I am neither bothered nor influenced by sorrowful or alarming photographs, nor by emotional scratchings left on a girder at the site of a building destroyed by terrorists.

In my judgement, the lessons to be learned from the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the attack on the Pentagon building in Washington, along with all the deaths caused therein, was that the United States government never should have allowed large numbers of Arab islamists to come to this country, either as immigrants, students or temporary workers. And further, that those already here should be removed from our shores.

As for feeling sorry for our national selves, that is as useless as keening for the victims of any other disaster, including the holocaust of the European Jews, the dead Turkish Armenians of 1915, the dead Soviet Ukrainians of 1933, or the mixed armies of dead from diseases such as AIDS. You must all learn to live in the present and the future, because there is no going back to the past, and attempts to do so are what largely cause so much of this planet's human turmoil.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

If we can not FEEL the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

I don't get that anyone is feeling "sorry" for them 'selves' in the least nationally or otherwise. All of the aforementioned happenings you mentioned, Arnold, are human transgressions that need to be looked at, analyzed and not repeated.

As human beings, that are thinking and feeling, it is irresponsible to look at events and happenings with only ones mind--i.e. your word 'judgement.' To be a whole human and act responsibly in a society one is called upon to use all of their senses--not just their brains. Their are many intelligences, Leonardo da Vinci identified the 5 senses. All animals have these. The separating factor in humans, I feel is their ability to combine reason--the thinking mind with feeling. Try it.

Despite being an immigrant myself, I agree with Arnold in this case. Countries like the USA and Canada, under pressure from leftist multiculturalists, have allowed thousands, if not millions of hard-core islamofascists to enter these 2 countries, and despite all that has happened since that horrible morning of Sept 11th, the governments of these 2 countries have been unable to either stop the flow of Islamic terrorists or deport the ones in-country right now.
i guess the multiculturalists will rather allow islamofascists to destroy our society, rather than allow the "civil rights" of the terrorists violated!!!

Katherine,

I respectfully disagree with your position on making public policy on the basis of emotion rather than cold analysis. It is true as you point out that all animals have and use five senses. And that is precisely why we have mastered all of them and the entirety of this planet in the fullness of human evolution. It is not the clouded leopards who protect us in zoos, but the other way around. That is the nature of intelligence and its continuous exercize.

In a history of America's entrance into World War I in 1917, I found a passage that interested me. It was about US president Woodrow Wilson; specifically, about his dislike of receiving eye-witness and other first-hand reports. As a well-school person, he had trained his own instincts solely to act upon written and carefully-arranged facts that he could analyze and act upon.

I am a a student of history with no particular fondness for Woodrow Wilson and the role he played injecting the United States into World War I; nevertheless, I am prepared to admit that he was right in the way he organized his thoughts, analyzed reports and did his decision-making. I also believe in totally objective analysis of facts. Emotion always is the enemy of objectivity, and all too frequently ensnares people into unwise decisions and frequently counter-productive decisions.

Translating all this into the particular lesson to be learned from the 9/11 attacks: It is easier and more effective to fight international terrorism by making certain that terrorists have no means of coming into our country, than it is to chase them fruitlessly and endlessly around the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Saudi Arabia, and the hell-holes of Gaza and Baghdad. Keep out the Arabs and expel those already here, and never again shall there be any Arab terrorist attacks on American cities. If you wish to control mosquitoes and other insects which breed there, first drain the swamps and standing pools of water.

This probably does not sound politically correct. But I could not care less about such considerations.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold,

Your points are well taken. However, I do not agree with your underlying premise and refer you again to my post. I did not say ONLY emotion. I stated that we must use all of our available human capabilities. Not merely analysis, not purely emotion.

I do differentiate between emotion and feeling. Emotion is instinctual, gut level--fight or flight. Feeling is the more humane, useful end of the spectrum of that realm and includes intuition--it is an intelligence. Much has been written on this subject.

When thought is melded with feeling, tempered with experience and sifted through spirit it becomes wisdom. Otherwise, it is reaction.

