Listen to the enemy

Ralph Peters:

AS White House staffer Jane Austen put it to Sen. Darcy: "It is a truth univer sally acknowledged that a single terrorist in possession of a good bomb must be in want of patient understanding."

Unfortunately for Washington wonks determined to deny that Islamist extremists are motivated by extremist Islam, the pride and prejudice of Allah's butchers were on public display (again) this week.

Framed in florid quotations from the Koran, the Gitmo Five - hard-core terrorists, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed - proclaimed in a filing released by a brave military judge that "We are terrorists to the bone" who regard the charges resulting from "the blessed 11 September operations" as "badges of honor."

Desperate to placate its blame-America supporters, the Obama administration has clamped down on news from Guantanamo. Why? After their lurid criticisms of Gitmo, the Dems now have the world's worst killers on their hands.

And they don't know what to do. Responsibility sucks.

At the core of our inability to cope with Islamist terrorists lies Washington's denial that fanatical Islam is even a factor. Yet refusing to accept that Islam Gone Wild is behind the actions of al Qaeda or the Taliban is akin to insisting that sex has nothing to do with making babies.

Other factors may intensify or accelerate a terrorist's will to slaughter the innocent. But the dark heart of the matter is that these men believe they're on a mission from their god to punish the godless (including fellow Muslims who don't measure up).

Yet, no matter how fiercely our enemies declare that their faith compels them to kill, our elected and appointed officials continue to insist that the terrorists don't understand themselves - that they're really driven by economic factors or our own foreign-policy missteps, that their savage interpretation of Islam is only a ploy . . .

Shouldn't we pay just a little attention to what our enemies say about themselves?

Radical Islam isn't just a smokescreen. Jihad is real. And it ain't about who got the Coca-Cola franchise in Khartoum.

...

Listen to the Gitmo Five. Unlike our Washington pols, they have intellectual integrity. They're telling us honestly who they are and why they seek to kill us.

Our response? "They don't know what they're talking about."

You can see this refusal to listen to the enemy from people like Joe Biden this week who still insist that 80 percent of the Taliban are not serious even when they tell us they are. I have always maintained that our enemies driving force is their religious bigotry. They even admit it, but liberals still try to suggest that more day care centers and hospitals are the answer.