Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The long twilight war

If you're tired of reading that Faisal Shahzad tried to blow up people in Times Square because of health care policy or because his home was foreclosed, here's a rational, sober analysis by Fouad Ajami. Shazhad and others of his ilk are, he says, represent a serious threat:

"This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning 'hearts and minds,' no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere - Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes - are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies."

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