Bill Bennett on Cultural Surrender

We've spoken of battlefields at home and abroad and I received a lot of feedback on my commentary about our culture and our national mindset yesterday when it comes to terrorism here--you can read that commentary at BillBennett.com.

Today we have an update on the most important battlefield we face, the homeland. The Washington Post reports: "Federal authorities unsealed terrorism-related charges against eight men Monday, accusing them of recruiting at least 20 young Somali Americans from Minnesota to join an extremist Islamist insurgency in Somalia."

On another aspect of our cultural problem when it comes to home grown recruits for terrorism, I've long-quoted Melanie Phillips who has written of "pre-emptive cultural surrender." She says western societies suffer from a growing "funk," defined as "a profound loss of cultural nerve which means that we become paralized by the terror of being thought racist, Islamophobic, or xenophobic if we criticize a minority religion, and are further paralized by the terror that any actions against Islamist extremism may provoke civil disorder or more terrorism."

This was clearly the case with Nidal Hasan and Ft. Hood. And it looks like much of the case with the American immigrants from Somalia who were, painful as this is to say, "settled in a gang-ridden enclave of Minneapolis." Minneapolis!

Why is it African immigrants can come here, escaping a forsaken place, for the hope and dream of America and become some of our most patriotic citizens only to see their children sign up for al-Qaeda and its affiliates? We see it, too, with second and more generation Americans like Adam Ghadan and John Walker Lindh. As I've said, youth thirst for a strong medicine, they will seek things like the Boy Scouts or the Gangs. Here they sought the gangs, with inspiration from local mosques. There are today more gang members in America than there are Boy Scouts. I said yesterday we are in danger of losing the idea of what we are fighting both for and against in this war on terror. That's actually only true of the good guys. The bad guys, the terrorists, know what they are fighting against. But what have we done with our teaching about America and what it stands for?

When we constantly run down our country, when our leaders run it down both on the domestic and international stages, when we think we have to apologize to Europe, when our schools instill an ethic of feeling good and promote self esteem over and above a sense of national pride, purpose, and greatness, the vacuum in the soul will be filled with whatever manna is fed our youth. We don't feed them ourselves, so whoever does satisfies the hunger. You want to know the danger of American history being our worst subject, this is it?

Yes, MOST Americans are okay--but how many people does it take to upend this country? One Army major? 19 foreign born Arabs? Well, today's story is about 20 American youth who were recruited for terrorism. We can stop teaching about America in our schools, we can allow leaders to run down the country, we can--in the name of political correctness--refuse to report on suspicious colleagues in uniform who speak of pouring hot oil down the throats of disbelievers, we can bow to foreign leaders, we can make apologies to Europe, we can denigrate democracy movements abroad, and we can stop using the word "terrorism," but there really is only one phrase to describe all that and it is "pre-emptive cultural surrender." And when you surrender the culture, just as when you surrender in war, you lose. When you do it preemptively, it means there was no need for it.