Terrorist Threat in a Blue State? You Betcha.
There’s a new terrorist threat to the Boston area. Six people, four Chinese and two Iraqis, reportedly crossed the US/Mexico border carrying nuclear weapons and heading for Boston. This may be a hoax, or nothing serious, but what made me want to write about it was this post from a favorite blogger of mine, Feeble Knees. The post is entitled “He must have mixed up his red and blue states.” Money quote:

I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone in Al Qaeda would want to target Boston. It just doesn't make any sense to me. It seems more likely they'd instead use it as another staging ground. There aren't that many people here (as compared with the US's larger cities) and a large percentage of them are more against the US war on terror than Bin Laden himself!

This was disturbing to me. As though somehow terrorists are going to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans. Hello…they hate AMERICANS! And they hate westerners in general. Just look at the people they’ve kidnapped and beheaded in Iraq! Remember that British woman who was there doing humanitarian aid? They killed her, regardless of the fact that she was there to help.

There isn’t evidence right now that this latest threat is Al Qaeda based, at least not that I’ve heard. And hopefully this will not turn out to be a big deal. But thinking that somehow if we are just nice to the terrorists, they’ll leave us alone is deluded. What is the logical conclusion, that we should call off the war on terror, apologize to Osama, and huddle in our houses, hoping for the best? If we show weakness, we encourage attacks, we don’t avoid them. We saw this with the way Clinton dealt with Mogadishu. Bin Laden said that our pulling out of Mogadishu showed him that America didn’t have the will to defend itself.

Terrorists don’t care if they are killing liberals or conservatives, or even undecideds. They just want to have as much impact as possible, so that they can spread terror (hence the term “terrorist”) whether it be in a red, blue or purple city or state. Ok, I’m done now. Just had to make that point.

  ¶ 10:36 AM