Another 9/11?

Michelle Malkin rips Stu Bykofsky of Philly Daily News a new one in her latest posting:

We don’t need healing. We need the half of the country that doesn’t believe we are under threat from global jihad to wake up and smell the suicide bomb smoke.

The answer isn’t to pray for another mass terrorist attack. The answer is to educate the sheeple about our enemies, name them, shame them, fight them overseas, and fight them and their apologists with every fiber of our collective being here at home.

With all due respect to the doyenne of the Rightosphere, I think she’s being overly harsh on Bykofsky, and simultaneously minimizing the problem.

First, I don’t believe that Bykofsky is praying for another mass terror attack, anymore than Steve Levitt wants terrorists to be successful.  It seems to me that Bykofsky is borrowing a page from Jonathan Swift in suggesting that we need another 9/11.  His whole column reads more like an elegy for the state of the nation than an exhortation to the boys with explosive couture.

Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that Bykofsky is attempting to do precisely what Michelle is recommending: trying to wake up the half of the country who doesn’t realize we’re in a war.

Because that’s the critical question in this war, isn’t it?  How do you convince the people who are earnest in their belief that there is no war, that the whole War on Terror is like the War on Drugs — just something cooked up to gain power over the populace?  Let’s even leave the whackos — the 9/11 truthers and their tin-foil crowd — out of it and talk only about the more-or-less rational liberals who still think that we’re not really in a war, that to even say that we’re in a “war” against terrorists dignifies them, and think that the cause of terror in the world is Arab discontent at Western imperialism?

How do you convince people whose worldview is so dramatically different that they’re wrong, and that you’re right?

I don’t believe there is a way.

In fact, I don’t believe that another 9/11 will do it either.  Another mass terror attack in the U.S. would actually strengthen the hands of the Dhimmicrats and their allies, as it would be clear evidence that the Bush Doctrine doesn’t work.  Never mind Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney & Co. have been warning us since 9/11 that we cannot possibly defend against every single attack, and that is why we need to go on the offensive.  Never mind that for that one successful attack, there have been dozens (if not hundreds) of attacks that were foiled, thanks to the efforts of the Bushitlerburton Theocracy.  Americans will reject the “Go On Offense” doctrine and exchange it for, “Let’s try giving the crazies what they want” doctrine of Reid, Pelosi, et. al.

The only thing that could possibly wake up the Other Half is for the Islamists to overreach and start demanding the imposition of shari’ah law here in the United States, on non-Muslims.  Once the libs realize that the Islamists aren’t content to just dominate the Middle East, but that they actually see their religion as universal, that they actually see all of humanity as belonging either in the House of War or House of Submission, perhaps then they’ll realize the truth.

Of course, by then, it will be too late.

-TS