Can politicians handle the truth about Islamic terrorism?

Joan Vennochi:

AMERICANS CAN handle the truth. But when it comes to terrorist acts on American soil, government officials are reluctant to give it to us straight from the start.

Instant analysis of the Times Square bomb scare kicked off with the usual official disclaimers: Don’t presume a Muslim extremist had anything to do with it.

It was likely a “lone wolf’’ operation, suggested Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, or, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated, “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.’’ Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, said it was being treated as a “potential terrorist attack’’ but it could be a “one-off’’ or isolated incident.

The arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, quickly ended alternative theories. Shahzad is not a Tea-Partier-gone-wild or someone unable to take the pressure of home foreclosure, as some news reports intimated. He told authorities his efforts to blow up innocent people are connected to the Pakistani Taliban.

The SUV parked in Times Square and packed with crude explosives appears to represent that group’s first effort to attack the United States. It stands as yet another, thankfully failed, effort by terrorists with Islamic ties to attack in America.

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the corresponding war on terror that American troops have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the average citizen gets it. Some Muslim extremists want to kill Americans and will keep on trying to accomplish their mission.

It’s the first thought that registers when a bomb is placed in cars, shoes, or underwear by someone described as Muslim. What’s so terrible about acknowledging that link?

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Whether or not Shahzad was connected to a militant jihadist Pakistani network, “he is not a lone wolf,’’ argues M. Zuhdi Jasser, president and founder of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a group that promotes the separation of religion and state. “The ideas that drove him to act did not hatch in his own mind. We ignore to our own detriment the common ideology, the common malignant virus of the slippery slope of political Islam that takes over these Muslims. When are we going to wake up as a nation?’’

Jasser, whose views are controversial to some Muslims, also believes that “many politicians are in denial or in avoidance behavior that there is a common ideology that threatens us. It is far more dismissive and expedient to say, ‘Well, just this last case must be isolated, forget the previous 100.’ ’’

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There is an enemy out there and most of us know who he is. It springs from an ideology of Islamic bigotry and supremacy. Not all Muslims follow that ideology, but those who do are willing to engage in mass murder for Allah operations against non combatants in the US and elsewhere.

The left in this country would rather blame these attacks on the Tea Party movement or militia movements, but the reality is Muslim religious bigots are the people who want to kill us. To hear all those voices suggesting other alternatives when terrorist strike suggest that some are not prepared for the leadership needed in this war.