In the "no good deed goes unpunished" department, consider this: Alert airline passengers, street vendors, and police saved thousands of lives by preventing two disastrous Jihad attacks from happening, one over Detroit on Christmas and the other in Times Square on May 1. According to this FOX News report, the death toll would have been in the thousands.

Times Square Bomb 'Would Have Killed Thousands,' FBI Test Shows

Published July 20, 2010
NYPost.com

A secret FBI test of a correctly made version of the Times Square bomb revealed that it "would have killed thousands of people" if it had been made to explode as terrorists had intended, law-enforcement sources told The New York Post.

Had he built the Times Square device the way he had originally intended to, terrorist Faisal Shahzad, would have turned his SUV and nearby vehicles into a fatal spray of razor-sharp fragments and transformed building windows into glass guillotines hurtling to the streets, cutting down hundreds of people walking by.

The results were discovered after feds composed the type of bomb Shahzad set out to make -- with the exact components he had initially intended to use -- and exploded it in Pennsylvania last month.

"It would have been the biggest thing ever to happen in this country since Sept. 11," another source said.

"It definitely would have been bigger than [the 1995] Oklahoma City" bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people, the source said. "There would have been a lot of casualties."

At the end of June, the FBI built its replica of the bomb to test its destructive force, sources said. The results of the explosive test were sobering -- showing that Shahzad was on track to becoming the biggest individual mass murderer in U.S. history, several sources said.

The increasingly obvious irony is this: Had either or both of these attacks succeeded, plans for the Ground Zero mosque would have been, at the very least, quietly shelved until it was determined that we had all forgotten. The fact that the mosque is on track to be built now sadly illustrates how short that time can be.

As the violent jihad continues to fail in this country, the stealth jihad advances -- and the question becomes whether it will require success at the former to awaken our snoring citizens to the encroachments of the latter. This is a devil's bargain we should have never got ourselves stuck in.