Your expulsion logic is flawed and emotion based. It is an ALL statement and does not hold up. There is no such thing as a true "all" statement. Refer to Plato, Aristotle, Einstein, and countless others. Also stating that a certain group of people are the cause of terrorism is flawed logic. A culture is not a terror group. Some people in that culture do things that hurt other people. That is not the whole of that people. Americans do things that hurt Americans as well. Have you checked our murder statistics lately?

Banning a group of people based on their race is prejudice. It is emotional ignorance based on fear--an emotion. It is a reactional behavior that is thousands of years old. I use ignorance in the literal sense. I am not name calling.

I keep thinking that different is not better. Logic would ask us to reach for a higher solution.

I do agree that there are holes in the immigration system that can and should be modified so that our country is safe. I do agree that the lack of safety measures contributed to the deaths of many people and to 9/11. I do feel our government should protect its people from those who come here to harm others. I do not agree that because a person 'looks' a certain way, or comes from a certain country that they are automatically a terrorist.

My son is currently serving in the war. He tells me that the people of Kuwait, although very different from him are some of the kindest, least prejudicial people he has ever met in the world. He says they don't look at his blonde hair or his age and judge him. Interesting...

Arnold is something of a Vulcan when it comes to these things.

Which is okay, because he's balanced out by Ara Rubyan, who's more of a Betazoid. :-)

Katherine, I was just short of my eighth birthday in 1942, some weeks after the Japanese attack on US army and naval forces at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, when then-president Franklin D Roosevelt ordered the expulsion of the entire Japanese-American population from the west coast and their incarceration in concentration camps guarded by US military personnel.

Very few people in the United States of 1942 gave this decision so much as a second thought, and a year or so later, the US Supreme Court, in Korematsu vs United States, brushed off a law suit about this action which had been brought against the government by Fred Korematsu, one of those so expelled and locked into a camp. It is frequently pointed out that no act of sabotage or other treason was carried out by any Japanese-American. To which I would respond that you cannot carry out acts of sabotage or treason while locked up in a concentration camp. The large Japanese-American population in Hawaii, throughout the war, was in the presence of a garrison of more than 100,000 armed and watchful Americans. There was no trouble.

After the war, the same Japanese-Americans found their way into a myriad of peaceful and useful pursuits in mainstream America.

Was all this caused by racism and xenophobia? You bet your ass it was, and I don't give a damn. Despite the fact that I am shortly to acquire a Japanese family as a group of in-laws through marriage of one of my sons to a girl who has a Japanese-American sister-in-law. And equally despite the fact that I am an outspoken admirer of Japanese history, culture, methods of enterprise and other attributes of that truly outstanding nation. But just because I admire someone does not mean that I cannot acquiesce in locking them into a concentration camp or expelling them from this country.

A large and growing islamic and Arab population in this country is a danger to the physical safety of the United States, and it will remain such until islam as a culture is thoroughly de-fanged, either as an internal process or because the leaders of this country one day may feel compelled to put to death some millions of them through thermonuclear destruction of certain of their large cities. As a message that they never again should fuck with us.

And in any case, just what do you imagine is going to happen if Arab terrorism begins striking again in this country, perhaps repeatedly?

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

....Katherine and Arnold have both moved me beyond, well...I grew up on a border city. It has changed more than a mere more can describe...
A son of blonde blue eyes of blue...I hear that word picture, Katherine I DO I DO.
...my baby son...,. is your word picture serving our Border in a green colored uniform...we both could lose at any given moment.
Arnold protecting our borders is at a crisis beyond, just beyond a magnituude humanly possible to understand. I will repeat like an old morse code....dotdotdotdotdot probably should be capital, excuse this old mind & frail old hand. meaning the dots should be DOTDOTDOTDOTDOTDOTnamed after a famous brilliant old man.
You are both right so what do we do?

