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Jewish World Review August 12, 2008 / 11 Menachem-Av 5768 Job One for #44 By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Events of the past week are a powerful rebuke to those who
assumed this fall's presidential election would turn on domestic issues
- and, presumably, redound to the benefit of the Democratic party and
its candidate since they have historically been viewed as better
equipped to deal with such matters. Four recent developments remind us
that national security must be Job One for our 44th president and should
govern his selection.
•
First, the vulnerability associated with our dependence on
foreign sources of oil - many of which are hostile - now arouses a
substantial majority of Americans. As syndicated columnist Cliff May
recently pointed out, a national poll conducted by his Foundation for
Defense of Democracies found that, "Depending on how the question was
asked, between 57 and 64 percent say they believe that energy
independence should be America's primary goal - because our economic and
national security depends on it."
Many Republican members of the House of Representatives have
taken the extraordinary step of spending the August recess in Washington
in order to respond to this heightened public awareness and concern
about our parlous energy situation. They are using a House floor
populated by tourists and other visitors as a platform from which to
challenge an increasingly despotic Speaker Nancy Pelosi to permit
legislative initiatives that will reduce our dangerous dependency on
foreign oil suppliers who wish us ill.
Among them should be adoption of the Open Fuel Standard, a bipartisan
initiative that would require cars sold in America to be capable of
using not only gasoline, but Freedom Fuels (notably, ethanol and
methanol) that we can readily make here or acquire from people who are
not trying to kill us. According to the FDD poll, fully 91% of the
respondents quite sensibly recognize that fuel choice is the best way to
reduce our oil addiction.
•
One particularly unreliable energy supplier is Russia whose
murderous aggression in the Caucasus nation of Georgia is not just about
toppling a democratic government allied with the United States and the
West. It is also designed to consolidate the Kremlin's control over oil
flows to Europe by seizing the one pipeline from the petroleum-rich
Caspian not currently in its grasp or that of Islamofascist Iran.
Moscow has already demonstrated its serial willingness to use energy as
a coercive weapon. Europe's acquiescence to the Russian rape of Georgia
is an ominous indicator - both of the prospects for freedom-loving, but
relatively weak, nations who look to the West for security and of the
risks of energy dependence.
If the Putin-Medvedev regime gets away unscathed with this violent
reassertion of authority over what it euphemistically calls the "Near
Abroad," all of its once-enslaved neighbors will once again be at risk
of Moscow's predations. Accordingly, creative ways must be found to
impose costs for such behavior. At the very least, as Sen. John McCain
has long suggested, the once-and-future Soviets must not be allowed to
engage in it while enjoying the privileged status of a member in good
standing of the elite club of leading industrial nations, the so-called
Group of 8.
Two other episodes this week remind us that the next American president
will also have to deal with challenges at home that have worrisome
implications both for the character and security of this country: the
Islamists' inexorable efforts to insinuate incrementally the repressive
theo-political program they call Shariah.
•
The first occurred when word of a contract negotiated by the
union representing Somali and other workers at a plant in Shelbyville,
Tennessee made national news. As reported initially by Brian Mosely, a
quintessentially American and gutsy small-town journalist with the
Shelbyville Times-Gazette, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store
Union had negotiated a contract with Tysons Foods which would supplant
Labor Day - yes, Labor Day! - with the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr as
a paid day off.
Mosely's story was picked up by the Associated Press and quickly became
a national sensation as talk radio, Michelle Malkin and other bloggers
and editorialists took Tysons to task for accommodating this affront to
American labor and example of creeping Shariah. Faced with cries for
boycotts of its products, the company moved to defuse the furor by
making both Labor Day and Eid paid holidays.
The episode has called attention, however, to a serious problem: an
influx of what often prove to be quite radical Muslim immigrant
populations as part of a State Department refugee-resettlement program
dating back to the Clinton Administration. At Tysons, they reportedly
engage in unhygienic practices and possibly pose a threat to food
safety. In Shelbyville and other towns they are populating across
America, many of these Islamist refugees are demanding separate
Shariah-based legal arrangements and privileges, rather than
assimilating.
•
Finally, another manifestation of Shariah's "soft" jihad in
America touched Barak Obama's own campaign last week. His Muslim
outreach coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, was forced to resign following
published reports of his association, as part of a Muslim Brotherhood
front organization's Shariah-Compliant Finance operation, with an
unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged terrorism funding conspiracy.
Each of these events underscore a point that cannot be overemphasized in
the run-up to November 4th: The man we hire to be our next president
will serve as our commander-in-chief in perilous times, times in which
we confront rising threats to our interests abroad and to our
Constitution and society at home. Let us pray that we choose wisely.
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JWR contributor Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. heads the Center for Security Policy. Comments by clicking here.
© 2006, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. |
Arnold Ahlert | ||||||||||||
