The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were terrible on so many levels. From the first, numbing shock of seeing bodies falling from the burning towers on live television, to the wicked exploitation of the event by conservatives for political gain, the events surrounding 9/11 for me are inextricably entwined with anger and disgust.
One of the cruder side effects was a new outpouring of racism. Chatter about how terror was unique or somehow integral to Islam - and, specifically, the brown-skinned version -- lightly categorized as a horde on the brink of overrunning the United States. Happily for many righties that vision of an endangered Anglo-Saxon empire dovetailed nicely with rhetoric on immigration, then neatly transformed into the hysteria surrounding Barack Obama's birth certificate and secret, "socialist" agenda.
One of the outputs of all this talk was a call to racial profiling, kicked off by New York's resident whack job, Peter King, back in 2006:
Declaring that airport screeners shouldn't be hampered by "political correctness," House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has endorsed requiring people of "Middle Eastern and South Asian" descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.
The Missoulian jumped right in, supporting the idea (the editorial, alas, has been scrubbed from the newspaper's digital memory):
Of course, many screening measures are intended to dance around an uncomfortable reality. The primary terrorist threat comes not from the general public. Our society's sensibilities and laws, however, don't permit us to focus on that specific subpopulation because it would seem discriminatory. Instead, we screen everybody, conduct random searches and, soon perhaps, even employ high-tech machines trying to divine their hidden intentions. The broad-brush approach makes it less likely to detect a terrorist, not more.
The problem we have is that we are unwilling as a society to acknowledge that we are at war with people who are more homogenous than the general U.S. population. Because of this, using a person's ethnic heritage as one of many factors to decide if a person should be inconvenienced a little more than the 80-year-old grandmother isn't discrimination. It is affirmative action....
But...racial profiling actually makes us less safe...
As Spencer Ackerman notes, racial profiling is "a move that would not have caught shoebomber Richard Reid (British citizen, Jamaican heritage); would-be-underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at the time (Nigerian citizen, lots of time spent in the U.K.; and now Jihad Jane (American citizen, white as the driven snow, and we know white people can't be terrorists)."
But then, racial profiling isn't about making us safer. It's about making us feel safer.
I'm not going to be around much in the next couple of days, but I thought I'd leave you with this little tidbit from some rightie blogger:
Islam wants to destroy the West.
Islam is not a religion: it is a political, commercial, ideological, and criminal organization disguised as a religion so that it can use Liberals within our own borders as Fifth Column enablers of its attacks upon US interests.
Wait! I thought it was the right that was so gold-durned religious!
As if to underscore Matt Yglesias' point the other day that terrorist attacks against doctors who perform abortions actually have consequences that discourage physicians to perform the procedure comes this LA Times article about the founder of a Colorado clinic, Dr. Warren Hern:
...Dr. Warren Hern leaves no window uncovered.
Full-length blinds shroud the bulletproof entryway; in his office, vinyl shades block a small window.
This is one of the facts of Hern's life -- no windows, ever. That was how Dr. Barnett Slepian's killer shot him in upstate New York, through a kitchen window. Slepian, like Hern, performed abortions.
"I can't sit in front of an open window. The shades have to be drawn," Hern said.
After Slepian's shooting in 1998, Hern predicted another would follow. "Will I get to live out my life?" he asked in a newspaper column in 2001. ". . . Who's next?"
And this is the comment from the local pro-life movement:
Bob Enyart, spokesman for Colorado Right to Life, which has demonstrated against Hern for decades, said that although his group doesn't condone Tiller's slaying, abortion providers should expect that violence begets violence.
"If a Mafia hit man gets killed, people recognize it's an occupational hazard," he said.
Remember, abortion is a legal and often necessary medical procedure. Scott Roeder, member of Operation Rescue, with links to the Army of God, murdered a man on the steps of his church. You tell me which person here resembles a hit man. You tell me which groups are using violence to intimidate its political opponents.
Meanwhile, Roeder himself is shocked - shocked! - that he's being treated "like a criminal" by Kansas officials. I guess he expected the pro-life's version of forty virgins or something...
The big buzz on the 'Tubes today is about a DHS report on the increased danger of right-wing extremists:
The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in "rightwing extremist activity," saying the economic recession, the election of America's first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.
A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.
"It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration," the warning says.
Rightie bloggers have been apoplyeptic about the news -- Malkin's response is typical -- they claim it's a "hit job" on the right hours before their tax-day protests.
My initial reaction was two-fold. The first was, hey! I've been saying for years that right-wing extremism is a much more real and present threat than Islamic extremism. Or have we forgotten the violence latent in the anti-abortion movement? The militia movement? Timothy McVeigh? That the Bush administration and its agencies were focusing our attention on the Middle East -- and not terrorism, per se -- was a political decision. They used the specter of terrorism to further their foreign-policy objectives, not to actually combat or curb terror. Especially the rightwing domestic kind, because that's kind of embarrassing, isn't it?
Keep a citizenry in submission to whatever it wants? What, like passing trillion dollar spending package in one month's time? Like the daily doom and gloom tour, promising that the economy will face an "economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression" unless this spend-ulus bill is passed? (Is President Obama guaranteeing that if the bill is passed, catastrophe will be avoided?)
