by American Airlines Pilot –
Captain John
Maniscalco Jerusalem, March 1, 2002
The following is the speech delivered at the annual Kahane
Memorial Dinner, January 29, 2002,
You Worry Me.....
I wish you didn't..... I wish when I walk down the
streets of this country that I love so much that your color and culture still
blended in with the beautiful human landscape we used to enjoy in this
country. But you don't blend in anymore.... I notice you, and it
worries me. I notice you because I can't help it anymore. People
from your homelands, professing to be devout Muslims, have been attacking and
killing my fellow citizens and our friends for more than 20 years now. I
don't fully understand their grievances and hate, but I do know that nothing
can justify the inhumanity and insanity of their attacks.
On September 11, nineteen ARAB-MUSLIMS hijacked four jetliners in my
country. They cut the throats of women in front of children and brutally
stabbed to death others. They took control of those planes and crashed
them into buildings, killing thousands of proud fathers, loving sons, wise
grandparents, elegant daughters, best friends, favorite coaches, fearless
public servants, and children's mothers.
So I notice you now; I can't help it. I don't want to be worried. I
don't want to be consumed by the same rage and hate and prejudice that has
destroyed the soul of these terrorists......but I desperately need your
help. As a rational American, trying to protect my country and family in
an irrational and unsafe world, I must know how to tell the difference between
you and the Arab/Muslim terrorist.
How do I differentiate between the true Arab-Muslim-Americans and the
Arab/Muslims terrorists, who attend our schools, enjoy our parks, and live in
our communities under the protection of our Constitution, while they plot the
next attack that will slaughter those very same good neighbors and
children? The events of September 11th changed the answer. It is
not my responsibility to determine which of you embraces our great country with
all of it's religions, with all of it's different citizens of different colors
and different faiths, and with all of it's faults. It is now yours.
It is now the responsibility of every Arab-Muslim in this country to determine
this for me.
I want to know, I demand to know, and I have a right to know whether or not you
love America. Do you pledge allegiance to it's flag? Do you proudly
display in front of your house or on your car? Do you pray in your many daily
prayers that Allah will bless this Nation, that He will protect and prosper
it? Or do you pray that Allah with destroy it in one of your
"Jihads"? Are you thankful for the freedom that only this
nation affords? A freedom that was paid for by the blood of hundreds of
thousands of patriots who gave their lives for this country? Are you
willing to preserve this freedom by paying the ultimate sacrifice?
Do you love America? If so, then I need YOU to start letting ME know
about it.
Your Muslim leaders in this nation should be flooding the media at this time
with hard facts on your faith, and what hard actions you are taking as a
community and as a religion to protect the United States of America.
Please, no more benign overtures of regret for the death of the innocent
because I worry about whom you regard as innocent. And, please, no more
benign overtures of condemnation for the unprovoked attacks because I worry
about what is unprovoked to you.
I am not interested in any more sympathy ...I am only interested in
action. What will you do for America -- our great country -- at this time
of crisis, at this time of war? I want to see Arab-Muslims waving the
AMERICAN flag in the streets. I want to hear you chanting "Allah
Bless America." I want to see young Arab-Muslim men enlisting in the
military. I want to see a commitment of money, time, and emotion to the
victims of this butchering and to this nation as a whole.
The FBI has a list of over 400 people they want to talk to regarding the 9/11
attacks. Many of these people live and socialize in your Muslim
communities. You know them. You know where they are. Hand
them over to us, and do it now! But I have seen little even approaching
this sort of action. Instead I have seen an already closed and secretive
community close even tighter. You have disappeared from the
streets. You have posted armed security guards at your facilities.
You have threatened lawsuits. You have screamed for protection from
reprisals. The very few Arab-Muslim representatives that have appeared in
the media were defensive and equivocating. They seemed more concerned
with making sure that the United States prove who was responsible before taking
action. They seemed more concerned with protecting their fellow Muslims
from violence directed towards them in the United States and abroad than they
did with supporting our country and with clearly denouncing "leaders"
like Ben Laden, Khadafi, Hussein, Farrakhan, and Arafat. If the true
teachings of Islam proclaim tolerance and peace and love for all people, then I
want chapter and verse from the Koran and statements from popular Muslim
leaders to back it up. What good is it if the teachings in the Koran are
good and pure and true if your "leaders" teach fanatical interpretations,
murder, suicide, terrorism, and intolerance?
It matters little how good Islam SHOULD BE if large numbers of the world's
Muslims misinterpret the teachings of Mohammed and adhere to a degenerative and
perverse form of the religion. A form that has been demonstrated to us
over and over again. A form whose structure is built upon a foundation of
violence, death, and suicide. A form whose members are recruited from the
prisons around the world......A form whose members (some as young a five years
old) are seen day after day, week in and week out, year after year, marching in
the streets around the world, burning effigies of our presidents, burning the
American flag, shooting weapons into the air. A form whose members
convert from a peaceful religion, only to take up arms against the great United
States of America, the country of their birth. A form whose rules are so
twisted that their traveling members refuse to show their faces at airport
security checkpoints, in the name of Islam. Islam?
Please do not insult a beautiful and ancient religion.
