Smith: Differing responses to deadly killers

photo Robin Smith

Let's compare two major global events and the different responses to each.

The War on Terror continues despite herculean efforts by the left to rename our enemies, such as the leadership of Al-Qaida being referred to as the newly identified Khorasan group.

The fight over the years has involved the loss of just under 3,000 of innocent, civilian lives in New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001, and more than 6,700 Americans dead in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fight has been to eradicate extremists who were directly involved in the terror attacks of 2001, those elements inciting violence through terror, and harboring those who commit these acts of violence rooted in the hatred of America's freedoms and Israel's existence.

In recent years, the lack of enforcement of our immigration laws and at our porous southern border has been a concern among citizens, local and state governments, and some politicians.

Beginning in 2009, the White House "ordered a cleansing of training materials" of terms such as "terrorists," "jihad," or other terms "deemed offensive" by Islamic groups. Counter-terrorism conferences for agencies such as the FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA stopped featuring any references to "Islamic extremism" within the War on Terror.

Currently, Barack Obama seems as firm as warm Jell-O on addressing the Middle East expansion of the Islamic State. In a law enforcement bulletin issued in July, ISIS has "a continued call ... for lone offender attacks against U.S. military facilities and personnel ...." in their homes in America.

This, as information was presented last week that President Barack Obama has only participated in 41.26 percent of the presidential daily briefs during his second term, compared to 42.43 percent in his first term.

Credible, accurate data has been provided to Obama since the autumn of 2012, before the presidential election, about "the breadth of ISIS' aims and their ability to run roughshod over large swaths of two countries," according to the UK Daily Mail.

So much for keeping the fight on foreign lands with an identified enemy.

The response to the West African Ebola crisis has elicited a response from the commander in chief to deploy 3,000 soldiers initially with a commitment of $100 million in funding that may be followed by at least $500 million more being shifted from the Pentagon, according to a Sept. 16 CNN.com report.

Seven hundred of these soldiers will hail from the 101st Airborne Division of Clarksville, Tenn., to build 17 new hospitals in West Africa to treat the projected 1.4 million infected patients by year's end. Half of that population is not expected to make it.

Aggressive intervention to prevent death by hemorrhagic fever occurs through quarantine, supportive therapies and contact tracing to isolate and eradicate.

There is a commitment to fight this deadly virus before it reaches America.

Both radical Islamic terrorism and Ebola are contaminants and will kill if left undeterred. The politics injected into strategy to protect Americans may prove to be just as deadly.

Robin Smith, immediate past Tennessee Republican Party chairwoman, is owner of Rivers Edge Alliance.

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