Make New York City a terrorist-free zone: A states’ rights defense against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/3/10

We might be at the sea change when CNN reports that it was a Vietnam veteran who noticed smoke from the car bomb intended to blow up Times Square. The degradation of Vietnam vets came from a society which couldn’t face the difficult realities of democratic life and represented soldier/action man – those who could - as a drug addict, “baby killer” and psycho. But here he is now with instinct, awareness, responsiveness and courage. He is Master Chief; he is Zen Man. He, the soldier, the veteran, is the culture’s one essential element; the fundamental building block of a free society. Possibly we are turning a corner. Maybe the black flags can start to come down now.

The incident may even bring even New York City, which prides itself on its inability to deal effectively with terrorism, much as Boston did before Christmas, to a fighting stance. The Christmas bomber brought Scott Brown to the Senate and brought New England – like the Kind in Lord of the Rings - out of its pseudo-pacifist trance. Possibly this could do the same for New York City.

It couldn’t happen at a better time for New York, for America. A week before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to New York City to gloat. New Yorkers should not let it happen.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu's senior ministers have arrest warrants waiting for them in Europe's capital cities - while mass murderer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is invited to lecture at Columbia University,” my Israeli friend Moshe Feiglin wrote last month. Now Ahmadinejad comes to the UN.

Certainly Hillary will grant him a passport. The Clintons, although generational figures; Sixties people and not real New Yorkers – denial again – have been snuggling up to terrorists since the Oslo Agreements.
Real New Yorkers should stop this from happening.

I hope the governor of Arizona is not aiming for annulment with her new immigration law. As Texas Governor Rick Perry said, it is a bad law. It is especially bad as states sovereignty posture following the wave and appealing to complex and low populist passions. But I bet New York City could find a great states rights defense against Ahmadinejad right now and prevent his entering the city; my city, the greatest city in the world.

There are so many different ways to make this not happen. But New York has, since the Sixties, come to see protest as an end in itself. That is, the idea that a bunch of people going outside to pout, as per the Saul Alinsky handbook, is in itself satisfying. It is zero sum. It makes no different to these people if it succeeds or fails. They like to fail. It relieves them of the responsibilities of governance; of adulthood. They substitute easy tasks for responsibility: Yes, we welcome terrorists like Yasser Arafat and Ahmadinejad, even Kali, the Death Mother, but we have a very strong bottle bill. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, which I opposed, we offered a price for the war on Iraq: State secession. A “states rights defense against Dick Cheney.” Seems to have caught on. There has to be a price extracted; there has to be an object, or it is just a play of conspicuous piety, and New Yorkers have been doing this for 40 years now.

The plan should be two parts: One, Ahmadinejad will not speak, will not arrive in New York City. Two: What are the options?

Because the UN is irrelevant to the moral core of the greatest city of the world and so it a federal government that would grant a high terrorist like Ahmadinejad a visa. And if New York City meets the needs and demands of these aerial abstractions that hover above her like the space ships in V, she loses her moral core; she loses her soul; she loses everything.