Russian, Israeli, and American Orientations to the Muslim Terrorist Problem

The bombing in the Moscow subway is a typical Islamic terrorist horror, complete with suicide bombings, mass death, and sneaky female perpetrators.  But Russia, like Israel, has within or lives alongside a large number of Muslims.  It acquired its Caucasian Republics as part of its 19th Century drive to have a warm water port.  As a consequence, an historically Nordic and homogenous group–the Russian Slavs–acquired a multinational empire of Tatars, Chechens, Ingushetians, Ossetians, and all the rest.  

Israel, likewise, was born in the post World War II Jewish reconquest of their ancient homeland, which, in the 2,000 years of their exile, had become populated by a majority of Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arabs. 

In other words, both of these nations because of where they are located and the settled facts of their ancient and recent history must deal with Muslims, and that means they must deal with Muslim terrorism.  The United States, by contrast, is protected by two oceans, has a miniscule Muslim population, and benefits in spite of it all from a great deal of historical homogeneity, particularly on the matter of religion. 

Our Muslim population is of recent vintage, often speaks with an accent, is easily identified, and is here because of the 1964 immigration reforms, which were deliberately designed to turn the white majority into a minority.  While we’re told repeatedly that “diversity is our strength,” the facts suggest otherwise.  Muslims do nothing extraordinary in America that Americans cannot do themselvses.  They are not particularly talented and seem concentrated in low skill merchant occupations, with a smaller cohort in medicine and engineering.  In other words, they do things we can easily do for ourselvs.  But since this ”reform” we’ve had the ’93 WTC attacks, 9/11, the El Al airlines shoot up, Major Nidal Hasan, and many other Muslim attacks and associated inconveniences. 

Is this what we want?  We are not fated to live this way.  The risk is completely artificial, a creature of immigration policy that is fairly easily reversed in this instance, as evidenced by the mass self-deportation of Arabs and Muslims in the wake of the increased scrutiny following the 9/11 attacks.  Russia and Israel, if they mean to preserve themselves, may have to resort to extremes.  Some view their common terorrism problem as requiring solidarity and American activity in the region.  But our common threat allows us (unlike Russia and Israel) a low effort, high reward solution not available to the fellow victims of Muslim terrorism.  America can do defend itself by simply shutting the front door through which the terrorists keep coming in and by reducing our presence in the neighborhoods in which they reside, which focuses their attention unduly upon us.  We should not allow a common threat obscure from us an uncommon advantage of geography and history.

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Tough Talk on Terrorism

This was unintentionally hillarious:

“Make no mistake. We will close Guantanamo prison.”  That’s what President Obama said during his recent remarks about national security in the aftermath of the attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.

I feel better already.  It’s like George W.’s “dead or alive” remarks, but, you know, a little different.

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Obama’s Bobbin’ and Weavin’ On Terror Incident

It’s been remarkable to see Obama progress from silence, to clinical discussion of the “alleged terror suspect,” to passing the blame for this incident onto nameless, faceless forces and procedures.  It’s true, there probably are many failures of procedure, imagination, and courage in the events that led up to the Christmas terror attack in which a Nigerian terrorist, revealed as such to the CIA by his own father, boarded a plane and was thwarted only by providence and a passenger that leaped across the middle row to subdue him.

Does this guy ever realize that he’s not on the outside looking in, “speaking truth to power?”  The people in charge of these procedures are his people and ultimately him.  The persistence of these policies is a consequence of his own lack of leadership.  And these failures are a product of the continued schizophrenic attempt to fight terrorism while assuaging the tender feelings of the prickly Muslim community–a high wire act that Obama himself performed by advising us all not to jump to conclusions in the case of Major Nidal Hasan’s mass murder last month.

This guy is a terrible leader, stumbling, weak, a bit lazy, alienated, confused, and devoid of any sense of personal responsibility for the most important job he has as president: protecting the lives of the American people from its enemies.

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Christmas Terrorism

I don’t have much to say about the Nigerian terrorist, other than this is what happens when you let Muslims into Western countries they hate.  It’s like night follows day:  some of them will be terrorists, some will get in touch with al Qaeda, some will be lone wolves, but once in a while, either way, they’ll be effective.  We were lucky here.  But this is not surprising.  It seems to happen every few months.