I cannot rewrite the above DEAN....it should have been mere word. I meant Morris was capitol. Humans do make mistakes. My hands are sincerely ravished by the hounds of hell.
For a child or just a simple person to understand. A disease of the immune system, rhum.arth. If a child saw it--it would scare him or her if he or she were not sat down and explained in a word pic.............the.........fix

May I know peace and the root of peace.
May my son know peace and the root of peace.
May Arnold know peace and the root of peace.
May Iraq know peace and the root of peace.
May the world know peace and the root of peace.
May I, my son, Arnold, Iraq, and the world know peace.
(A Buddhist tradition of prayer and compassion.)

Katherine: that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee...

Cato said it long ago: "If you would have peace, prepare for war."

The Versailles Treaty didn't bring peace.
The Washington Naval Treaties didn't bring peace.
The Kellog-Brian Pact didn't bring peace.
Locarno didn't bring peace.

It was the British 7th Armored Division, the US 1st Infantry Division, the 101st & the 82nd Airborne, the 45th Infantry, and other -uncounted- divisions along with the RAF, the USAAF (and most especially) the XXth Bomber Command that brought peace.

Its about remembrance, guys and gals - everyone should take some time to write down their impressions of that day, as a legacy for the future: I did, this was part of what I got onto paper -

...As I recall now, I couldn’t even read the newspaper on September 12th - it was eight months later before I read the special section devoted to the 9/11 attacks. I was in my garage, trying to bring some order to it as I had just moved into my new house and as we had moved from a 2,200 sq foot house to a 1,500 sq foot house, we had a bit more stuff than we had house. I opened a box to see what was in it and there it was - the special section from 9/11. I sat down to read it - and was soon crying alone in my garage. The feelings of that day resurfaced - the sadness, the frustration and the burning desire for vengence upon the criminals who did this and all who helped them in any way....

Always remember. Whenever you wonder why we're doing what we do - remember; think of That Day, remember how you felt.

Arnold did something that I've noticed that not very many do, in his first post above.

He mentioned the Pentagon.

Oh, I know everyone knows it was hit too, but it seems to mostly not get mentioned. The only excuse I've seen for this is that 'oh not so many people died'.

But I think it goes deeper than that. I think folks don't want to look at the very dark pit of anger that must burn in our military.

I know I saw it in the eyes of the airmen when I worked out at the base gym before we went into Iraq. It is a dark burning that will not be easily quenched.

Perhaps not until the last Arab nation is either a democracy or a smoldering pit.

A cup of Tazo Earl Grey tea please...

As Dean said, "Because it drove home for me that unity will never exist among we frail and foolish mortals."

Good Night All.

Casey,

Don't forget the Soviet military that sacrificed far more than any western army did. Of course, their military leaders were far more inept than ours.

That being said, while your argument may be backed up by history, it only perpetuates the cycle of retribution throughout nations and fanatic groups within those nations. History has also shown that it is nearly impossible to reason with such radical groups. (Even with bombs, which almost always tends to strengthen the overall movement.)

If I want peace in my house and in my community, I don't prepare for "war" by automatically setting up a defensive perimeter in my front yard or living room. Peace begats peace. I will not accept your conclusion outright....that's just me....an Army guy WITHOUT the seething anger for revenge.

Tim the Soldier

Tim,

I was an "Army guy" 50 years ago this year, just in time a few months before the Korean war ended. I was not seething for revenge against anyone for anything then, and I am not so today either.

Those of us who favor seriously restricting immigration to this country and expelling those whose culture is at war with ours do this strictly as a prudent measure of protecting our society against one of the most virulent forces of hate and destruction that has ever been visited upon this planet.

Nor is there any sense of revenge or hate in suggesting that it may some day be necessary for this country to incinerate some of the major breeding grounds of wahhabist mass terrorism in the Arab lands. Some cultures understand no language other than brute force, and it is sometimes necessary for western societies whose citizens value their freedoms to use such force against those who wish to reduce the human race to slavery under their form of islam.

I am certain that Casey Tompkins did not bring up the references to our World War II victories out of a sense of hatred and revenge. Did our forces and those of our British and Russian allies commit mass killings during that war? They surely did. Were they justified? I was a child of that era, and I say that no action would have been unjustified in ending the career of armed Nazism and Japanese imperialism.

