Or language like this, which could be interpreted as a defense of the insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan: "It takes heart to be a guerrilla warrior because you're on your own. In conventional warfare you have tanks and a whole lot of other people with you to back you up, planes overhead and all that kind of stuff. But a guerrilla is on his own. All you have is a rifle, some sneakers and a bowl of rice, and that's all you need -- and a lot of heart."

Or this, a wish for insurgency at home: "There's a new deal coming in. There's new thinking coming in. There's new strategy coming in. It'll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It'll be ballots, or it'll be bullets, It'll be liberty, or it will be death."

The last lines are a give-away: Malcolm X -- a Muslim of a decidedly different vintage than the rancid variety exploding all over the headlines these days -- delivered those words 41 years ago in a church in Cleveland. If Malcolm were speaking like this today (and how much richer and fortunate, how much more humble the nation would have been had he not been assassinated), he'd probably be in handcuffs before his next speech. He'd be charged with inciting terrorism or treason or the overthrow of the government, or with any one of a series of repressive charges the federal government has cooked up since 2001 to silence individuals, imprison or deport them.

Last week a federal judge sentenced a Muslim scholar, Ali Al Timimi, to life in prison, not for anything he did, but for what he said in the days following the 2001 attacks -- inciting a few like-minded fanatics in Northern Virginia to fight against the American military in Afghanistan, and describing the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 as one of many "good omens" that "Western supremacy" is ending. As distasteful and idiotic as Al Timimi's words are, they're no less distasteful or idiotic than those of Jerry Falwell blaming the attacks of 2001 on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians . . . all of them who have tried to secularize America," and all of whom, Falwell said -- and Pat Robertson concurred -- "make God mad."

Ali Al Timimi is no prince of peace. Nor is he more than an Arab version of those red-blooded American survivalist-militiamen types who ran around in the 1990s, wishing (and exercising) for war on the federal government. Democracy should always presume a dosage of ideological varmints. But doesn't the Justice Department's so-called war on terror have more lethal targets to go after than moronic loud-mouths who didn't notice the Sept. 2001 expiration date on many of the nation's freedoms? Apparently not.

Two months ago in Ohio, President Bush urged the renewal of the USA Patriot Act (our current version of the Alien and Sedition Acts) and claimed that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted." Even for the fibber-in-chief, this was a gross exaggeration. A June 12 Washington Post investigation based on Justice Department data revealed that since 2001, and out of 330 suspects charged, only 39 (not 200, as the president claimed) were convicted of terrorism or national security crimes. Most of those were convicted on charges so minor that the median prison sentence doesn't exceed 11 months. Only 14 of those had connections, most of them suspect, to al-Qaida.

Of course, Congress is on the verge of renewing the Patriot Act, Timimi is in prison, and others will follow, if only to prove that the war on terror, whether or not it has anything to do with protecting the nation from terrorism, is worth marketing by any means necessary.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.

©2005 Daytona News-Journal