Now, in response, TSA has freaked out in its usual fashion, not by looking at who is on its planes, but instead promulgating various across-the-board and draconian restrictions on having any items on your lap and taking a crap in the last hour of a flight.  This is a prime example of how the false freedoms of multiculturalism and open borders undermine our traditional freedoms, including the freedom to use a laptop on a flight and not to be practically strip-searched every time you board a plane.

I am surprised the suspect was not a psychiatrist with the transferred post-traumatic stress of his patients!  I’m also surprised that Obama didn’t go out of his way to protect the reputation of the “Religion of Peace,” the way he did with Major Nidal Hasan.  Remember when Obama said we should not “jump to conclusions” in interpreting his “Allah Akbar” initiated shooting spree.  And remember in Cairo, when Obama said, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”  Oh well, even an instinctual leftist like Obama realizes when he’s gone too far and it’s time to beat a hasty retreat.  But when will the country realize we’ve gone too far in indulging the leftist and sentimental fantasy that we can let in Third Worlders, particularly Islamic Third Worlders, and remain a free country?

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Peter Regan on NY Civilian Terror Trials

 

My cousin Peter Regan had a piece published in the NY Post condemning the ridiculous decision to try terrorists in NYC.   His father, and my uncle, Donnie Regan died on 9/11 in the service of the FDNY.  Peter was in the Marines at the time, took leave to assist in the search for survivors, served two tours in Iraq, and, after finishing his service (and a call up in the IRR!) followed in Donnie’s footsteps as a NYC Fireman.

He wrote, among other things, “I will never be convinced that these terrorists did not commit an act of war. And committing an act of war does not qualify these men to enjoy the rights and liberties of the citizens of this country, rights that so many have died to protect.”

I am proud of Jill and Peter and other 9/11 family members that are standing up to this administration and reminding them that there are public relations and moral consequences for their actions not just in Europe and the Middle East, but here at home too.

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War or Law Enforcement Problem?

One of the biggest traditional liabilities of the Democratic Party, particularly since the election of Ronald Reagan, has been its perception as weak on national security. 

The end of the Cold War gave the party a new lease on life, but 9/11 propelled Bush to office.  His comparative incompetence, particularly in waging a wasteful and prolonged “nation building” effort in Iraq, turned back the dial towards a more realistic and restrained foreign policy championed by Obama. 

That said, Obama misreads the public if he thinks all but a few of us care much about the long-suffering detainees in GITMO or whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was water-boarded or much else that Bush did in the wake of 9/11 to treat al Qaeda as a military problem to be dealt with by military means, including targeted killings, streamlined military tribunals, and prolonged preventitive detention for the duration of the conflict.

Bringing Khalid Sheikh Mohammad to Manhattan for a civilian federal trial is the repudiation of all of these efforts, for which GITMO itself is only a symbol.  The prospect of a circus, complete with condemnations of America, divulgence of our intelligence apparatus, and lengthy and cumbersome procedures is the wrong tool for the job and will do much to demonstrate why al Qaeda is a different kind of problem from an ordinary criminal conspiracy. 

Let us only hope that the lesson is not written in blood in the form of a spectacular escape, a terrorist attack on the trial site itself, the murder of a federal judge, or, perhaps worst of all, an acquittal based on the application of civil liberties inappropriate and unearned by foreign enemies of the United States.

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“With all Due Respect”

The picture that emerges of Major Nidal Hasan is of an obnoxious, provocative, and disloyal gadfly.  He showed little respect for the uniform, his peers, or the rights and wrongs of the war on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.  His deranged criticisms were absorbed by the politically correct and risk-adverse culture of today’s military.  Consider this nonsense from the Army Chief of Staff, General Casey:  “Our diversity not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Worse?  Worse than 15 dead and 28 wounded?  Worse than an institution whose deracinated soldiers were well trained to know that raising an objection to someone like Hasan could be “racist” and thus the end of one’s career?

