verging_on_random

The enemy within

May 19, 2007 on 11:14 pm | In Uncategorized |

Neo-con American pundit Hugh Hewitt seems to think that the USA has ‘hundreds of thousands’ of illegal immigrants who are ‘jihadists’. He’s scared shitless the proposed law to allow illegal immigrants to be ‘regularised’ will let all these ’sleepers’ gain respectability … presumably until they’re ready to scream “Allahu Akbar” and start blowing themselves up in Times Square, or let off a nukular device at the Superbowl or something.

I suppose I shouldn’t joke about such things because an isolated incident like that (the suicide bomber, not the Tom Clancy stuff) will probably happen sooner or later, but two thoughts occurred to me:

1. Wasn’t the objective of the Iraq thing to fight the jihadists ‘over there’ so they wouldn’t come ‘over here’? If in fact hundreds of thousands of them are already ‘over here’, doesn’t that make the Iraq thing a fairly spectacular failure?
2. If there really are hundreds of thousands of jihadists in the USA, or just thousands - hell, a few hundred even - isn’t it a bit odd that they haven’t managed to do anything since 11 September 2001? Surely terrorism works best if there’s a continuous stream of atrocities.

No disrespect to Hugh Hewitt but on the evidence it seems unlikely that there is a massive terrorist fifth column ready to plunge the USA into turmoil. On the contrary, his paranoid ranting is all too reminiscent of the late Senator Joe McCarthy, who warned that there were Commies everywhere just busting to destroy the land of the free from within.

I bet it’s only a matter of time before Hugh or one of his equally crazed fellow neo-cons waves around a piece of paper claiming it contains the names of 205, or 57, or 81 ‘known jihadists’ working in the State Department or somewhere. While it seems to be subsiding in Australia (thank god), terrorist hysteria still seems to be alive and well in the USA.

Meanwhile, another 100 or so people got killed in Iraq yesterday … I don’t read Hughie getting concerned about them though.