2 Americas, one understands war, other says it is a bumper sticker

Jack Kelly:

The FBI announced Saturday three Muslim men have been arrested for plotting to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The New York Times ran a story about the plot in Sunday's paper. On page 30. The front page was reserved for a sympathetic story about Omar Ahmed Khadr, a suspected al Qaida terrorist being held at Guantanamo Bay.

We learned early in that story that Mr. Khadr was only 15 when he was arrested in Afghanistan in 2002; that he is "nearly blind in one eye" from the firefight in which he killed one American soldier and maimed another, and that he "doesn't trust Americans." Only much deeper in the story does reporter William Glaberson mention that young Mr. Khadr's father was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.

Had the JFK plot succeeded, thousands of Americans could have been killed, and the economic damage would have been enormous. Reporters Cara Buckley and William Rashbaum don't get around to mentioning this until the 28th paragraph in their story. But in the 5th paragraph, they tell us JFK "was never in imminent danger because the attack was only in a preliminary phase."

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New York Times reporters also played down the threat posed by six Muslim men arrested May 8 for planning to massacre soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The original Times story didn't get around to mentioning that the plotters were Muslims until the 6th paragraph. Subsequent stories questioned whether there was a religious motivation for the planned massacre, and speculated that the Fort Dix Six may have been victims of entrapment.

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On ABC's "This Week" program Sunday, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa) said the JFK airport plotters were provoked by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Rep. Murtha has difficulty with time lines. Sep. 11, 2001 happened before March 19, 2003, when the Iraq War began. So did the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia; the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

Radical Islamists have been trying to kill Americans since long before the Iraq war began. There is no reason to suppose they will stop trying to kill Americans when the war in Iraq ends. But in the Democratic presidential debate in Manchester, New Hampshire Sunday night, all the candidates argued, in effect, that our troubles will be over once the troops have been brought home.

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We should never forget how the retreat from Mogadishu led bin Laden to believe that the 9-11 attacks would force the US to retreat from the Middle East. What would he think of our retreat from Iraq? The Democrat desire for defeat in Iraq is part of a misguided ideology that attempts to avoid the use of force for any reason. It is like they were all raised in the idiotic kindergarten in Michelle Malkin's column today.