People outside the military don’t realize quite how much the h.r. nonsense we’re all accustomed to in academic and civilian life has become the lingua franca of the military since the Clinton’s administration, the Tailhook scandal, and the unnatural integration of women into combat-like roles.

We are fighting a war against radical Muslims, but no one is allowed to notice this inconvenient fact, even inside the military.  Today’s p.c. soldiers are supposed to train indifferent Iraqis and Afghanis, police these crummy countries’ sectarian elections, brook their proteges’ constant whining about civilian casualties (even though their own internecine struggles are positively Satanic in comparison), and ignore the fifth columnists in their midst like Sgt. John Muhammad (DC Sniper), Sgt. Akbar (who fragged his fellow soldiers), and now Major Nidal Hasan.

Neither Bush, nor Obama, nor most of the leadership at Ft. Hood takes note of the fact we have a self-professed Islamic enemy.  And that some of these enemies were born here, wear our army’s uniform, and have conflicted views about the country the rest of us love.  Instead, these manifest facts are dutifully suppressed by the ideology of diversity.

I think the media’s and other elites’ refusal to look at the content of Islamic beliefs, the relative lack of patriotism of the American Muslim community, and the way this community and the broader American community talk past each other is a problem. Non-Muslim Americans wrongly assume Muslims want to be treated fairly as equals.  Some do and would be content with that.  But Muslims on the whole see themselves as an elect, a superior community that needs to be treated deferentially.  This is the meaning of the Danish cartoon riots, the pushy suppression of dissent under the rubric of “hate speech,” and the double standards on accidental civilian deaths by western forces on the one hand (unintentional but worse in their eyes because committed by infidels) and the nearly daily and far more deadly bombings and killings of Muslims by other Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Their idea of “due respect” is anathema to a democratic society built on tolerance and Christian ideas of freedom and conscience, whether in Europe or the United States.

Channeling Aleander Kojeve, Francis Fukuyama in the End of History noted that the animating principle of democratic societies is the abandonment of the earlier “warrior aristocracy” ethic, whereby one group in the community demanded recognition as superior because of its physical courage, in favor of the more limited respect between each stratum of society merely as an equal to the others.  This practical equality of self-perception and social demand by different cohorts in our own society has a lot to do with our vital and relatively strong traditions of self government and peaceful social life.

Fukuyama to his credit more recently noted that, “Democracy’s only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism. . . . Some disenfranchised Muslims thrill to the rantings of Osama bin Laden or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the appeal of this kind of medieval Islamism is strictly limited.”

This is all to say that the Nidal Hasans of the world are not an existential threat, particularly to the United States.  At the same time, they–and by “they” I mean Muslims in America in general–should not be considered presumptively loyal.  They should prove themselves.  Every other immigrant group has done so, usually in the uniform and with the sacrifice of blood.  But unlike the Japanese and immigrant Italian and German Americans in World War II, Muslims have largely been MIA from the War on Terror and have shown a lack of moral clarity regarding the same.

Is it too much to ask a little expression of anger that anyone anywhere thinks like this bastard, Hasan?  Can we not say, roughly, “Love it or leave it.”  If they insult us, show discomfort with the uniform, express sympathy for Islamic terrorists, or otherwise threaten the military and its need for uniformity, Muslims and anyone else who thinks like this should be shown the door.  In other words, while we should not abuse loyal and peaceful citizens, we should be profiling.  We should be demanding displays of loyalty.  And we should be kicking out bad guys like this from the military and from the country before they do us any harm.  Diversity is hardly important and its loss is not a greater tragedy than the loss of life from some of our best Americans at the hands of someone who was only here because of a misguided and reversible immigration policy.

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Fort Hood Shooting

We’re soon going to have the shooting in Fort Hood reduced to a question of individual psychology.  We’re supposed to conclude that it was the meaningless act of a madman.  Thus understood, it’s random, a senseless tragedy, and a story of a good soldier gone bad.  In fact, this treacherous assault on our servicemen by a traitor in their midst is anything but senseless.  It is perfectly understandable.  It’s non-random.  It’s an act of “meaningful” violence.  And the key to deciphering that meaning is in the name of the shooter:  Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

I’ve written about this deficit of analogical reasoning by the media and our politicians regarding Muslim-on-American violence before.  When the patterns involved are permitted to be observed and recognized, this act of treachery should not be the least bit surprising.   It’s natural and regularly occurring and logical considering the utter incompatibility of the soldier’s religious faith and the necessary loyalty of a soldier to a country that will not implement that faith’s aggressive political program.

