Readin' Writin' and Jihad

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been running a series of quarter-page ads in the New York Times' "Week in Review" section for the last couple of weeks. Usually the ads have some smiling men or women with vague Arab features explaining why they're just like you or me, except they are Muslims; the caption that accompanies the picture is "I'm (or We're) An American and I'm a Muslim." In today's paper, there's a picture of a woman wearing a hijab (head scarf) detailing her education at Georgetown and her position as a researcher for an international corporation. Fair enough.

But in the main section of the paper, in an article about Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shiek Mohammed, we learn that he earned his mechanical engineering degree in North Carolina. Now I'm filled with the sickening realization that Mohammed, who has been branded as the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, may have determined just the right spot to hit the World Trade Center so the buildings would buckle and disintegrate – and that knowledge was imparted to him right here in the U.S. Did he calculate the kinetic energy of a jumbo jet and the compressive strength of steel softened by jet fuel using an old textbook and a Texas Instruments calculator?

Well…I think that's all I'm gonna say about that.