They really are trying to kill us

Dan Sernoffsky

Lenin called them “useful idiots,” and for the 70 or so years that the Soviet Union existed, they were, indeed, very useful. From Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for deliberately covering up Stalin’s genocide in the Ukraine, to those who demonized Whittaker Chambers for demonstrating that Alger Hiss was, indeed, a Soviet spy, and even to Henry Kissinger (”We cannot prevent the growth of Soviet power” — 1976), there was a constant drumbeat of support, and in many quarters respect for, the advances of Soviet society while ignoring the realities of the brutal totalatarianism of the regime.

Ronald Reagan managed to put all that to rest in rather short order.

But as a wise man once said, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The United States has apparently not learned from history. But the Islamofascists who are bent on destroying the United States have.

The Soviet Union may have been consigned to the “ash heap of history,” and because of that no longer threatens us, but Islamofascists do, and they have found in the United States a new group of “useful idiots,” primarily, but certainly not limited to, the American left.

There has been of late considerable indignation on the part of some that captured Islamofascists, men who wore no uniform but who engaged in acts of war against American military forces, and acts of terror against civilians, are not being properly treated at various detention centers. Worse, they have been coerced into revealing information by means considered unmannerly.

Perhaps it is time to remember Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg, Paul Johnson and Eugene Armstrong. Pearl was a journalist, Berg an aspiring journalist. Johnson was an engineer, Armstrong a contractor. All of them were civilians. All of them were kidnapped, tortured and beheaded, the vicious beheadings videotaped and shown around the world. Calling their killers sadistic murderers would certainly be an apt description. But it is also worthy of note that they were Islamofascists, no different from the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or elsewhere, captured on the battlefields of the war on terror. That they receive any consideration as legitimate prisoners of war is almost laughable.

Yet the “useful idiots,” and that even includes Sen. John McCain, himself the victim of torture while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, fail to recognize that America’s Islamofascist enemy has no concern for the niceties of civilization. Indeed, while Americans dearly cling to the concept of “taking the moral high ground,” the enemy will have no qualms about torturing and killing any American prisoners it may take.

In August 1928, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed. The treaty was designed to “outlaw” war. Among the signatories were Germany, Italy and Japan. Three years later, Japan invaded Manchuria. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936, and three years after that, Germany invaded Poland. The Geneva Conventions, first signed in 1864, attempt to lay down rules for war but specificially exclude terrorists. The Islamofascists being held by the United States and her allies are terrorists.

There has also been of late considerable condemnation of the war in Iraq as unnecessary, criticism which includes the assertion that it is creating an even greater terrorist threat.

But while the Vatican has no standing army and has, in fact, been critical of the war in Iraq, when Pope Benedict XVI recently cited a centuries-old text condemning the militancy of Islam, it triggered a wave of terroristic actions that included rallies calling for the death of the Pope, burning the Pope in effigy, threats to the Vatican and to Catholicism in general, and the cold-blooded murder of Sister Leonella Sgorbita, a 65-year old nun who had spent 40 years in Somalia treating the poor.

When a Danish newspaper published several cartoons depicting Muhammad, there were terroristic riots throughout Europe and the Middle East resulting in more than a dozen deaths.

For all the condemnation and criticism of the American effort in Iraq, there has been no rioting here similar to that which has happened in Europe, nor has there been another attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001, even though Islamofascists have struck in Spain and in England.
When the United States left Somalia in 1996, Osama bin Laden said, “After a few blows, it (the U.S.) ... rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace.” The American soldier, he said, “was just a paper tiger.”

Later, in predicting the fall of the United States, bin Laden said “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

The weak horse, according to bin Laden, is the United States. His useful idiots in the United States are trying to make that a reality.

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Dan Sernoffsky is an award-winning sportswriter and political columnist for The Lebanon Daily News in Lebanon, Pa. A career journalist, he is a graduate of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Ks., and attended graduate school at Central Michigan University. The father of four grown children, he and his wife reside in Lebanon.

dsernoffsky@yahoo.com