The Folly of Apology

Americans need to muster the necessary grit to win.

Doesn't it burn you when hearing and reading statements from American leaders and journalists that are downright dhimmi-talk, apologizing to Islamic barbarians, heartening the enemy?

The stories about the video of US troops burning the bodies of dead Taliban are disgusting––but not because of anything our troops may have done to the corpses of fanatical murderers. What’s disturbing is the groveling reaction of our government and military officials, who are falling all over themselves to apologize to people who cheer every time an American is killed.

Remember what type of people the Taliban are? Like the jihadists we are fighting in Iraq, they are murderers whose religious beliefs warrant any kind of brutality and atrocity against the “infidel.” These are the people who, when they ran Afghanistan, tortured and murdered their own citizens in a soccer stadium built with Western money. These are the people who behead and murder, the people who kill women and children. And these are the people whose corpses we are supposed to worry about mistreating, whose religious beliefs, the ones that justify murder, we are supposed to be respecting.

I know all the rationales for the apologies and investigations and anxious assertions of how much we respect Islam. We need to win the “hearts and minds” of all those alleged “moderate” Muslims who hate us only because they don’t understand us, don’t realize how much we admire their wonderful religion, don’t quite get everything we’re doing for them, and who are abetted in their misunderstanding by the bad behavior of some of our troops. So the State Department has issued “talking points” to U.S. embassies “to explain to foreign journalists and officials that the alleged misconduct was an aberration that did not reflect American values,” as the New York Times reported.

This false belief that Muslims only react to Western deeds also puts a powerful weapon into the hands our enemies, who can then deflect their true intentions and manipulate our behavior, as the jihadists of Palestine have been doing for decades. How else explain the bizarre spectacle of the terrorist Mahmoud Abbas being welcomed to the White House, at the very moment we claim to the world that we are at war with those who use and endorse terrorism? When has Abbas ever condemned terrorism as categorically evil and unacceptable in any circumstance, rather than condemning terrorism for being the wrong tactic at the wrong time? How can we keep saying terrorism “won’t work” when we are giving financial and moral support to a Palestinian regime that incorporates terrorists like Hamas that say explicitly they want to destroy Israel and will use any means necessary to do so?

More important, when our enemies compel us to apologize and investigate and assure the world how much we really respect Islam, they validate their estimation of our spiritual weakness and corruption. From their perspective, why else would we apologize, unless we had doubts about the rightness of our cause and the beliefs that drive our actions? The jihadists, after all, are convinced of the rightness of their belief, one validated by Islam and its traditional intolerant and arrogant disdain for the infidel. So why should they ever apologize? They believe they are right, and that Allah sanctions their slaughter. Christians can be brutalized, as is happening right now in Alexandria, where Egyptian Copts are being murdered and terrorized by Muslim mobs. Christian churches can be desecrated, Christians and Jews murdered and mutilated on videotape, and we never hear even from secular Muslim leaders the sort of anxious protestations of regret that the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth indulge in.

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