His case is also a vivid reminder that the War on Terror did not end simply because the current occupants of the White House prefer the term "overseas contingency operations" and have a more nuanced pronunciation of "Pakistan": radical Islamists did not take a sabbatical or suddenly find inner peace when George W Bush retired to Texas. by Matthew Bastian
(conservative)
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253, was able to board the plane in the first place is disturbing enough. He had been placed on a list of potential terror suspects and still had a valid travel visa, despite the fact that his own father had warned the State Department about his son's radical indoctrination. He never should have left Schiphol Airport.
His case is also a vivid reminder that the War on Terror did not end simply because the current occupants of the White House prefer the term "overseas contingency operations" and have a more nuanced pronunciation of "Pakistan": radical Islamists did not take a sabbatical or suddenly find inner peace when George W Bush retired to Texas.
There will be plenty of hand-wringing and finger-pointing in the fallout over Northwest 253. The Transportation Security Administration, eager to show it can do something constructive, added strict baggage searches and torso pat-downs to its repertoire over the holiday weekend, making air travel even more of a nightmare. And while most Americans have come to accept that flying will involve a significant amount of inconvenience, ostensibly in the name of safety, there is something painfully reactive about the various measures taken by the TSA. Footwear, for example, was never of particular concern at airport security until Richard Reid, the infamous Shoe Bomber, failed to detonate his sneakers. Now, everyone, whether it's a family of four headed to Disney or a grandmother from Duluth, must send their shoes through the x-ray machine. If the next attempt by al-Qaeda involved a carry-on Teddy Bear loaded with plastic explosive, TSA would surely view every child with a stuffed flying companion as a potential terror threat. It's like a perverse game of "Simon Says," with the radical Islamists calling out the commands.
The most foolproof security measure, of course, as well as the most proactive, is to keep the shady characters from getting on aircraft in the first place. There were plenty of red flags on Mr. Abdulmutallab, including his time spent in Yemen, which is quickly becoming the unofficial West Point for aspiring jihadists. We can only hope that whatever breakdown occurred will be pinpointed and rectified, but in the meantime we continue to bend over backwards to avoid profiling, choosing instead to treat anyone, including that little old lady from Minnesota, as a potential suspect.
The retort from liberals is often: what about Timothy McVeigh? If someone of his ilk is the radical agent on the next Northwest 253 then any profiling will be pointless.
Yes, Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist, and of the variety that the Left can really get their heads around: an angry white man with a fondness for racist literature and a violent distrust of the federal government. Willful myopia, however, is required to accept this brand of relativism.
The following events all had something in common: the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon; the Achille Lauro hijacking; the bombing of the Berlin disco; World Trade Center one; Khobar Towers; the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; EgyptAir 990; the USS Cole ; and 9/11. They were all committed by Muslim men of Middle Eastern descent, age 18-35. And that's just a sampling of events since 1983.
To proffer Timothy McVeigh as a counterpoint to such a bloody body of evidence is akin to saying that the Kansas City Royals, with one World Series title, is just as storied a baseball franchise as the New York Yankees. The comparison is ludicrous.
Yet in the wake of every terror attack, we are quickly cautioned not to hold all Muslims responsible. After the Fort Hood massacre, U.S. Army Chief-of-Staff George Casey said, "Frankly, I am worried...it would be a shame - as great a tragedy as this was - it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well." It is a frequent admonition that never seems to be necessary.
Indeed, if the extent of the collective anti-Muslim backlash has consisted of the occasional worried look from an airline passenger, it's safe to say that the Judeo-Christian West has passed the civility test. Repeatedly. The anti-Muslim mobs that were supposed to go rampaging through Dearborn Heights in the wake of 9/11 never quite materialized. (Publish a few cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, however, and you will have a riot on your hands.)
Still, we get it: not all Muslims are terrorists. And perhaps there is wisdom in repeating that mantra to prevent violence against the innocent from begetting the same. The unfortunately reality, though, is that the terrorists are driven by a radical brand of Islam. They may be in the minority, but they are a vocal and headline-grabbing minority at that.
The most troubling aspect of Northwest 253 is that we seem to willfully ignore that fact, and at our own peril.
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Very well-written, Matthew, and for this you get my "thumbs up."
While I'm in general agreement with many of the details you've mentioned, I feel that what is called for is absolute replacement of the TSA with the citizen militia. If ever air passenger were prepared to defend themselves and their fellow passengers from the almost vanishingly insignificant percentage of "terrorist" attacks, it would be the terrorists who would fear getting on an airplane and we would be rid of the ridiculous rigamarole surrounding modern airflight.
As usual, in this situation government is the problem and not the solution.
The standard government method of reacting to situations is over-.
As in over-reacting.
As a confirmed cynic, it was refreshing to see Bush doing little about Katrina, partly for the relief from the near-constant din of CRISIS!!!! that permeates every phenomenon, and partly to watch and see what the imbeciles who would call themselves grown men and women would actually do in the face of something that could not be controlled by a battery-operated hand-held remote. What they would do is crumple into a little fetal ball and start weeping crocodile tears at how they need their hands held every second of the day by Mommy Government.
