Losing Our Sons

A movie review by Rebecca Bynum (July 2012)

Tennessee Freedom Coalition. It tells its story through the eyes of two American fathers as they grapple with reality after the son of Melvin Bledsoe shot and killed the son of Daris Long at a Little Rock army recruiting station on June 1, 2009. Carlos Bledsoe, also known as Abdulhakim Mujahid Mohammad, shot Private Andrew Long on what was planned to be the first phase of a cross-country jihad killing spree. Fortunately, he took a wrong turn in a construction zone and was apprehended.

explosives so that his jihad upon return to America would be a “martyrdom operation” – in his words, not a “drive by,” but a “drive IN.”

denied purple hearts to the soldiers killed or injured in both attacks. Says Daris Long, “My son wasn't killed for who he was. He was killed for what he was,” a soldier in uniform.

shot up a Jewish community center in Seattle in 2006, killing a woman and injuring several more, it was not classified as a terror attack, but was classed as a hate crime. And when Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian-American mowed down a crowd of students with a rented sport utility vehicle on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to “avenge the deaths of Muslims worldwide” and to “punish” the United States government, it was prosecuted as simple attempted murder by the state.

Christopher Paul who pled guilty to joining al Qaeda in 2008, Nuradin Abdi, sentenced in 2007 for plotting to blow up a shopping mall, and Iyman Faris who plotted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. While in prison, Mohammad stabbed a prison guard and another inmate. He also freely confesses to these acts, indeed brags about them, in his letters.

Anwar Al Awlaki, the former leader of al Qaeda in Yemen and calls him “our shaykh.” Awlaki was born in New Mexico and was considered an important Salafist thinker whose work was promoted in mosques around country and by organizations such as Nashville’s Olive Tree organization before he drew attention by being linked to terror attacks. Major Nidal Hasan (the Ft. Hood jihadist) corresponded with Awlaki before his attack and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was sent by Awlaki to blow up an American airliner in the underwear bombing plot. Awlaki, an American citizen, was subsequently targeted and killed in a US drone attack in Yemen.

Rabbi Y. Kliel Rose of the West End Synagogue compared pending Tennessee state anti-terror legislation to the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany. The film also shows several examples of Christian and Jewish leaders listening in silence when Muslim leaders make outrageous public comments (outrageous to non-Muslim Americans, that is) with the local paper, The Tennessean, failing to report those comments as well. To quote Charles Jacobs’ remarks at the premier of the film in Nashville:

America is flying blind. Into a storm. You have only to look at Europe to see where we are headed.

Our leaders have failed us: at every level.

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