The circumstances of the murders at Naval Air Station Pensacola look like a terrorist attack (tip to Instapundit):
The Air Force trainee who killed three and injured eight when he opened fire at a naval base in Florida assailed the United States as 'a nation of evil' before he went on his shooting rampage, AFP reports.
The man, first identified by NBC News as Saudi national Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, opened fire inside a classroom at Naval Air Station in Pensacola early Friday morning. Police quickly responded to the scene and he was shot dead.
US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the suspect was a second lieutenant attending the aviation school at the base.
Law enforcement arrested six other Saudi citizens. Three of them filmed the attack.
Unfortunately--despite being "intensively vetted" before being allowed into our training program--if those Saudis watched MSNBC while in America they'd get all the reinforcement they'd need of their view of America's guilt to justify their killing spree.
I've noted it before but it bears repeating. The vast majority of the victims of the jihad are other Moslems who aren't quite of the approved kind of Moslem as defined by the jihadi scumball losers. Americans and other Westerners are collateral damage in that civil war within Islam to define Islam.
We have a role in this civil war. One, we need to protect ourselves at home. Two, we need to help the reasonable Moslem people defeat the fanatics so better people define Islam. They deserve as much as we do the chance to live in peace not under threat of death or acid attack for being different.
This requires America to lead a coalition of Western states in killing jihadis abroad and arresting them at home to both protect ourselves and to make it safer for the reasonable people to reject the jihadi version of Islam. This is a holding action, and while necessary is not the way to defeat the source of the problem.
For that we have to bolster the reasonable people who want to change Islam into a modern religion that rejects intolerant conquest of all those who disagree with whatever form of Islam is designated as the dominant form. This is where the real victory will take place. Even imperfect leaders who can start the change must be supported.
And this is why I still retain hope that the Arab Spring will yet succeed despite the failure to transform the Arab portion of the Islamic world. For God's sake we should support reform in Iraq--which will have the effect of also rejecting Iranian influence--as those protesters have demanded even while being killed.
It's a long spring, too.
Until that victory of the reasonable people happens, we will continue to have terror attacks at home. With calls to ratchet up our security a little more to protect us from the next one. Which eats away at our freedoms one victim at a time. Which is another form of the collateral damage of the Islamic civil war.
The war on terror was briefly called "the Long War" for a reason. The persistence of their hate-filled ideology allows them to regenerate. Which is a problem, as we see in Pensacola.
UPDATE: By chance I ran across this 13-year-old post that I forgot about. I quote information that we foresaw the Islamist problem in the Moslem world in 1946. Yeah, the jihad is not our fault.
Do you wonder why I cling to hope that an Arab Spring will finally remedy the problems identified back then?