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Terrorist Arrests

It’s extremely worrisome that only eight years after 9/11, a Jordanian illegal immigrant and a relatively recent Afghan immigrant that looks like this are even in the country.  Equally worrisome is the problem posed by Caucasian, native-born converts to Islam such as the angry ex-prisoner arrested in Illinois.

There is no doubt these are bad people.  In a more self-confident society, they’d be interrogated, tried, and hanged within a month.  But I do wonder if the two arrests involving FBI informants that also functioned as co-conspirators is the best use of FBI resources, as was the case of the Illinois and Dallas arrests.  There are no doubt many hateful, anti-American Muslims within our borders.  But many are lifelong seethers and trash-talkers who lack the resources, brainpower, and discipline to actually harm anyone.  They’re as dangerous as “attempted murderers” who cast spells and poke voodoo dolls.

When the FBI builds and provides a bomb to someone like this, it may be propelling a person that is in practical terms a low threat into a resource-draining inmate.  I may be wrong; the wherewithal and ability of the accused may be higher.  It’s hard to tell from this vantage point.  But one notable facts suggests they were just angry losers:  in both Dallas and Illinois, the conspiracy and the provision of disarmed bombs involved the work of FBI agents and informants.  We also know the FBI and all government agencies are fairly risk adverse.  It’s not clear they would triage potential suspects based on likelihood of success.  Let me be clear that I am only concerned about this as a matter of resource allocation; there is certainly no injustice or standing to complain on the part of the would-be Muslim terrorists themselves.

On the other hand, the New York arrests of Zazi shows a much more worrisome situation, where the accused terrorist was buying bomb-making supplies independently. I am glad that he and his confederates have been found out, before they could maim and kill.  One wonders if we would have drawn lessons from their success.  The El Al Airlines massacre in Los Angeles, the DC Sniper (involving a convert and immigrant), and the shoe bomber plot have all gone down the memory hole, as has the Lackawama Six.   Foiled or failed efforts make little impression.  Even the 9/11 attacks have been converted into a saccharine tragedy and time for national service as opposed to a wake up call that certain bad people believing a certain religion hate out guts.

Have we all been so brainwashed to forget that America was able to have limos driven and food served and other menial jobs perforemd before Muslim immigration began in the last two or three decades.  It’s not like these are essential or particularly valuable residents.  Their continued presence is a sign of national weakness and paralysis brought on by multiculturalist liberalism.  No one thought, for example, that commitment to American values required large scale Japanese and German immigration during World War II.  We knew then that saboteurs and double agents would exist in any such groups and that the risk of disloyalty and danger to national security was simply too high, even if some–perhaps a majority–of those coming would be peace-loving and loyal folks who did not like and did not fit in with the authoritarian regimes they were fleeing.

These arrests all reveal something missing from our strategic approach to terrorism.  We continue to ignore the “formal cause” of Islamic Terrorism which is a belief in Islam.  And recognizing this would make it plain that we need to (a) close our borders to Muslims, (b) remove all Muslims we can legally remove now, such as non-citizens, and (c) limit proselytizing activities of Muslims in American prisons, the military, and anywhere else where these groups can be limited  But it’s simply anathema to the liberalism and the ersatz spirituality of guys like Bush and Obama to consider that the very content of someone else’s religion might be the problem and that the Muslim terrorists might be those who understand and act upon that religion in the most sincere way.

Concerned and looking for answers, I read a lot about Islam after 9/11. Like modern Christianity, it is a varied thing with various viewpoints. But some of those viewpoints are more persuasive, rooted in the text, and made with logical and historical rigor.  I concluded the terrorists and extremists were acting on the basis of an understanding of Islam that rang the most true, that seemed to manifest its historical and textual spirit most sincerely.  All of this is another way of saying that the best Muslims are the worst people, and our only hope for decency among them is the extent to which they disregard or modify their religion’s teachings.

