Ok, all you people who think the United States has a right to defend itself, raise your hands. What do you mean by this? To what lengths should we go to ensure the survival of our nation, our way of life, our freedoms and our beliefs? I think the answer to this is easy….as far as necessary. What we are facing as a nation is a hatred of our success and our liberty. The only thing that will placate our enemies is abandoning what we believe. The enemies of freedom, at home and abroad demand that we join the misery that encompasses much of the world.

Our crime is that we're happy. Our crime is that we can feed ourselves. Our crime is that they cannot have what we have without becoming like us. When the system you live under cannot compromise, and compromise is the only way out of poverty, hatred of the prosperous is the only recourse. Otherwise, leaders have to admit to the great unwashed that all the nonsense about self sacrifice is the cause of all their misery. This makes the masses unhappy and the obvious target is the leadership who are often in the minority and living better than everyone else.

The United States doesn't have this problem. Don't get me wrong, we do have unhappy people. They are the whining crybaby leftist bedwetters who think that we should share in the global misery out of some warped sense of fairness. But for the most part, our people are happy and grateful to live in a country where commonality isn't a strict adherence to a religious or political orthodoxy. Instead, we can embrace any religion we please and any political point of view, as long as we are willing to agree that the religion or the politics come second to the greater community or union of common goals and ideals. In other words, you can be a member of a religion, but the Constitution comes first, the religion second. You can be a member of a political party, but the sanctity of the electoral process supercedes the tenets of your politics.

In most of the Moslem nations, Islam comes before the secular and there is no tolerance of other religions. Holding a non-Islamic religious belief is against the law. Promoting a religious belief other than Islam can be a capital offense. This begs the question, do the Moslems visiting or living in this country put Islam first or the Constitution first? If the answer is Islam, then we have a problem. The United States is a tolerant nation, but tolerance doesn't require self immolation.

We don't have to allow our country to be threatened in order to tolerate beliefs that are anti-American. We don't have to allow things to get to the point of the destruction of our institutional freedoms and liberties. We don't have to tolerate the intolerable. If any religion or political stance suggests that the United States should be forced to subscribe to the beliefs of that religion or political stance, then we should seriously consider outlawing that religion or political movement. That's right, freedom of religion and freedom of speech do not require our surrender.

We are at war with a movement which has scattered itself across the Moslem world and has even gone to ground hiding in the United States. This movement believes in a radical form of Islam which preaches hatred for the western world in general and the USA in particular. There are a lot of them and because of their claim to be Islamic, they get funding and rhetorical support from the rest of the Moslem world. The "moderate" Islamic countries, claim that the Taliban doesn't represent Islamic truth but still they insist that we stop attacking them on Islamic holidays. Why? The "moderate" Islamic countries privately assure the Bush Administration that they support the war on terrorism, but insist on supplying money to the Islamic schools which teach hatred of the US. Why?