Yet despite the Daily Star’s perversely hopeful tone, there was no violent reaction in the UK from said fanatics, nor was there one in the United States after the episode originally aired here last Thanksgiving weekend (in a grimly ironic twist, the same weekend as the devastating mass murder and mayhem committed in Mumbai by a band of – wait for it – Muslim fanatics, or as the culturally sensitive media preferred to call them at the time, “gunmen”). So why no Muslim fury over The Simpsons?

In the episode “Mypods and Broomsticks,” Homer Simpson believes a local Muslim couple are terrorists planning to blow up the Springfield Mall. It turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a misunderstanding; no plot is being hatched after all. As a spokesman for London’s Sky1 reassuringly sums up, “At the end of the show, all the issues are resolved and Homer realizes the error of his ways.” In other words, Homer was wrong to suspect Muslims – despite seeing them unload dynamite in their garage, despite hearing them discuss blowing up buildings, despite finding the schematics of the targeted local mall on their computer, and despite the fact that, in the real world, Muslim fanatics do have an impressive track record of blowing up innocent civilians.

The moral of the toon: coming forward to protect your community from a possible terrorist attack by Muslims, even with an abundance of probable cause, marks you as a buffoonish bigot. So, contrary to the Daily Star’s claim, the episode did not poke fun at Islam, but at Homer. Simpsons creator Matt Groening explained to Sky1: “Cartoons deal in stereotypes. We try to be sensitive.” Well, sensitive to the murderous rage of Islamists, anyway, since the episode ridicules the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists, while stereotyping Homer as an Islamophobic, paranoid, ignorant American.

Thus CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, ever-ready with a quick denunciation of any criticism of Islam or any association of it with terrorism, instead whipped out a statement approving of the episode’s plotline and congratulating the show’s creators “for tackling the disturbing phenomenon of Islamophobia.” If I were CAIR, I’d be much more concerned about tackling the disturbing phenomenon of violent jihad committed by fanatics who have supposedly hijacked my religion (then again, CAIR is currently tackling revelations that it is a Muslim Brotherhood front group committed to replacing American democracy with Sharia and theocracy). What if Homer Simpson had been right, and the Muslim couple intended to murder and maim hundreds at the local mall? I guess CAIR would rather that he keep quiet and stifle his Islamophobia than act on reasonable suspicion, report the possible bombing to the authorities, and save countless lives.

Najibullah Zazi

Admittedly, those are cartoon characters in the service of comedy writers whose aim is to give the topic a light treatment; but they nonetheless reinforce the default PC position that only stupid bigots draw a connection between Islam and terrorism. In the real world, meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and his ilk are busy making that connection themselves, and political correctness won’t save you from them.

“Mark, this is all very fascinating,” I hear you say,“but doesn’t Obama’s election mean that America is now safer and more ‘well-liked’?” (A concept I previously bashed here) “Won’t our Islamist enemies respond more peacefully and diplomatically to his flaccid ‘open hand’ policy and his many cringe-worthy expressions of pro-Islam sycophancy?” First of all, no less an authority than bin Laden himself has made it clear that he considers Obama no different from his predecessor. Second, since Obama has taken office, over 40 American-born Muslims or converts have been arrested for plotting terrorist attacks here and abroad, including Najibullah Zazi, a Denver-based Muslim who apparently is connected to al Qaeda and at the center of what could have been a catastrophic terrorist plot; Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, for attempting to car-bomb a Dallas office tower; and Muslim convert Michael C. Finton, who planned to blow up a federal building in Springfield (Illinois, not the one in The Simpsons). Even as I write this, Tarek Mehanna and cohorts, apparently desirous “to participate in Islamist holy war,” were arrested in Massachusetts for plotting to attack a mall in the U.S. Are all Muslims terrorists? Of course not; indeed, the fundamentalists have no qualms about targeting Muslims who aren’t onboard with the notion of embracing Sharia and a worldwide Caliphate. But make no mistake, there are untold numbers of Islamists here in America, and many of them want to kill you.