Do you and your fellow Muslims hate us because our women proudly show their
faces in public rather than cover up like a shameful whore? Do you and
your fellow Muslims hate us because we eat forbidden foods, drink wine with
dinner or celebrate Easter and Christmas? Do you and you fellow Muslims
hate us because we have befriended Israel, the ONLY civilized nation in the
entire Middle-East? And, if you and your fellow Muslims hate us, then why
in the world are you here in this country you hate so much? Are you here
to take our money? Are you here to undermine our peace and
stability? Are you here to destroy us? If so, then I want you to
leave.
Now. I do not want you in my community, in my town, in my city, in my
nation. I want you to go back to your desert sandpit where women are
treated like rats and dogs and children are sold like cattle. I want you
to take your religion, your friends, and your family back to your Islamic
extremists, and stay there!
We want you to know very clearly and without any question whatsoever.....we
will never give in to your hatred, your fanaticism, your retarded mentality,
your twisted, violent, intolerant religion. We will never allow the
attacks of September 11, or any others for that matter, to take away that which
is so precious to us....our sacred rights under the greatest Constitution in
the world.
I simply want to know where every Arab-Muslim in this country stands, and I
think it is my right and the right of every true citizen of this country to
demand it. A right paid for by the blood of thousands of my brothers and
sisters who died protecting the very Constitution that is protecting you and
your family. And I want to know now.
I am pleading with you to let me know where you stand, now, at this time and in
this place. I want you here as my brother, my neighbor, my friend, as a
fellow American. But there can be no gray areas or ambivalence regarding
your allegiance....
It is up to YOU, to show ME, where YOU stand.
Until then ...You Worry
Me.
Said
like ONLY a Marine could say it!
Since the attack, I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such surpassing
stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.
Here they are:
1) "We're not good, they're not evil,
everything is relative."
Listen carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative. Say it with me
now and free yourselves. You see, folks, saying "We're good"
doesn't mean, "We're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is
the bearded guy on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The plain fact is that our country has, with all our mistakes and blunders,
always been and always will be, the greatest beacon of freedom, charity,
opportunity, and affection in history. If you need proof, open all the
borders on Earth and see what happens. In about half a day, the entire world
would be a ghost town, and the United States would look like one giant line to
see "The Producers."
2) "Violence only leads to more
violence."
This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League
university to say it. Here's the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts
already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky,
half-measures lead to more violence. However, complete, fully-thought-through,
professional, well-executed violence
never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are
all dead. That's right, dead. Not "on trial," not
"reeducated," not "nurtured back into the bosom of love."
Dead. D-E-Well, you get the idea.
3) "The CIA and the rest of our
intelligence community has failed us."
For 25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and
now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us.
Starting in the late seventies, under Carter appointee Stansfield Turner, the
giant brains who get these giant ideas decided that the best way to gather
international intelligence was to use spy
satellites. "After all," they reasoned, "you can see a license
plate from 200 miles away."
This is very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately,
we were attacked by humans. Finding humans is not possible with satellites. You
have to use other humans.
When we bought all our satellites, we fired all our humans, and here's the
really stupid part. It takes years, decades to infiltrate new humans into
the worst places of the world. You can't just have a guy who looks like Gary
Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop himself down in a coffee shop in
Kabul and say "Hi ya, boys. Gee, I sure would like to meet that bin Laden
fella." Well, you can, but all you'd be doing is
giving the bad guys a story they'll be telling for years.
4) "These people are poor and helpless, and
that's why they're angry at us."
Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry
for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and,
ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see, are
the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohamed Atta,
one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing grounds (I'm
sorry, one of the "alleged hijackers," according to CNN. They
stopped using the word "terrorist," you know), is the son of a Cairo
surgeon. But you knew this, too.
In the sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were
upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to
get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. At least, that was
my excuse. It's the same today. Take the Anti-Global-Warm-ing (or
is it World Trade? Oh-who-knows-what-the-hell-they-want demonstrators). They all
charged their black outfits and plane tickets on dad's credit card(!) before
driving to the airport in their SUV's.
5) "Any profiling is racial
profiling."
Who's killing us here, the Norwegians? Just days after the attack, the
New York Times had an article saying dozens of extended members of the
gazillionaire bin Laden family living in America were afraid of reprisals and
left in a huff, never to return to studying at Harvard and using too much
Drakkar. I'm crushed. I think we're all crushed. Please come back.
With a cherry on top?
Why don't they just change their names, anyway? It's happened in the
past. Think about it. How many Adolfs do you run into these days?
Shortly after that, I remember watching TV with my jaw on the floor as a
government official actually said, "That little old grandmother from Sioux
city could be carrying something." Okay, how about this: No, she
couldn't. It would never be the grandmother from Sioux City. Is it even
possible? What are the odds? Winning a hundred Powerball lotteries in a
row? A thousand? A million?
And now a Secret Service guy has been tossed off a plane and we're all supposed
to cry about it because he's an Arab? Didn't it have the tiniest bit to
do with the fact that he filled out his forms incorrectly three times?
And then left an Arab history book on his seat as he strolled off the
plane? And came back? Armed? Let's please all stop singing
"We Are the World" for a minute and think practically.
I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a plane four seconds
away from hitting Mt. Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the guy next to me to
say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them."
SO HERE'S what I resolve for the New Year:
Never to forget our murdered brothers and sisters.
Never to let the relativists get away with their immoral thinking.
After all, no matter what your daughter's political science professor says, we
didn't start this.
Have you seen that bumper sticker that says, "No More Hiroshima’s"? I
wish I had one that says, "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Semper Fi!