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CIA Prosecutions

I can’t tell exactly why Obama is seeking to prosecute the CIA officers involved in interrogating al Qaeda suspects. I can’t think this plays too well in Peoria, and the man is very political (if a bit tone deaf). It’s possible Holder is on a rampage, and Obama doesn’t want World War III within his cabinet.  It’s possible the Democrats are all collectively blind to how this appears to a post-9/11 America.  And it’s also possible that Obama is a true believer, a child of the post-Nixon Seventies, who thinks that this will redeem America in its own eyes and the eyes of the world.

My own opinions on the merits have been stated at length before; I think this prosecution is ill advised, even if some of the actions were in violation of the law.  This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion in my opinion, and the liberals are not engaging squarely with the tradeoffs involved with treating the al Qaeda detainees to the full panoply of legal protections afforded POWs and ordinary criminal defendants, including freedom from coercive interrogations.  The links are below:

On the lunacy of demonstrating “water boarding” on oneself as proof of its evil.

On the Democrats’ generally soft-on-terror policies.

On the preferability of pardons rather than formal torture policies.

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Scotland’s Shame

America was supposedly devoid of moral credibility on account of the long term al Qaeda detentions at Guantanamo Bay.  But at least they’re behind bars.

Europe has shown many times that it cannot be trusted to deal forcefully with terrorists.  It is a weak place with a weak will and a lax criminal justice system.  Germany, recall, released one of the Hamburg Cell.  Many other terrorists have been released from European prisons after very short sentences. And, now, not only has one of the Lockerbie Bombers been released–a murderer of 259 people(!)–but the West was further humiliated with his hero’s welcome in Libya.

What does this prove?  It proves that Europe is too cowardly and too irresolute to be trusted to punish or detain terrorists.  It proves that the constant moralizing of Western Europe in particular should be taken with a grain of salt; it is much worse to reveal oneself and one’s society as a decadent mess one breath from extinction than to have excessive zeal in defending one’s women and children. Finally, it proves that the Arab Muslim world, in spite of its occasional noises of moderation, is still a backwards and uncivilized place unable categorically to condemn the murderers of innocents.

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A Tale of Three Murders

When a Kansas abortionist and a Washington DC security guard at the Holocaust Museum were murdered in recent weeks by right-wing wackos–an ardent anti-abortion Missouri “freeman” and a neo-nazi respectively–the cases rightly received extensive news coverage because they were dramatic, unusual, and involve salient social controversies. There is no doubt that in both cases the perpetrators’ extreme, paranoid, and self-certain worldviews had a lot to do with why they did what they did.

It’s also true that other people that hold those views do not commit murder. This proves exactly nothing. Most of the important information in life is probabalistic in nature. There is no doubt that people with strong, uncompromising views of moral and political injustice–particularly when a certain group is viewed as the absolute enemy or absolutely evil–will be more inclined to dramatic political violence. As a consequence, it’s at least not crazy to say that if the rhetoric is extreme enough the government should keep an eye on public source data and monitor committed members of the extremist group.

But another group we are all familiar with that also employs extreme rhetoric. This group has, in fact, murdered thousands in the name of its belief system. It’s fair to describe the group as akin to certain right-wing movements: anti-modern and anti-liberal, combined with a view of violence as proof of commitment.

But this movement is never considered in such terms. It’s, in fact, treated with the utmost respect by the media and various elites. Any criticism of it qua group is treated as unfair stereotyping. In the case of this group, little effort is made to examine the connections of belief to violent action, connections which are patently obvious in the case of anti-abortion extremists and neo-nazi extremists.

At some point a crime by someone who “happens to be ‘X’” becomes “yet another X-motivated crime” or a characteristic crime of “X group” And while there is no bright line when that happens, if the actions in question follows from uncompromising statements about the need for certain kinds of violence by the group’s founders and leaders, we should not engage in back flips to avoid the obvious.

