A 22-year old Rockford Illinois man, a convert to Islam, named Derrick (Talib Abu Salam Ibn) Shareef, was arrested last Friday, December 8, 2006, when he took actions to carry out plans to explode hand grenades in the Cherry Vale shopping center at the height of the holiday shopping season. According to surveillance affidavit reports, Shareef was also looking to murder Jews in the Rockford – DeKalb area, using MapQuest to find potential synagogues and targets to “shank.” This was all in retaliation for “that war with Hezbollah” and to let Jews know that “they not as safe as they thought.”

Why is it that we hear so little about this plot in the news media? Why do you have to scour the Internet for his name, photo and details of what the FBI had on this guy? If I made similar plans to carry out a crime against a specific ethnic group and I was caught, I would be charged with planning a “hate crime” and castigated in the liberal media as a racist, and a conservative right wing nut. They would probably call into question my conservative Christian beliefs as the cause of my hatred and I am sure the word “fundamentalist” would get tossed in there as well.

Today in the Sunday Trib, I see articles about the disgruntled truck driver shooting at the law firm in Chicago… but little mention of the Islamic TERRORIST in Rockford! Are we asleep? Where is the Jewish outrage? This was a “hate crime” being plotted by a terrorist toward Americans and Jews in particular! Remember Germany and a guy named Hitler? That nation allowed him to grow until it was too late and a full-scale genocide was well underway! What about the holocaust mantra of “we must never forget?” The silence on this Shareef thing is unbelievable to me!

Reflecting on this, I fear that it is an indication of a far deeper and disturbing problem in America. We have bought into the current liberal “tossed salad” thinking and moved away from the conservative “melting pot” idea of America.

David Dykstra (author of Yearning to Breathe Free? Thoughts on Immigration, Islam & Freedom – Solid Ground, 2006) responds on this topic in a World magazine interview: “The jettisoning of our historic melting pot concept (E Pluribus Unum – “out of many, one”), has taken place because of our uncritical acceptance of multiculturalism. George Will recently wrote of the ‘sacremental nature of multiculturalism.’ The belief that no culture is superior to another is an asserion that needs to be challenged and not merely accepted. The roots of multiculturalism are Marxist, and the degree to which it has been accepted is frightening. The current “tossed salad” alternative to the “melting pot” will only lead to more and more fragmentation of society.”

To put it another way, read Ifezwe Okoli’s book, Tribalizing America. The same idea put forth from an African cultural perspective.

I agree with these assessments. Mr. Shareef is just the beginning of our troubles if we do not rethink our immigration and homeland security policies. The open and frank agenda that Islamists communicate is: infiltrate, procreate and dominate. Don’t believe me? Look at what is happening in Europe.

Our policies should require reasonable assimilation into our common culture and oppose dangerous policies that allow immigrants to live in separated and isolated communities within our culture. We need to start challenging the assumptions of multiculteralism, and distinguish between the alien who poses a threat and the one who doesn’t. We need to practice reasonable ideological exclusion as we have in our past (anarchists, communists, fascists, etc.)

As a Christian, I am called and prepared to love my neighbor as myself, and welcome the foreigner who resides in my land. We should understand the plight of those coming to the US legally, and treat them with compassion and understanding. But, this does not mean that we should welcome anyone and everyone, or that there should be no rules, restrictions or safety measures to protect our land from evil doers and those who would destroy us. We should reward those who assimilate and restict those who do not. We put our future in peril when we refuse to make these distinctions.

The underlying fear I have is that America has lost its historical foundation and the roots upon which to make these just and reasonable discriminations. Because we have believed the lie that there is no Truth, and that all truth is relative, and depends upon the individual perspective, we have no framework upon which to say, “you are wrong” or “you may not do that!” A nation cannot last long without that foundation. If we do not recover it soon, I fear that we will go the route of every other great civilized nation – to ultimate destruction – from our moral decay within.

NOTE: Our immorality is precisely what the Islamists hate about us, and our decay and destruction from within pleases them greatly! The more we waffle on moral issues, the more they believe they are superior and will ultimately destroy us!