding. To date, unlike that other high-profile Muslim critic Theo van Gogh, Flemming Rose has not yet been murdered.

This leads me inevitably to that troubling but unavoidable question, that elephant in our living room: Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with a society where an editor’s decision to publish some controversial cartoons can be justly characterized as being “courageous”? Is this what our once proud and advanced Western Civilization has come down to? Is this the awful price we have paid for our blind adherence to some delusional multicultural PC agenda? Has our highly-developed, but increasingly culturally diluted, Western Civilization become so weakened, so impotent, so pathetic that it can no longer protect the lives of its finest citizens? Our newspaper editors, our authors and our columnists are now living in fear for their lives for daring to objectively comment on a foreign religion in their own country. Are you outraged yet?

I am personally becoming ashamed to consider myself a member of this cowardly civilization. Not only do we not fight back against this encroaching evil — and yes, folks, it is evil, evil incarnate — we turn against those amongst us who do have the courage to fight back. We call them racists and bigots. We emasculate them. One by one, our weak-kneed liberal Western governments are succumbing to the Islamists’ demands and intimidations. One by one, in the most ironic of ironies, we are losing our freedoms of speech in the name of some deceptive ideal of religious tolerance.

Where will it all end? How did we let this happen? Who fell asleep on guard duty? Who are the enemies amongst us who are responsible for allowing our defenses to erode away and for letting these deadly vipers into our nest?

And I look in the mirror and the enemy is me.

The enemy is complacency, naivete and ignorance. And it’s all there in my mirror. And all I can do at this late date is apologize to my fellow citizens for my complicity in this national crisis. I apologize for allowing my petty self-interests to blind me to the inevitability of these approaching horrors. I apologize for living my little life in comfortable ignorance, for ignoring all of that accumulating evidence, for not studying the issues earlier, for not listening more closely to the jihadists’ well-publicized and deadly goals, and for not heeding the frantic calls of our alarmists.

Finally, I apologize for waiting until three thousand of my innocent fellow citizens were slaughtered before I even began to acknowledge the enormity of this threat.

Now that I’ve admitted my culpability — how about you?

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Too many of us have lived our lives ignorant of the world around us. Our news outlets (The Main Stream Media [MSM]) are willing participants in this charade that screams to the world the value of free speech and an open, honest media then turns around and censors itself.  This is not free speech.  It is censorship.


MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and now FOX NEWS has jumped on the self-censorship bandwagon.  The Saudis control our news outlets, letting no criticism of them, Muslims in general and Islam to be broadcast upon our airwaves.

Thus without firing a shot, or passing a law, Islam has won.  With the passing of FOX NEWS, we now have no free speech. And what Roger warned us about over 2 years ago has come to pass.