You were certainly correct in pointing out that the Soviet army suffered far higher casualties than did our own forces in World War II. One day my wife and I intend to visit eastern Europe, and we hope to visit the great monuments marking the battle of Stalingrad -- the greatest battle in history -- where so many Russian soldiers laid down their lives 61 years ago to stop Hitler's march of conquest at the banks of the Volga river.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold,

Good points. I am certainly in agreement with you....now, I'm scared ;-).

Tim the Soldier

I am certainly in agreement with you....now, I'm scared ;-).

Tim: Didn't Nostradamus say that was one of the signs of the Apocolypse?

Arnold,

I would rather leave our country exposed to terrorists than to stoop to the expulsion of Arabs. Holding the moral high ground has risks, but the rewards are greater. We just need to enforce existing immigration laws. After all, these dorks just got lucky. The ideological war is much more significant than the actual threat.

The correct response is the one we are taking. The military pro-active response is much preferable to living in a fortress. I think Tim would agree that the correct response to a threat is to destroy it offensively. (Preferably while there asleep, heh heh heh.) Besides, Sept 11 was a result of sissy-ass security procedures at the airlines. Give up the plane? Security by surrender?

Lets not loose our heads here. As threats go, Islamics are no comparison to the Axis powers.

Oh, and the action we needed to change was passivity in response to attack.
The leason we need to learn is: stop supporting dictatorships. (And now that the cold war is over we don't have to compromise anymore.)

Hayes, the only moral high ground that I recognize is the security of the USA. Fuck all the rest.

As for comparisons, the islamicists are an even great threat than the Nazis were. In comparison to most of Adolf Hitler's master race, the Arabs islamists apparently are not afraid to die in the service of their jihad, and the believers among them think they are going straight to paradise the moment the Semtex, C4 or the jet aircraft goes bang. That makes such people too dangerous for the rest of us to hang around with. Remember: They cannot threaten anything or anybody in this country if they are excluded from being here.

Besides, there are a lot of potential enterprising black folks who could just as easily run the Arab-owned 'Palestine' grocery stores that pop up around the poorer parts of just about every city in America. It's about time someone gave THEM a break and stopped catering to foreign troublemakers who want to bring their vicious and hateful culture over here.

I say again. Keep them out, and get rid of a lot of the ones already here. After all, how can you really tell which ones of these people you can trust not to kill you if they get a chance? Otherwise, what is going on in the west bank and Gaza right now will visit our shores one day. Again.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

That kind of security is available Arnold, in North Korea. Trading freedom for security turns US into the thing our soldiers have been fighting against this country was conceived. Why do you think that the one thing that Iraqis all seem to miss about Saddam is security?

Immigration is another matter. I tend to agree that we hang up the "No Vacancy" sign. However, "Arabs Raus!" is not going to increase our security. It will prove the Islamio-fascist-terrorists propaganda of Arab oppression by the west. Arnold, if we loose the political war, we loose the war. We couldn't even pay for enough security measures and terror alert color codes to compensate for the wave of fresh terrorists that would spawn in the Arab world. So again, unless you want to live in a fortress, or DPRK, defeat the enemy. The enemy is Islamio-fascist-terrorists lies and the battlefield is hearts and minds.

As for comparisons to the Nazis, besides the common fascism and “master race/master religion” ideology, the threat is not even in the same category. Hell, the VC were a bigger threat than these guys, how many of our pilots has Al Qada shot down? They have no air force, no tanks, you see where I’m going…

Well Arnold, it’s their willingness to be kamikazes that makes them so dangerous then, huh? I have never heard anyone claim that the Nazis (or Imperial Japan) were not fanatical enough to die for their cause but I’m sure you can search google under “World War II”.

{Remember: They cannot threaten anything or anybody in this country if they are excluded from being here.}

Remember: Even the Israelis can’t prevent all terrorist attacks.

is it not better to die free than live imprisoned?

