Selective Sensitivity By Marilyn Penn
http://politicalmavens.com/
At a time when the liberal left is consumed with placating the sensibilities of minorities and creating “safe places” on campus to insure that words will never harm them, I wonder if our president and other pundits are considering the sensibilities of 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors and the grieving families of those who were murdered. How devastating it must be to have lived through those domestic Jihadist attacks, suffered permanent physical and mental impairment and then have to listen to our president proclaim that there is no need to fear the influx of 10,000 Muslim immigrants, or to read the Times’ daily vilification of people with the opposite point of view.
At the same time that the newspaper reports the bombing of the Mali hotel due to security lapses, its columnists excoriate those who question the efficacy of our national security to safeguard us from terrorist interlopers. Fear is the appropriate reaction for people who have experienced firsthand or suffered the consequences second-hand of the stated aims of Islamic Jihad. Too many of us have felt sick just seeing the images of executioners lopping off the heads of innocent people, raping and kidnapping scores of women and militarizing African children – forcing them to do unspeakable things including cannibalism. It’s impossible to pretend after this year’s double catastrophe in Paris that we can walk the streets of NYC, a prime stated target for repeat attack, completely confident that our excellent police and anti-terror squads can be omniscient and omnipotent. It just isn’t feasible in an open society where we don’t have security screening in our public museums, city transportation hubs, multiplex theaters or most of the myriad places where people congregate. A day after the Paris attack, I saw a New Yorker with a backpack large enough for a weeklong camping trip enter a movie theater, sit down and casually place that baggage on the floor beside her.
If we’re being asked to increase our awareness of how a transgender student feels not being allowed to shower with the “other” girls in the locker room, how about increasing our empathy for brave first responders who know that some of the 9/11 killers were on our no-fly list but now have to listen to how effective our security is regarding 10,000 Muslim immigrants. If we are told to be mindful that donning a Mexican costume on Halloween might offend the feelings of ethnic Latinos, how about remembering the thousands of 9/11 families who lost their loved ones, the children who lost their fathers, the wives whose unborn children never had one – before stating conclusively that it’s discriminatory and hateful to question the vetting process of these immigrants. No politician has ever said that all Muslims are terrorists but neither were all Germans Nazis. That doesn’t diminish the excruciating damage that fascism and its current embodiment – Islamic Jihad – have caused throughout the world. There is no easy answer for how to protect ourselves – the Parisians sitting in restaurants could not have seen the drive-by shooters determined to kill anyone so vigilance alone would not have saved them. Spectators and runners at the Boston Marathon were carried away by the excitement of the event and couldn’t possibly have guessed that killers with backpacks had nail-studded bombs inside. The next attack might be biochemical or some other poison – who will notice that?
What we should be hearing from our leaders is what they are doing to ramp up their intelligence, their training programs for police and National Guard and their security requirements for public spaces. The last thing we need from them and our pundits is scolding for our fear – a normal and intelligent response to attack and the prospect of importing many thousands of people from the vortex of radical Islam.
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