I have to think that a terrorist attack on the US (which has actually happened) is at least as likely as an "irreversible" recession (which has not).
Note that the green line is not projected job losses, but actual job losses.
Let's see. On one hand, you have the right-wing fantasy of the extinction of Western civilization by "Islamo-fascists" and the need to jettison all of our civil liberties to prevent it...
...on the other, you have an actual recession, thousands out of jobs, foreclosures, and an economic stimulus strategy that's supported by Nobel winners that should, at least, mitigate the effects of the downturn.
The terrorist threats might have been real, but we know now that a lot of the "facts" marshalled to support the rhetoric wasn't. In the case of the economic crisis, though, maybe Americans aren't panicking as much as they should: the job market spiraldown continues, and more apocalyptically, the rate of decline is picking up. The labor force is contracting rapidly; the unemployment rate is close to its 1990s peak at 7.8%. (Want higher than that? Go to the 1970s.) Americans are working fewer hours, too. Scary! Christina Romer, the White House's chief economist, noted that of the 3.6 million jobs lost over the past year, most of them have been lost in the last four months. The rate is comparable to the rate recorded by economists in 1938, during the....yep.
Forget delusional fears of the government seizing your 401(k) account, here's some actual policy change Barack Obama's administration is going to make:
President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.
The "controversial new system" of justice is talk of a court designed specifically to hear cases involving "sensitive national security cases." Presumably they would in part resemble the FISA court, where procedings are secret and presided over by a panel of judges.
Spencer Ackerman, who dislikes the idea of the new system of justice, that probably will involve some sort of military tribunal:
So we'll wait to see what proposal actually emerges. But consider not only that this is one of the first initiatives that Obama is pursuing -- it's one of the first that he's leaking, as well. This is as clear a signal as can be sent that the Bush era isn't just over, it will be actively rolled back. How far it actually gets rolled back we'll have to wait and see. And pressure.
This particular black eye against our national reputation, this affront to hundreds of years of legal tradition, this inhumane and unjust system of detention is going to end.
So, two Tennessee neo-Nazis were involved in a plot to kill Barack Obama and over a hundred school children.
Now we haven't heard much lately about "Islamo-fascism" and the Islamic plot to take over the world -- most of the nutjobs are busy scanning Obama's birth certificate and pondering whether he's a Maoist or Stalinist -- but this is something that's stuck in my craw for some time, the belief that terror and violence is owned by a particular religion or particular region.
Is the plot serious? Is it overblown? Who knows. What I do know is that right-wing militia and white supremacist groups operating in this country do pose a threat. Heck, I'd argue they were a bigger threat than Islamic terrorists. Me, then:
My point is that terrorism isn't inherently Islamic - or even religious - or the purveyance of dark-skinned illegal immigrants. To simplify the problem to a set of preprogrammed ideological values only diminishes the complexity of the problem.
The "enemy" isn't a group of people you can sort out by skin color or religious affiliation or nationality. They're not even an "enemy," but a bunch of degenerate criminals.
Okay, Berlin was more than a "little speech." It was a clear reaffirmation of Obama's intent to bring a disgraced United States back to the forefront of the international community as a leader for democratic values:
...the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.
The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.
[snip]
But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived - at great cost and great sacrifice - to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom - indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us - what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.
Simply put, awesome. Obviously the use of "walls" has an emotional appeal in Berlin -- they know what he's referring to...and did I ever tell you I was in Germany and Berlin for the 1989 revolution? Forget Reagan, forget consumer goods; the '89 revolution was about people, just ordinary folks, like you reading this blog, who stood up and left. They had it, and they quit the system. And that was the end.
So you might have seen the link, but Michelle Malkin led a right-wing blog rampage against Dunkin' Donuts because they ran an ad of Rachel Ray...wearing a scarf.
I kid you not.
Apparently, the scarf looks like something that a Palestinian might wear.
The best reaction to this bit of news belongs to Kossak Hunter (well worth the read):
S o this is what we've (well, I say "we", but I mean a small subset of American patriots who, having absolutely no intention of doing anything meaningful for their country that involves getting out of their chairs, spend their days looking for secret terrorist messages in television commercials) been reduced to. We're examining the fashion statements of donut ads and parsing them for hints of surreptitious Islamic culture. We're locked into a mortal combat against those that casually accessorize without remembering that we are at war; we're mere weeks away from probing the hidden alliances of the doilies on our grandmothers' coffee tables.
We are a nation that sees images of Jesus on toast. Admit it; there was absolutely no possibility that we would not eventually devolve to this point.
Malkin, of course, is the same blogger that broke the big story about the kitchen countertops of a CHIP family.
Read the editorial. Have you ever seen such contempt for our legal system in print before? Read this passage:
But Padilla and his Yale Law School attorneys think that these decisions are better second-guessed by plaintiffs' lawyers and judges rather than our elected leaders.
Look, I'm no law professor, but even I know that "elected leaders" don't interpret the law - that's the role of the judiciary. You'd think by reading this that John Yoo has yet to read the Constitution. Yet he holds a teaching job at UC Berkeley's prestigious Boalt Hall school of law.