Hayes,

Expelling a group of culturally-identified immigrants from this country in the name of public safety does not mean most of us lose our freedoms; it just means that a number of potentiall dangerous Arabs get removed to a foreign shore where they can and will rage against us, but do no harm other than that. And frankly, I don't really give a damn about their civil liberties.

About the Israelis not totally stopping daily terrorist attacks against them and their children. You are absolutely correct, but you also help me make my point. There would be no Arab terrorist attacks against Israelis if they were all expelled east of the Jordan river, where they already have a "Palestianian" state. The Jordan river is the nearest defensible and exclusionary border available to Israel east of the Mediterranean sea. I would expelled every last one of them in 1967 immediately following the Six Day War.

And no, I do not believe in even the remotest possibility of peace with the Arabs, either for the Israelis or for the Americans. Their particular culture drives them to perpetual war against the non-islamic west.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold, your first graph is flatly racist, and wrong. Expelling people and denying due process to immigrants, many of who are surely citizens, on the basis of ethnicity is simple-minded bigotry. The immigration laws on the books are adequate, they just need to be enforced.

Of course you’re right about the Jordanian River keeping out the riffraff. Everyone knows that Arabs can't swim, right? Of course they hate peace, and freedom too.

Balderdash! People are people, and some truths are self-evident. Would you not rather have a customer than an enemy? The path of reconciliation (after the fascists are defeated) is the correct path. Look at Germany: WW1 (Punished- Hello, Hitler!) WW2 (reconstructed-You want fries with that?) You can never win a war with an entire race of people, unless you exterminate them.

Even if we took these draconian measures your are suggesting it wouldn’t work. Tiny Israel may be able to seal its border but we can’t even seal Iraq and it is much smaller than US and under Martial law. . This is a free society and I like it that way, thanks!

You solutions would doom us to an endless war sir!

Expel Arafat, kill Saddam and Osama, and force these Feudal Arab governments to get with the program.

Hayes, the language in which you couch your arguments is becoming shrill and juvenile. Unless you have lived in the Middle East as I did for almost two years in 1973-1974, I know more about that place than you do. As a fellowship graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during that time, I got to meet numerous Israelis and Arabs, and nothing that I learned in those two years has been contradicted by events since then.

And I can tell you from this perspective that no permanent peace is possible between the Jews of Israel and the islamic Arabs, who gained control over all the lands from the Persian gulf to the Atlantic ocean in the 7th and 8th centuries, and have enslaved their own peoples there ever since.

There is continual low-intensity war there now precisely because two disparate peoples with totally unalike cultures are fighting for control of the same small patch of land. People are dying almost every day because of this. The country is too small to divide, and none of the participants would ever agree to abide permanently with such a division of territory.

There really is only one way out. That is to remove one of the two hostile populations. In theory, the Jews could be sent back to Europe or their hundreds of home countries from which they or their ancestors migrated to Israel. Except that the Jews now have some six million people on the ground in Israel, including almost 200,000 in the part of Jerusalem they annexed after the 1967 war, and almost 250,000 in "Yesha" -- Yehuda, Shomron, Azza (Judea, Samaria, Gaza) and on the Golan. More significantly, they have the largest and most modern armed force in the region, backed by about 175 nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and Jericho-III ballistic missiles which can deliver such ordnance on any islamic city from Pakistan to Morocco.

The other choice is to relocate the Arabs. There are only about three million of them living under Israeli rule. Most of them live within 20 minutes bus ride west of the Jordan river, and could be resettled across that river in Jordan, which in reality IS the Palestinian state, or in some 22-23 other islamic Arab countries. Then the daily terror would be over, both for the Arabs and the Jews.

I don't know what you really know about history, so let me remind you this is exactly what has happened throughout the ages. In the 1930s, supposed mistreatment of large German populations all around eastern Europe were the excuses that Adolf Hitler used to invade and destroy both Czechoslovakia in 1938 and a year later, Poland, thereby launching World War II.

At the end of that war, with Nazi Germany destroyed, some 12 million Germans were expelled from their homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Prussia, Silesia, Hungary, Romania and Jugoslavia, and driven westward across the Oder river, which then became modern Germany's permanent eastern border. That is a fact of history which will not be altered without another world war engulfing Europe.

