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Say what you may about the Boston Marathon bombing, it spells the end of Islamophobia.
The dictionary defines "phobia" as "an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation." Ever since 9-11, liberals have berated conservatives for suffering from "Islamophobia" because they sincerely believed that there was no logical reason to fear Islamic terrorism.
Now that the reality of Islamic terrorism has been demonstrated for all the world to see, nobody can argue that it's irrational to fear attack by devout Muslims. Nobody can call that a "phobia" because it's perfectly rational to worry about Islamic terrorism.
When Maj. Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. in November of 2009, our media were united in proclaiming that we shouldn't regard it as an act of Islamic terrorism. They stuck to that line when it was reported that he yelled "Allah Akbar" while killing his victims. Their accusations of Islamophobia continued even when it came out that he had consulted the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki on whether the Koran said he would be justified in killing American soldiers to keep them from killing his fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. The chorus of see-no-evilers even included Barack Obama himself, whose Defense Department ruled the murders as "workplace violence" so as to deprive the victims of their rightfully-earned Purple Hearts and the military benefits they should have received from combat with a self-confessed enemy of America.
Six months later, Faisal Shahzad filled an SUV with explosives and tried to detonate it in Times Square. He was born in Virginia, graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, earned an M.B.A., and worked as a financial analyst. He married an American-born woman of Pakistani ancestry and had two children.
The New York Times summed up his statement after he was convicted:
Calling himself "a Muslim soldier," Mr. Shahzad denounced the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The drones, he said, "kill women, children, they kill everybody."
"It's a war, and in war, they kill people," he added. "They're killing all Muslims."
It sounds like he thought he was fighting infidels on behalf of Islam. As with Jihad Jane, wouldn't his own words make him a home-grown Islamic terrorist by any reasonable definition?
There are many Muslims who don't run around murdering people, but that's because they don't follow the principles of the religion they claim. Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of one of the founders of Hamas, gives warning:
At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God... I know this is harsh to say.
Why?
Most Muslims are ignorant about their religion. Once they understand Islam, they become terrorists. Read chapter 9, verse 9, or verse 9.5, or 9.111: the Koran is the war-manual for Islamic terrorism. [emphasis added]
Our media won't take Muslims at their word. For a decade, nobody wanted to admit that Islam is an inherently violent religion which is dedicated to the extermination of all non-Muslims.
What's worse, European elites try to blame us for acts of Islamic terrorism. The Economist reports:
In Brussels, just after the July 2005 Tube and bus bombings in London, Lexington watched European colleagues question a British-born EU official about why Britain had been targeted. Was it because Tony Blair's government had sent troops to Iraq? Perhaps, the Briton growled in reply, you could let my country bury its dead before asking us to take the blame. But his questioners' tactlessness was representative. In much of western Europe, progress involves embracing a sort of deep-grained passivity towards the rest of the world: to be attacked is to be suspect. You must have done something wrong. And Britain is not immune to this. The supposedly conservative press rushes to examine the national conscience and demand more government action in the wake of any violent outrage. [emphasis added]
Even when a group of American Muslims refuses to associate with violence themselves, they don't seem to share the same sense of communal responsibility against those that do. One of the marathon bombers was thrown out of his mosque earlier this year for his extremist beliefs, specifically because he condemned the nonviolent practices of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and its promotion in a sermon.
Good for them - but it didn't occur to anyone to drop a dime and report him to the cops? Not that it would have made much difference as the FBI had already "thoroughly" investigated the terrorists before the attached and found nothing to worry about.
The two Chechen brothers who perpetrated the Boston bombing were able to perpetrate their horrors only by the kindness and generosity of America in letting them come into our country, escaping the war-ridden hellhole of their homeland. We even granted them American citizenship, helped along by the marriage of one to an American wife and production of American-citizen kids. It would be no surprise if some of our media blamed conservatives for not giving them enough money to make their lives in America pleasant enough that they wouldn't resort to violence, even though the Times Square bomber had an MBA and a high-paying job.
Ordinary American citizens generally believe in evil even if our leaders refuse to acknowledge the reality of evil. Americans are suspicious of liberal claims that if we'd only spend enough money perfecting society, everybody will behave well. We've seen too many formerly prosperous cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Newark become uncivilized wastelands despite billions and billions of dollars spent "perfecting" them.
It's probably too much to hope that liberals would stop blaming conservatives for not wanting to spend more money on welfare and take a look at the actual results of their programs, but maybe, just maybe, they'll give up this particular delusion and admit that Islam is fundamentally a religion of violence and terrorism.
What's more, the evolving tale of the Boston Marathon bombing clearly demonstrates that Islam is a contagious mental disease. In the right (wrong?) circumstances, it can turn ordinary Americans into medieval psychopaths. We've seen this several times, from John Walker Lindh the American Taliban to Jihad Jane to, now, Katherine Tsarnaev.
Fearing Islam is no phobia. It's a rational reaction to a clear and imminent danger. This isn't a reason to go out and shoot every last Muslim in the world or even in our country, any more than we rampage through the world exterminating spiders and snakes - but anybody who wants them freely roaming their home without being closely monitored, much less welcomed in with open arms, has a serious screw loose.