Earlier this week, a US soldier was murdered in broad daylight by someone who considered himself a sincere believer in Islam, following the religious commandment to avenge insults to Muslims and engage in jihad. But you would hardly know this from the national news. They’ve been busy focusing on the much less common domestic, right-wing extremists. And they’ve been avoiding considering the roots of Muslim violence in a widely held interpretation of Islam itself.

Consider the contrast of this lengthy AP wire report about the Arkansas attacks and the much smaller and more anodyne blurb at the NY Times.

Here’s some of what the Times cut out:

Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.

He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.

“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.

Consider what’s implicit in the NY Times’ editing of this wire report. A bunch of agnostics from DC and NY believe they understand Islam better than a guy who spent time in Yemen and changed his name to Abdulhakim Muhammad. The media and various political and academic elites are doing a disservice to our understanding of Islam, and there are implications of that misunderstanding relevant to the war on Islamic terrorism, our immigration policies, and domestic surveillance that should be undertaken of mosques and other Muslim groupings domestically.

The media and other elites buy into the view that our liberal social structure works well with everyone because “people everywhere want the same things,” thus diversity is basically good, and that the Third World and its people are basically victims of the West historically and victims today of “prejudice.” This view runs into conflicts with reality regularly, especially in the case of Islam, whether it is the text of the Koran, atrocities committed in the past and today by Muslims, the anti-modern and totalitarian viewpoint of the most extreme (sincere?) Muslims, and by the relatively strong connections between the content of Islam and the acts of Islamic terrorists.

Now that we have a President talking about Islam being “revealed” on the Arabian peninsula, I don’t see this sorry state of affairs changing any time soon. Failures of analysis and understanding beget failures of imagination about the threats we face as a people.

It’s sometimes objected that these terrorists are not following true Islam. Perhaps. But someone forgot to tell the perpetrators, their leaders, the thousands who cheered the “19 Lions,” and whoever put all that stuff about killing infidels in the Koran.

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Obama the Chameleon

Now that it’s convenient–in this case, the eve of a diplomacy tour to the Middle East–Obama talks far more candidly about his background, his Muslim dad, the Muslim country he was raised in, and his Muslim roots.

I don’t think he’s a secret Muslim, a Manchurian Candidate who will soon institute sharia law. If anything, many of his writings suggest an extremely self-absorbed agnostic. But I do think he has a great deal of sympathy and fellow feeling with Muslims because of his background and friendships (such as his many Pakistani friends from college) and also identifies as a black person with the Third World criticism of America as arrogant and oppressive. This all matters because Obama portrayed himself as American as Apple Pie during the campaign, highlighting his white relatives from Kansas, even though his whole life has been spent in strange locales (Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan), in the company of his mom’s strange succession of Third World men and then her eventual abandonment of Barack, and his public life has consisted of a fight for the “oppressed” against America’s traditional elites and traditional institutions.

This all matters because people that don’t obsess about politics and policy tend to vote for people that they think share their values and experiences. His “official” background–ambitious, American, sensitive to the marginalized, by the bootstraps, explicitly Christian, patriotic, even-handed and open-minded–was something many could relate to and about which they could find something to admire. But it deviated greatly from reality and concealed his very exotic past and his Muslim connections in particular.

His criticisms of Guantanamo Bay or the War on Terror take on a very different cast when one must ask if they merely appear to be from a patriotic American concerned about imperial overreach but are in fact expressions of a sense of brotherhood with the groups–seething Muslim extremists and their supporters–most Americans cannot relate to and consider to be the enemy.

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India’s Umpteenth 9/11

There’s a lot of talk about the recent attacks in Bombay being India’s 9/11.  But there was another such attack by Islamic militants in July 2006, it killed over 200 people, and I wrote about it here.  In 1993, a series of bombings killed 250 Indians in the same city.  Neither event is exactly ancient history.

I am struck, however, about the massive death toll the modest number of terrorists–10 by the latest reports–were able to inflict.  Any open society, whether in Europe or North America risks these kinds of attacks.  What would stop a similar group with similar goals from shooting up shopping malls, sporting events, or country fairs here at home.