...and that was just those who read the newspapers. Those in New Orleans re-enacted Lord of the Flies.
No such under-reaction is happening with this. The TSA, one of many governmental organs in desperate search for validation, will use [and has been using] its unchallengeable regulatory and enforcement authority to impose all manner of rote, superficial and pointless faux-security protocols.
Because the Nigerian yahoo did his schtick in the last hour of the flight ... why, why, why ... that means that the last hour is somehow more critical than any of the other hours during the flight, and so everyone must sit in their seats, hands folded in their laps, crayons away, in some collosal airborne time-out.
Because he used the bathroom to arrange his routine during that last hour, no one else may use the bathroom during that last hour. Young children, old women with bladder-control issues, and old men with prostate problems, take note. And don't eat spicy food for a few days before flying. We'd hate to have anything from the other end being aired!
There's pat-downs, and double-checking of minutia snaking its way through airport terminals the nation over reminding anyone who's read Catch-22 of the Great Loyalty Oath Campaign. But don't you dare say anything to TSA weenies, for they carry with them a 1st Amendment-Free Zone and reminding them of the Constitution and its 4thAm by the idle question of, "ya got a warrant for this, pig?" will net you a rubber-gloved digit up your ass in the back room lasting just long enough for you to miss your flight. Hey! They gotta be sure! Because it's a well-known fact that pan-islamist terrorism is populated by middle class, middle-aged American males who remember reading the Constitution, and not by middle-eastern chuckleheads who do everything in their power to not draw attention to themselves while boarding the airplanes they want to blow up, and are impeccably polite and cooperative every inch of the way.
Once again, the larger picture is going to be missed and a gargantuan "process" involving coincidental and impertinent detail is going to be enacted. In the meantime, the trained apes at TSA have zero victories in their home-field in The War Against Terror [my preferred designation, as it provides a comforting acronym], while passengers themselves have thwarted the only two attempts, since 9-11, to conduct in-air sabotage on American-bound planes.
Posted By: Jahfre Fire Eater
Date: 2009-12-31 08:40:05
Hi Matthew,
 Good article. I cringed at your hope that the security breakdown would be pinpointed and rectified because it gives life to the ridiculous notion that mass state-mandated oppression of decent people is the only way to deal with threats when in reality the State refuses to even consider that the warmongering Christian empire our ruling class think they are in charge of is the cause of much of the hatred and violence in the world today.
Until the non-violent populations, Muslim, Christian and non-religious, rise up to remove these blood-thirsty despots from our government nothing the TSA does will every provide security. Yes, not all muslims are terrorists and not all non-muslims are peace-loving innocents. The problem is that the force, power, violence and mayhem fomented by each side is not limited to just those who are responsible for the violence on the other side. The US military terms those losses on the enemy turf as "collateral damage" rather than "innocent victims". Innocent victims only are recognized when the hornets nest we perpetually poke manages to send a stinger into the masses as a random reaction.
This is a holy war that has been going on for over a thousand years. As a non-religious anti-religionist who values religious freedom I hold both the Christian Emperialists and the Muslim Fundamentalists equally responsible for the horrible state of peace on our planet.
Posted By: Ross Williams
Date: 2009-12-31 13:02:45
... the warmongering Christian empire our ruling class think they are in charge of is the cause of much of the hatred and violence in the world today.
...huh??
Are you asserting a starting point to history?
Modern "western" nation-states, some of which are only of relatively recent coinage, are responsible for the "holy war that has been going on for over a thousand years"? How did that occur? They have a Wayback Machine?
There's a number of things that the superficial "blame religion" worldview fails to account for in their single-minded quest to gain their scapegoat. First among them is that war predates religion; the second is that many of the wars that are commonly viewed as "religious" today are not. E.g., Northern Ireland.
"Oh, but Ross, you dimbulb: the Limeys are Protestant and the Micks are Catholic! And they're killing each other. It's a Protestant versus Catholic war!"
Horse hockey. It's an English versus Irish war; the English invaded Ireland when both were Catholic peoples, and they invaded Ireland because they could. The English became "protestants" [nominally; "Anglicanism" is Catholicism once-removed, placing the Pope in Canterbury instead of Rome] only after the fact; the religious difference grew up around the political difference, and not vice versa.
Another factor conveniently overlooked is that Christianity has had a Reformation [with the not-coincidental Renaissance accompanying it] while Islam has not. A religion -- as any other human organization -- becomes subject to graft, hypocrisy and the self-service of its leaders; when that organization actively questions its dogma and restructures itself by breaking away or by rewriting its creeds, it asserts the power of non-leaders to control the organization. The organization loses authoritarian control.
In most societies dominated by a strong central religion, there is no material difference between the religious structure and the political structure -- medieval Europe and modern "Greater Islamia".
The religious structures of both pushed literal interpretations of their Holy Writ. The Reformation asserted figurative interpretations of Christian scripture. And while you can, today, find pockets of Christians who will quote chapter and verse and claim every bit of it to be literal, that's all it is: pockets. "Christendom" has adopted an extremely liberal interpretation of the bible, and about the only piece of the thing that anyone can really point at as being subject to literalist translation among any sizable portion is the first chapter of Genesis -- which, sorry, I won't allow anyone to wildly extrapolate from in order to equivocate to their pet philosophy that Christianity is taken over by a literal rendering of "The Kingdom of God".