In 1948, when the British imperial rule ended on the Indian subcontinent, that country was broken up into India and Pakistan. Amid great violence, millions of hindus were driven out of their homes into what become India, and millions of moslems were driven out of their homes into what became Pakistan. Sort of like the shifting of continental plates that take place periodically in geological processes as the earth continually remolds itself.

This has happened throughout history, and it shall happen repeatedly as long as the human race inhabits this planet.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold,
My language is and has been forthright and civil. And I stand by my "couching". You are proposing collective punishment by exile based on race. If it walks like a duck, it’s a duck. In addition, juvenile is description perfectly befitting the use of "fu*k" and "damn" as in:

{Hayes, the only moral high ground that I recognize is the security of the USA. Fuck all the rest.}
and
{And frankly, I don't really give a damn about their civil liberties.}

Arnold, I don't need a "history through the ages" brief every time we discuss a topic. Save the electrons, and my time. In addition you have a graph on several other conflicts, lets stick to one topic at a time. I could spend hours on the Indo-Pack wars alone.

So what about this US Arab expulsion you are so eager for? How do you expect to seal thousands of miles of US border? Regarding Israel, you’re right, the Palestinian State is Jordan. And I wouldn’t mind seeing the Palestinians relocated there as part of a peace deal. The other neighboring Arab countries have used the Palestinian people as a human weapon against the Israelis since they were expelled from Jordan. I don't want them forced out at gunpoint, for the simple reason that it would make our support for Israel all these years seem as biased against Arabs as the Islamo-terrorists claim it is. (And expulsion STILL wouldn’t prevent terrorist attacks in Israel or the US either so it really is a loose-loose.) But even if the Arabs and Israelis really can’t ever live together in peace the Arabs and Americans can. Let’s support; not sew ourselves to Israel.

What you learned about "that place" at Hebrew University was that all Arabs are unredeemable peace hating terrorists and can't be trusted then your claim of expertise is dubious at best.

Yes Arnold, There have been conflicts throughout history. There have also been as many truces.

Hayes, I have never written or said anything about expelling large groups of people from a country because of revenge. The sole justification for expulsion is to protect a country against known or probable enemies, present or future. America's multi-racial problems and potentials are now fully built into our domestic scheme of things, and can largely be dealt with over time. But the admission here of large numbers of moslems, whose very culture is inimical to the freedoms that people here take for granted, in inexcusable. I would not let them come and I would not let them remain here.

In the case of Israel, there will be no peace treaty between the Jews and the local Arabs. And certainly not so long as the Israelis allow a hateful mob of Arabs to live in their prime territory west of the Jordan River. Because the Arabs truly wish to expel all the Jews from the Middle East, and because regardless of what they all say, the very soul of Judaism and Zionism is to reclaim and resettle the entiretry of ancient Eretz-Yisrael. The Jewish-Arab conflict began at the end World War I, when significant numbers of Jews came into the country, and has continued unabated.

Israel is spreading all over the conquered territories regardless of this permanent conflict. Partly this is do to ideology and Israel's defense considerations. But a lot more is explained by studies of urbanization. Most of the big settlements are suburbs and exurbs of Israel's major cities, growing the same way they grow here in North America.

There are now about a quarter-million Jews residing in Yesha (Yehuda, Shomron, Azza and Golan). The population growth rate in these territories is the highest in all Israel, and the population there is doubling every eight years. No government in Israel will now abandon these settlements, some of which already are major cities on Israel's scale of size. In fact, just about the only source of employment for Arabs on the west bank is earning money from Jewish contractors building largescale housing for Jewish families moving into the settlements. The world may moan, scream or shout about all this, but nothing will change. Take my word for it. I have been there.

In the end, the Arabs will in fact be forced to emigrate because of the all but impossible economic conditions under which they live, or at Israeli gunpoint, or both. And that is good. Because with the Arabs removed to the real Palestinian state, it may lay the groundwork in the future for a peace that can work.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

lkn