What a disgrace to his profession, UC Berkeley, and to the country.
...the available evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as important causes of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities. Such explanations have been embraced almost entirely on faith, not scientific evidence.
Why is that important? Poverty often is the cause of many other crimes. Low employment rates and low wages directly correlate to crime levels. Well-paying jobs, then, are the antidote to crime-ridden neighborhoods. A serious effort made to reduce crime should include as much money towards infrastructure improvements - schools, transportation, parks, etc. - that make communities more attractive to employers as towards law enforcement. In short, if you understand the root of your problem, you can correct it.
If poverty were at the heart of Islamic radicalism, then, the solution would involve helping alleviate poverty in the area producing terrorists. Raise the economic level of those areas and -- *poof* -- no more terrorism. Only Kruger persuasively demonstrates that terrorism (and hate crimes, interestingly enough) are not affected by jobs and wages and education or other similar economic conditions. That contradicts a lot of amateurish observations (including mine) that crushing poverty among the Palestinian refugee camps contributes to Arab-Israeli conflicts.
Christopher Hitchens yesterday made a heroic effort to defend the term, "Islomfascism." Of course the f-word has been bandied about lately to smear those on the left, so it's interesting to hear what Hitchens has to say on the matter:
Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression-especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"-and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements.
Hitchens does admit that "Islamo-facism" is missing its nation-state, corporatism, and racial politics, but, hey! The analogy isn't perfect.
Some time ago I wrote a post about how acts of terror committed by right-wing groups are often ignored by the media. I got slammed for that post by Jeff and Craig -- and rightfully so. Not because of content, but because of clarity.
In fact, I think I make myself much more clear in the comments to Jeff's post -- basically that no one religion or people "naturally" produces terror, that terrorism is complex, and the reasons for resorting to it are not as simple as your typical right-wing blogger's explanation for it. That is, them Arabs is naturally evil, and we Americans are naturally good.
And maybe to clarify it more, I'll cite another incident. This time of a (presumably) crazy guy who shot a member of the US military on the Fourth of July.
PhillyBurbs.com reported that a relative said [shooter Matthew] Marren was "angry at the government and wanted to make a statement" on Independence Day. Authorities found two suicide notes that "were indicative of an individual suffering from mental-health problems."
Investigators have no clear-cut motive for Schrieken's shooting, despite two suicide notes left behind by the gunman, Milavsky said. They have no evidence that Schrieken knew his assailant, he said.
"The shooter was a troubled and disturbed individual," Milavsky said. "We will not release the content of these notes.
Marren's parents temporarily disconnected their home phone in New Jersey. An aunt told the Burlington County Times that the suicide notes described Marren's anger at the government and a desire to demonstrate that anger on a national holiday.
Let's assume that Malkin is correct and that Marren's antigovernment stance was leftwing and not rightwing. (Although there's no evidence of Marren's politics in any report.) And let's ignore Malkin's pathetic attempts to tie the shooting to the mainstream antiwar movement based on rhetoric from a few crazy outliers. (Mainstream war opponents are anything but violent extremists and the craziest leftwing bloggers -- like me -- have never said 'kill Bush' or 'kill US servicemen.') Whatever.
Let's assume this guy was a lefty, was incited to kill a serviceman because of politics, and pushed over the edge by violent anti-war imagery and rhetoric.
That only underscores my point that political violence is not isolated to any group, regardless of political affiliation, religion, or color of skin.
The sooner we rid ourselves of the notion that there's something inherently violent about Islam and Middle Easterners, as if there's something in their genes that makes them blow themselves up, and the sooner we look for the real causes of international terror, the quicker we can address the problem.
Bruce Schneier has a great post up about how the government is protecting us from "stupid terrorists" whose plots are so ridiculous they could never be pulled off.
Think about all the plots that have been thwarted. The JFK pipeline crew. The English liquid bombers. The Fort Dix six. The Dirty Bomber. The Miami Seven. None of their plots were even remotely feasible; many of them were actually prodded into more violent and anti-government planning by FBI informants.
After shooting his wife, Hamilton targeted the dispatch center in the Latah County Courthouse, killing one police officer and wounding two others before retreating to a nearby church, where he killed a sexton. According to Dave Niewert, that's probably a sign that Hamilton's rampage was at least in part politically motivated:
What's clear is that Hamilton fully intended to take as many people with him as possible; that's why he began by targeting the dispatcher's office, where he knew he would get police response. And considering his extremist background, it is certain this was intended as some kind of political statement. It was, by most definitions, an act of domestic terrorism.
This news followed on the heels of the busted-up Christian napalm bomb plot. And that's not all, of course. Rick Perlstein recalls other recent incidents involving right-wing groups and individuals and urges the right to cease their Islam-o-hysteria:
Stop it. Stop it right now. Stop pretending Islamicists - or environmentalists or animal rights activists (which are, ridiculously, federal law enforcement and non-governmental terrorism-watchers' next most obsessive concern) - are the only imminent terrorist threat to our nation.
