I know that it makes for saleable media but we have to stop calling every nutcase who wields a weapon in public a terrorist. Reporters on TV this week whined in horror about the terrorists in Canada and the U.S. who were gathering headlines. How about a little intelligent reporting?
Those who refuse to accept that the problem in the Middle East is more Arab than it is Muslim and that the propaganda arms of the Arab legions are only using the religion as a rallying cry, point to the three “terrorists” that were arrested or killed in Canada and America the last week or so as evidence that it is the religion that is teaching the wrong principles. This is certainly partly true, but let’s look at the characters who committed these violent acts and see how they got where they ended up.
Michael Zehaf-Bibeau the Canadian gunman had been a party boy and wastrel until he got hooked on drugs and finally grabbed at religion as a crutch. Like everything else in his life, he used it badly and ended up killing a soldier and closing down Canada’s Parliament. Was it because he was a dedicated Muslim or because he was a human disaster? Blaming Islam, his newly acquired religion for this nut’s problems is ludicrous. He was a disaster waiting to happen and his religion or lack of it had nothing to do with his acts.
The man who ran over the soldiers in Canada had just recently converted to Islam and the crazy man who attacked the cops in the Brooklyn subway with an ax had also just converted. All these guys were crazy long before Islam touched their lives. That is not to say that there are not some very bad aspects to the current beliefs in the Muslim world but that Islam is more the excuse than the reason for their actions. As this column has presented the case before, the problem I the Middle east and with terrorism, is far more Arab than it is Muslim.
Jihadi’s have been calling on their followers to attack western targets for well over ten years now. Of the over a billion Muslims in the world only a very few have actually engaged in violence in this country or Europe. That said, there is still a problem in Islam. It’s just not enough for the moderate leaders to repeat what I have said above. It is their job to do something about the violence that seems to come so easily from the twisted principles of their religion.
Moderate Islamic leaders are right to point out that there is anti-Islamic bigotry in the world but they would be better off if they took on some of the Islamic based bigotry instead of worrying who is bigoted against them.
The Canadian reaction to the gunman that killed a soldier outside Parliament was quite different than what it might have been if that had happened in DC outside the Congressional Office building. There was little panic. The police reaction was immediate and kind of calm. The media didn’t start screaming about the failure of the national security system and the parties didn’t start accusing each other of not doing the right thing or blaming the government for not having stopped it before it happened. It was an amazingly civilized group of reactions especially when viewed through he lens of U.S. reaction to like events.
If it had happened here, Cruz, McConnell, McCain and Cheney would be on the tube screaming for the President’s scalp, accusing him of treason for letting, what was obviously a nut armed with a gun that they had helped him get, infiltrate our security system. Peter King and Daryl Issa would be howling for a congressional investigation of the White House and talking impeachment when it was their support of the NRA that allowed this crazy man to carry a gun in the first place. That’s the asshole way that we now deal with crisis.
The question becomes what do we do about these lone wolves. The answer is not much. It is clear that we need to stop them but we must also consider when possible security restrictions on freedom of speech and movement cross over into unconstitutional territory and create a situation where the nut case, because of our reaction to him, has won. How do we deal with the not yet guilty? We don’t, lest we violate their rights. It’s that simple and that difficult. To quote Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and NSA, “All free people have to balance their security and safety with their liberty and privacy, this is what democracies have to do all the time.”
Texas Republican Congressman, Mike McCaul, who is squeezing every second of TV time and every cowardly vote out of this situation by calling that attack by a Muslim convert, who was mad as a hatter, a terrorist incident
The same has been said about the guy in Canada who shot a soldier outside parliament and entered the building only to be shot himself. This guy was a nut. If he had been a real terrorist he would have shot any number of parliament members who were exposed to him. He didn’t, why, because he had no plan, not real political or religious motive or goal. He was mad as hell and he wanted to kill someone. That is the definition of a nut not a terrorist.
What we are doing in the media and the political system by crying wolf, is we are diminishing the real threats of actual terrorist activities that we must be alert too. Groups of men on planes with explosives are a terrorist threat. A man in the subway with workable poison gas and an agenda, is a terrorist threat, a nut with a hatchet is just a nut with a hatchet. If, like McCaul, you can’t tell the difference then you’re just a cheap politician looking for face time.
McCaul is joined by Mat Olsen, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who illogically agrees with him but offers no reasonable approach to a solution to the problem, thereby making one understand why, with such men in charge, we will never be able to stop this kind of problem.
Charlie Rose engaged a panel of Mike Morell former CIA chief, David Ignatius and Clarissa Ward CBS correspondent on the same subject. Morell, who is a very smart guy and who has a very intelligent view of most things can’t get off the official narrative about these individual nuts all being terrorists but he does see very clearly the solution. He understands that we should be using our resources to monitor online conversations between radicals and using that information to pinpoint them and track them down. He also understands that we must be using moderate Muslims to assist us. Like most government guys, he can’t resist taking a swipe at Ed Snowden for getting in the way of these investigations. What he doesn’t say, of course, is that if the NSA had been doing this kind of investigation instead of tapping everyone and his brother’s phone, Snowden would never have had a platform. This is where everyone in the government including the President has dropped the ball.
The appeal to the Islamist radical isn’t the way it used to be. Now it is an emotional appeal and when it involves young women, as it has come to, a romantic one. The Jihad is shown as a desperate fight back against the invasion of the all-powerful West. It has now developed a romantic narrative, much like that of the 1960’s Black Panther Party, of the struggling rebel fighting the white establishment for freedom and equality. It worked very well considering that not all, but a good number of those romantic rebels were nothing but common criminals. This is a myth that has been repeated over and over throughout history and the establishment has always been dumb enough or blind enough to act in ways that fed the fires of rebellion for the rebels. We have to fight this narrative with one of our own, one that is calmer, less biased, more compelling and yes, even more romantic. Our myth has to be that of the good guys standing up for the unprotected people, offering them peace, safety and a humane life. But in order to pull that off we have to act that way, and we have most often found that very hard if not impossible to do.