What can you do about it? Join a great activist organization like Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT! for America, buy The Citizen Soldier Handbook: 101 Ways for Every American to Fight Terrorism by my friend Michael Mandaville and put his action items to work, or simply keep your eyes open and trust your instincts. The LAPD recently rolled out a community awareness program called iWATCH, a neighborhood watch service designed to nip terrorist plots in the bud by providing citizens with a hotline to report suspicious activity. Seems a little long in coming - nearly ten years after an alert customs officer arrested Ahmed Ressam at the Canadian border and foiled the “millennium LAX plot” in late December, 1999 - but better late than never. Skeptical, pseudonymous police officer “Jack Dunphy,” pointing out that iWATCH bluntly warns against ethnic profiling, believes the program will be hamstrung by political correctness. He may be right; time will tell. In any case, if only programs of this sort were promoted as frequently on television as Obama’s volunteerism propaganda (which includes nothing about combating Islamic terrorism), Americans would become more conscious of a local role they can play in the war-formerly-known-as-the-war-on-terror.

“The price of freedom,” said Thomas Jefferson, “is eternal vigilance.” Not willful blindness, not political correctness, not naive complacency, but vigilance. While the current administration has its hands full demonizing its critics, winning the praise of dictators worldwide, and embracing anti-American radicals and Sharia supporters, radical Islam continues to wage war against us on our own soil. It’s up to each one of us ordinary Americans, us Citizen Soldiers, to throw off the yoke of political correctness, disregard trumped-up accusations of Islamophobia or racism, and help law enforcement protect our communities and our country from the enemy among us.

Let me state for the record that I firmly believe America should not torture. But I’m at ease about that, because America does not torture. Do we use harsh interrogation techniques?  Of course we do, and why not? This is war – why should we treat captive enemy combatants to a rejuvenating stay at the Four Seasons? Some of these maniacs plotted the devastation of 9/11, all cheered it, and if given the chance, all would gleefully saw your head off and then post a video of it on the Internet as inspiration for others of their fanatical ilk. Many of them might have information that could prevent further mayhem here and abroad – information they’re not going to volunteer simply because we’re congenial hosts.

But liberals presumably would prefer that we sit down with the captives (after bowing to them, of course), and engage in mutually respectful “dialogue”  – the left’s favorite and only way of confronting evil – which will yield no life-saving information, but which will enable them to air their grievances. After we promise to make things right, we can let them return to the battlefield and take up arms against us again. This makes for a pathetic, brainless wartime strategy, but hey, national self-preservation and victory against violent jihad are far less important to liberals than providing our guests with civil rights that the Islamists themselves want to deprive us of.

Many liberals and conservatives say we should handle enemy combatants (I keep forgetting we’re not allowed to call them that anymore) with kid gloves because to do otherwise incites the enemy to take punitive measures against their prisoners of ours. This is perhaps the lamest argument against harsh interrogation. First of all, the Islamists need absolutely no incentive from us to mutilate and murder infidels, Jews, and Muslims who don’t fall in line. Second, they do not operate according to such rules of fair play, so we are not rewarded for our good will. Third, jihadist captives are trained to lie anyway about the brutality of their “mistreatment” at our hands, so what we do is irrelevant. And those who insist that America is obligated to hold herself to a higher standard than our enemy are willfully ignoring the fact that we already hold ourselves to the highest possible standard – and unlike our enemy, we punish any interrogators and guards who cross the line. 

The problem is that the left thinks everything crosses the line, that causing enemy combatants any degree of discomfort constitutes sadism. Because the left in America has commandeered the topic of torture, such basic interrogation techniques as sleep deprivation and waterboarding have been held up as reprehensible and horrific examples of it. Is waterboarding extraordinarily uncomfortable, even panic-inducing? You bet your ass it is, and that’s the point. Is it torture? Not surprisingly, former community organizer Barack Obama has announced that it is, and as with all his opinions about confronting radical Islam, he is wrong.