Even Christian evangelicals have adopted Anthropogenic Global Warming as their eschatology du jour. Christ will reappear driving a hybrid and weilding a reusable cloth grocery sack.
...whereas, on the other hand, Islam has yet to have its Reformation, nor islamic culture its Renaissance. They still believe that Islam is destined to rule the world -- literally -- and even if many in muslim nations aren't actively helping it to occur, they are doing nothing to stand in its way.
...and what was it that guy said ...? "all that's required for evil to exist in this world is for good men to do nothing..."? Was that Ghandi? MLKing? John Wayne? Homer Simpson?
You want to paint "mainstream muslims" as non-violent innocents not worthy of being implicated in titanic political struggles between forces well above their pay-grade? I'll paint you the same picture with jihadi enablers.
Meanwhile, modern western culture is attempting with every breath to spread its current religion of profit, which the eastern world sometimes recognizes as "economic imperialism" [when they forget that they own the lion's shore of the oil we need to hold services], often as "cultural imperialism" [when they object to the particular religious icon we are hawking at any given time] or any number of types of "hegemony" [when they forget about their own hegemonic oil cartel]. When they need to exhort their own illiterate masses, they phrase it all in terms they can understand: western infidels.
Additionally, and as I alluded to before, there is no starting point in history. This "holy war" is merely the continuation of old greivances that originally probably had something to do with whose goat was eating off whose-else's pasture. The explicit "holy war" aspect of it was, in fact, invented by the islamists. And mostly -- as with England invading Ireland, or Rome invading Judea -- because they could.
They are the ones who spread a "religious empire" on the point of a sword. The other empires relevant to this discussion existing at the time were not spread for religious purposes, but for plain old garden variety rapaciousness. The Roman empire didn't care what religion its subject provinces had, as long as those religions didn't foment revolt; there was no Olympian Will to subjugate neighboring kingdoms, just a military powerful enough to do it. When the eastern empire split from the west, the religion -- due to Constantine getting hisself "saved" -- was already in place. And at that point, it was not exactly the expansionist "empire" it had been under its pagan roots. The only "expansion" Byzantium seriously attempted was a reconquista of the old [western] Roman empire from the weak and disparate Christian principalities.
Meanwhile, Mohammed himself discovered religious zealotry due to essentially intertribal conflicts in his hometown of Mecca, and played politics successfully enough that he could whip together a "coalition" that won him Mecca from the tribe not ruling it correctly. Once discovering he could do that, he figured the trade center of Medina might be nice. Then controlling [and taxing] the trade routes would fill his pockets. And before he knew it, he had himself a nice little kingdom. And by the way, here's our new religion.
Then he died. But his generals, flush with lust for conquest, decided to keep going. Greater Islamia conquered Greater Arabia and Persia, sidestepped Byzantium for the moment, and oozed into central Asia and Iberia -- all within a hundred years of its founding. For the purposes of spreading Islam. I.e., holy war. When the tenuous Arab unity petered out and they reverted to self-absorbed squabbling tribesmen, the newly converted Turks rose up on their Arab masters, and reconquered themselves much of what had just been conquered by Arabs the century before -- and they started nitpicking the Christian Byzantines.
Everyone wishes to point at The Crusades as some out-of-left-field, apropos-of-nothing, capricious invasion of "peaceful" Islamia by war-mongering western Europeans. That is perhaps the biggest fabrication we've perpetrated upon ourselves in our western self-loathing.
The Crusades were a direct result of the Turkish invasion of Byzantium in the late 11th century wherein the Turks wrested Anatolia from the Greeks. This would be akin to the US losing the territory between the Appalachians and the Rockies to Mexico. What it meant to Byzantium was that they had to buy what had once been their own food, and they lost a large tax-base. What it meant to western Europe was that the strong military power protecting them from the occassional scourges coming from central Asia was now unable to protect them.
So with an Islamic empire in Iberia and another Islamic empire setting itself up in the east, western Europe was put in a classic military pincer. Standard military response: hit back in the middle.
I.e., Palestine.
Ergo: "Crusade".
The Crusades were sold to the illiterate peasantry as religious. It was, though, very much a matter of survival. And the Western kingdoms were relatively weak and ineffectual forces individually -- with a possible exception being the Franks [how long has it been since that could be said?] -- and except for the First Crusade, which was scoffed at among the Turks, they were largely failed affairs. All they materially accomplished was temporarily halting the expansion of the Turkish empire to territory gained.
The Crusades were sold to the illiterate Europeans as a religious exercise when it was a matter of regional security.
Jihad is being sold to illiterate muslims when it is instead the Islamist power structure that is threatened by western "decadence" and "self-indulgence".
And a military response is being sold to Americans through fear-mongering when all that's really going on is "Leave us alone to peddle our cheap shlock [that's made in China anyway] or we'll kick your ass".
Worrying about "innocents" and whether they are called "collateral" or ignored altogether -- as they were for eons -- is being played.
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