Giuliani's straight talk about terrorism

Rudy Giuliani’s speech last night at the Republican convention was a breath of fresh air. Common sense and the guts to say it are too rare among politicians.

His words about terrorism especially stood out:


Terrorism did not start on September 11, 2001. It had been festering for many years.

And the world had created a response to it that allowed it to succeed. The attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics was in 1972. And the pattern had already begun.

The three surviving terrorists were arrested and within two months released by the German government.

Action like this became the rule, not the exception. Terrorists came to learn they could attack and often not face consequences.

In 1985, terrorists attacked the Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen who was in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer.

They marked him for murder solely because he was Jewish.

Some of those terrorist were released and some of the remaining terrorists allowed to escape by the Italian government because of fear of reprisals.

So terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was "accommodation, appeasement and compromise."

And worse the terrorists also learned that their cause would be taken more seriously, almost in direct proportion to the barbarity of the attack.

Terrorist acts became a ticket to the international bargaining table.

How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize when he was supporting a terrorist plague in the Middle East that undermined any chance of peace?

Before September 11, we were living with an unrealistic view of the world much like our observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate ourselves to peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union through mutually assured destruction.

President Bush decided that we could no longer be just on defense against global terrorism but we must also be on offense.

I almost shouted “Amen!� For years, I watched with anger as Europeans coddled terrorists and as Presidents Carter and Clinton were soft on terrorism. I knew that was not the way to deal with terrorists. And we finally found that out the hard way on September 11th.

Now, finally, we are warring against the terrorist scum who have warred against us for years, something we should have done many years ago. And we have made progress.

So why should we let those Europeans who were friends of terrorists run our foreign policy? Why should we let the world, for that matter, run our foreign policy? Frankly, with few exceptions. the governments of the world were wrong in dealing with terrorism before September 11th. Heck, many of them were appeasers and even collaborators with terrorists.

Anyway, I’ll stop hyperventilating here and say I loved Rudy’s common sense about terrorism. Bush’s hard line against terrorists is indeed the right policy. And Europe and certain past presidents were and are wrong.