These Are Traitorous Times

Now that the silly season is over, and the Labor Day weekend is just an alcohol-hazed memory, it's time for gravitas, so I shall write about treason. Back on the old continent, liberal courts have been freeing Islamic zealots prosecuted under new post-Sept. 11 antiterrorist laws, labeling the laws as "discriminatory and unlawful." The zealots were not foreigners, but passport holders of their adopted countries, mainly Britain and Belgium.

There is absolutely no restraint shown at the 500-some-odd mosques of Britain during Friday prayers, the imams who run these hotbeds swinging freely against the West in general and America in particular. P.C. makes it impossible for the media to headline these outrages and call for the arrest of the rabble-rousers. It is a strange thing: during wartime there were no Nazi sympathizers permitted to proselytize and preach against Uncle Sam's efforts. But here we are at war with militant Islamofascists and, according to the London Sunday Times, 3000 British passport holders have been recruited since 1996 for training in Osama bin Laden's Afghan camps. What in hell is going on here?

Muslim clerics are open about their intentions in places like Britain, but they restrain themselves against attacking host countries such as France and Germany. Which is par for the course. Both the French and Germans have regularly paid their dues to terrorists, as did the Dutch until the recent murder of Pim Fortuyn. But this is Europe, a tired old place full of culture and good food, but as eager to fight back as Bill Clinton was to go to Vietnam. There are now 13 million Muslims living in Western Europe, and the EU bigshots worry only about p.c. and offending minority cultures.

Uncle Sam, however, is a different story. The leader of the world is flexing his muscles abroad, but is blind where its own backyard is concerned. Forty years ago there were fewer than 20 mosques in America; now there are more than 2000. Saudi Arabia, the greatest Trojan horse since the original, provides the driving missionary zeal and most of the funding. Although freedom of worship is part of the Bill of Rights, if, say, the Catholic Church preached a holy war against America and obedience to the Pope, there would not be many Catholic churches left standing, if any. Tens of thousands of copies of the Koran are dispatched regularly to American prisons, where African-Americans predominate. The National Islamic Prison Foundation coordinates a nationwide campaign to convert prisoners to Islam. There are 135,000 such conversions every year.

Now, for the $64,000 question, as they used to say on tv during the 50s. (I haven't watched the idiot box-except for sports and old movies-since then.) Political correctness aside, are these people committing treason if they preach that Sept. 11 was plotted by the government in order to launch a crusade against Islam? Of course they are, no ifs or buts about it. Under the guise of free speech and freedom of religion we have an enormous Fifth Column operating right in front of our nose, but our armchair warrior-heroes want to fight abroad. Like charity, treason begins at home, and the media should call a spade a spade and dub those who preach treason traitors and be done with it.

Mind you, treason ain't what it used to be, not since the Vietnam War, that is. The first book that I read upon my return from abroad was Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in Vietnam, by Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer. It is a short, good book, a veritable source on what treason is and how Jane Fonda gave aid and comfort to those fighting against her country. I highly recommend it. Had Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution, which defines treason as "levying war" against the United States, "or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort," been enforced, Fonda would have been arrested and tried and-if I had anything to do with it-given life in prison. Fonda's defenders hide behind the canard that the U.S. had not declared war against North Vietnam, ergo she was exercising her right of free speech. The Holzer book wipes the floor with that argument, pointing out that Aaron Burr was indicted for "levying war" even though Uncle Sam was not at war with anyone at the time.

In 1863, in United States v. Greathouse, Justice Stephen Field made the point that "the term enemies?applies only to subjects of a foreign power in open hostility with us." Needless to say, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, voted by every member of the Senate except for Wayne Morse and Ernst Gruening, constituted a contingent declaration of war. Although Jane Fonda always denied levying war against the United States, she undeniably gave aid and comfort to the enemy, and went as far, in fact, as to excuse the barbarous treatment of our pilots by calling them war criminals who deserved it. We tried Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally for their broadcasts from abroad during World War II, but the government refused to indict Jane Fonda for traveling abroad to spread propaganda against her country. In fact, Hollywood gave her an Oscar for playing a whore in 1971.

Which brings me to yet another point: Western intellectuals were tireless in their defense of the tyranny that was communism, and a decade after its collapse, I don't know of a single academic or egghead who has recanted and done a mea culpa. A hatred of America seems to be the universal theme that unites these morally blind people, and the media has also played a terrible part in ignoring the untold suffering of tens and tens of millions. This hatred of America was developed by Western intellectuals in the late 1960s as "moral equivalency," the notion that both capitalism and communism were equally corrupt and tyrannical, thereby absolving each from criticism. Thus the moral and physical outrages committed by the most evil system in history against hundreds of millions were passed over by our chattering classes as one and the same with the occasional outrages of capitalism.

Under such a climate, no wonder traitors like Jane Fonda not only walked free, but were actually lionized by the left. This climate endures today, and is as strong as ever. This is why John Walker Lindh, who should have been tried by a military court on the spot and shot at dawn, will enjoy a trial by his peers and the comforts of an American jail, showers and tv included. He might even walk, if the p.c.-multicultural rabble have their way. In the meantime, Bandar is photographed with our president, while another towelhead, at present down below, offers a horse to those who lost their loved ones when those financed by the likes of Bandar flew airplanes into the WTC. Talk about "my kingdom for a horse." Let's take their kingdom, and let them keep their horses as well as their camels.