Do you want to know what torture really is? Have you ever seen a beheading video, or footage of a stoning? Because that’s torture, and nothing America does is even remotely in the same category. Below are four marginally more palatable examples that you won’t hear about in the current liberal-driven debate because they were committed by jihadists, and liberals and their media collaborators don’t want to cloud the whole torture issue by allowing the ghastly facts about our enemy to be introduced. I tried to refrain from explicit detail:

1) The drug-stoked jihadists who devastated Mumbai last Thanksgiving weekend and left nearly 200 infidels dead in their wake took time out from their rampage to sexually torture a rabbi and his pregnant wife (who, as it was later revealed, were their primary targets) before executing them. The doctors who examined the corpses were so horrified they didn’t want to discuss it.

2) This week the leader of a jihadist gang went on trial in Paris. The gang had kidnapped a Parisian Jew in 2006 and tortured him over a period of 24 days – 24 days – during which over 80% of his body was “butchered,” according to police. He was dumped near a train station, bound and unable to speak, and died on the way to the hospital. The gang leader proudly shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” in the courtroom and taunted the victim’s family.

3) In June of that same year, two young American Privates, Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca, were captured and tortured to death by Iraqi insurgents. Their bodies were later dumped and booby-trapped (because of course it’s not enough for the Islamist cowards to butcher helpless captives – they also have to wire the corpses with explosives to cause even more mayhem). The mainstream media reported only that the two had been killed in a “barbaric” way; I won’t even begin to relate here the truth of how horrifically they were mutilated, but if you want a gut-wrenching appreciation not only for what torture really means, but also for the depths of our enemy’s sadism, you can read the details here. 

 4) A former torturer for the Taliban describes here how inventive he used to be in terms of enforcing the most fundamentalist strain of Islam on the planet. His methods against insufficiently pious Muslims included crucifixion and rubbing salt in the wounds of victims who were so badly beaten and bloodied that it was impossible to tell whether they were wearing clothes.

(If these contemporary examples aren’t enough to convince blustery, high-minded liberals that true torture is unimaginably worse than our own interrogation techniques, then they could enlighten themselves with such eye-opening historical examples as: Armando Valladares’ memoir of 22 years in Castro’s prisons, Against All Hope; Haing Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields of Cambodia under the monstrous Khmer Rouge; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic of Communist brutality, The Gulag Archipelago.)

None of the victims in the above list was suspected of war crimes and “harshly interrogated” for information that might prevent another 9/11; on the contrary, all were targeted, cruelly brutalized, and killed by evil men for no other reason than that they were Jews or Americans or supposed “apostates.”

Let’s get real. As much as it pleases the New York Times and leftists here to brand America as “Torture Nation,” we must recognize that there is a vast gulf between the ways we and the enemy treat prisoners. It is the Islamists who torture, not us. Roughing up suspects who have been trained to resist our medically-supervised interrogation techniques, and who are among the most hateful bastards on the planet, in order to extract information that may prevent more terrorist horrors, is not the same as torture. Anyone who says that we’re the bad guys, brutalizing helpless innocents who just happened to be caught in the net of Bush’s chimerical war on terror, is completely divorced from reality.

Speaking of divorced from reality, the Obama administration is determined to pretend that we’re not at war with radical Islam; it recklessly intends to release Guantanamo suspects on our own soil; it is suicidally exposing America’s intelligence secrets to the world; and it is vindictively seeking to retroactively punish the previous administration for its anti-terrorism efforts. The enemy, meanwhile, is laughing at all our moral and legalistic hand-wringing, and at our paralyzing internecine debate about interrogation. They consider it contemptible weakness – which indeed it is. It’s no wonder that insanely apocalyptic Iranian President Ahmadinejad recently declared to America, “We say to you that you yourselves know that you are today in a position of weakness. Your hands are empty, and you can no longer promote your affairs from a position of strength.”

For once, Ahmadinejad is right. Instead of bending over backwards to treat these scourges of civilization better than we treat our own prison population, we need to grow a pair and start presenting an uncompromising and unapologetic strength. The first step is to seize back control of the discussion about torture in this country from those who have no grasp of the reality of torture, who blindly serve the propaganda purposes of our enemy, and who froth at the mouth all day long about the satanic Bush cabal but never have a critical word to say about real evil. It’s time America shows the world that we recognize we already have the moral high ground, that we derive strength and national unity from that certainty, and that from now on the spotlight on torture will be trained on those who are truly guilty of it.