Coupled with the attackers’ unappeasable demands and the high cost of stringent security measures, they appear inevitable and likely to be repeated barring what has for some years become unspeakable.  The most cost effective and least draconian solution for societies like ours still appears to be (a) not let people from the world’s aggrieved and militant populations within our borders and (2) make life difficult and laden with suspicion with an ultimate goal of self-deportation or assimilation for those whom we improvidently have allowed in.  Yet this approach is treated as unspeakable, while strip searching 80 year old grandmothers at airports is A-OK. The values of equality and diversity trump all others, including genuine security and our historic liberties.

We are not India.  Pakistan is not on our border, nor is there any source of organized militancy to be found at home.  While there are aggrieved groups among America’s poor, various ethnic minorities, and home-grown losers in the trends of globalization, their organization is lacking and their grievances dispersed in all directions against what may loosely be called “The Man.” In other words, these are problems of our own making; the root cause is easily identified, but we are too scared of not living up to our au courant value of open borders.  I should think if the body count of these types of attacks climbs high enough in Europe and America, the current order will be exposed as a fraud, and both regions will be ready for what is now considered radical political change.  For now, we have meaningless gestures of condemnation by the Bushes and Obamas of the world, neither of whom has shown any insight or moral courage on the big picture issues.

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Happy Birthday to a Terrorist

They just had a big ol’ bash for Nelson Mandela’s birthday in the UK. Will Smith, Annie Lennox, and even crackhead Amy Winehouse made an appearance. Nelson Mandela, of course, is a terrorist who fought long and hard for majority rule in South Africa. He spent many years in jail for a real terrorist crime: attempted sabotage of trains in South Africa with bombs. He and the ANC movement ultimately succeeded, and South Africa has since gone down the tubes with out-of-control violence, rape, economic troubles, and overall chaos.

You would not know about this somber reality from the happy celebration in Europe. Much of the anti-Apartheid movement there was part of a broader and rather extravagant exercise in self-loathing. Nationalism was deemed the origin of the two very terrible World Wars, and it too was the root of colonialism. Colonialism undoubtedly had many evils attached to it, though in practice it varied quite widely from place to place, and those evils should be compared with the evils that preceded European rule or followed in the restoration of majority rule.

After abandoning their colonial empires out of necessity, Europeans in the 60s had little to feel guilty about. So after condemning their parents–about whom they could do very little–they set about an orgy of condemnation of the small number of whites still living in Africa. They labeled them as the apotheosis of evil and treated them far more shabbily than the far more murderous Soviet Union and friends.

Europe swiftly threw Rhodesia and South Africa in front of the bus in the 70s and 80s, while saying little about the mass murder of fellow Europeans in Hungary (1956) and the Czech Republic (1968). It’s very easy to be generous with the lives and fortunes of people that are distant from you. The European indifference to the problems of majority rule in Africa is akin to the American liberal indifference to the problems working-class whites face on such issues as school bussing or gun control. Liberal policymakers send their kids to fancy private schools and live in well-protected high rises and gated communities. Yet their co-ethnics with far less wealth must deal with race riots in high school and out-of-control crime enabled by misplaced compassion. The way Europe has treated European settlers in Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa is the same phenomenon: costless “charity” with other people’s lives. It’s an opportunity for irresponsible self-satisfaction, self-condemnation, and other ugly practices.

Looking for dragons to slay, the Europeans also opened the floodgates to mass immigration from their former colonies in the 60s. What began as a trickle is now a raging torrent. From the murder of Theo Van Goth and Pim Fortuyn to the Paris riots of 2006 and the all-too-frequent “honor killings” on the streets of Britain, unease has grown into real fright and despair.

What should the leaders who brought about this doomed course do? Surely they won’t talk straight about what’s happened and what needs to change going forward. Better to forget and celebrate the likes of Nelson Mandela, whose black-ruled South Africa has predictably emerged as failed state replete with corruption, disorder, and all of the other traits of Africa as a whole.  Minority rule coupled with prosperity and order has been replaced by failure on every mark of good governance save one, majority rule, which is cold comfort to people murdered in their beds by thugs.

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