Why can’t we just call terrorists terrorists when they ARE terrorists?

My thoughts on the attacks and marches on New Year’s day.

Do you remember when, just a few years ago, everybody on the left was mocking the idea of a border wall by saying that illegal immigrants can just fly over it in airplanes? Now, when a man drives a truck with an ISIS flag through New Year’s celebrations, after publicly declaring his allegiance to ISIS online, we have people on the left who refuse to call a terrorist a terrorist. Well how can you mock the “futility” of trying to keep terrorists and their ideologies from entering the country, and then deny the existence of their influence on these terrorists when attacks happen?

How can someone think these things after the year of rising anti-Jewish and anti-American violence in America that we saw in 2024? How can someone think them while there are people in their teens, twenties, and thirties marching in New York while chanting “New Year Revolution, New Year Intifada”?

There’s only really one answer: Because the terrorism does not stem primarily from foreign ideology. It stems from home-grown leftwing ideology that teaches Americans to hate their country and to commit violent acts. The influx of foreign scapegoats is just what the left needs to cover itself whenever its ideas bear fruit, as long as we don’t ever call it what it is like plain-speaking people that really want to stop the violence. That’s the left’s narrative jiu-jitsu: invite violence, have someone commit it under a different banner, then distract with a debate over whether it was or wasn’t violence type A, B, C, etc.

But the bigger question than how people can think that way, is how do we normal Americans get out of the trap to see these issues and the people who create them in a proper light so that we can act against them?

Despite the Trump election, it still takes a lot of courage for someone to publicly admit that 99% of American’s problems would go away if we did away with the illegal immigrants, terrorist-breading mosques and imams, AND our own homemade radical communist left-wingers (including the Democrat party as a whole). Most people think that’s too broad, too brutal, too insensitive. The sad fact is that we care way too much about the motivations of malignant people. Where is there room for being sensitive about people who do any of the following?

• Drive a truck into a crowd in New Orleans on New Years, followed by a shootout with cops.
• Blow up a Tesla in front of Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
• Light a woman on fire in the subway in New York and watch her burn to death.
• Take over apartment buildings in Colorado, while kidnapping and torturing multiple residents.
• Shoot a CEO in broad daylight, because “capitalist greed.”

I’ve spoken to several people who, despite thinking all of the above were terrible in isolation, still fall into the same scapegoat arguments provided by leftwing narratives when looking at them as a whole. For example, they feel the need to point out that although the arson/murderer in New York’s subway was an illegal immigrant, the New Orleans attacker was an American Citizen. Who cares!? What does this “distinction” actually achieve? Do these backstories really matter if all they become are excuse not to dole out justice or to accurately profile future threats? Of course not. Those distinctions only matter if, like John Douglas, you are planning to use them to build profiles, identify, and stop future terrorists. Do you get the impression that this is being given its best effort right now?

More to the point, where is there room for being sensitive about the Americans who march in support of things like “intifada?” Once again, why should it make a difference that these are American citizens? They are openly aligning with enemies of America, and ideologies that are antithetical to the American dream. These people need to stop being described as citizen-first, problem-second. Citizenship is not a getaway free card for terrorism. We need a broader brush in America if we want to deal with this stuff. If you march in solidarity with terrorists then we ought not to care about your backstory; you are a terrorist first and only.

I’ve heard people compare this mindset to those who supported internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II, and that comparison couldn’t be less relevant. First, consider that this action was heavily driven by FDR being a thoroughbred racist and because it allowed for land confiscation for his public works initiatives, not by any interest in national safety. Second, consider that Thomas Sowell has written compellingly about the public sentiment of Japanese Americans in WWII America.

He notes that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly in favor of America against Japan, and that the opposite is true of large Japanese communities in Brazil at the same time. His conclusion being that America is unique in that immigrants who come here legally are generally leaving their allegiance to the old country behind because they believe in or identify more strongly with the American way of life. The Japanese living in Brazil didn’t particularly identify with any Brazilian way of life, so they still strongly supported Japan during the war.

You could also say that the Japanese who moved to most countries didn’t feel like there was something fundamentally lacking about Japan that the new country offered them. America was different. Most people who come to America want to become Americans.

But not all.

Terrorists, islamists, and illegal immigrants do not want to be Americans. They are like the Japanese who moved to Brazil. Their hearts remain with their run-down home countries.* Their mannerisms are still those of their run-down home countries. Their faith is still tied to the jihad of their run-down home religion. What’s more, despite being born in America, leftists are in the same boat. Their minds, hearts, and way of living belong somewhere that is not America.

So why should we treat all these groups with such sensitivity? Why do we even treat them as separate groups when they are really a uniformly-aligned, violently Anti-American movement? It’s time we start calling these terrorists terrorists, and deal out the consequences that they deserve.

*I am not calling Japan a run-down country here, for the record. Modern Japan is a must-visit.