Terrorism and Immigration Policy
From a story in The Globe and Mail
The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.
Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the child of Muslim immigrants is similar to that of other recent Islamic State and al-Qaeda devotees who have brought terror to the cities of Europe.
Second-generation immigrants born in France to parents who had immigrated from Algeria carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the centre of Paris in 2015. The Belgian-born children of Moroccan immigrants masterminded the shooting and bomb attacks on the Bataclan nightclub and Stade de France later the same year. All five perpetrators of last year’s bombings of the Brussels airport and subway had a similar profile.
“If the story of radicalization and Islamism in Europe is about anything, it’s about second-generation immigrants, children of immigrants who feel culturally dislocated … a sense of dislocation related to being brought up in Western culture and finding something doesn’t quite fit,” said Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
Of course, it isn’t just Europe. Think Omar Mateen, Syed Farook, Nidal Hasan, Nadir Soofi, and add to them any number of individuals raised in the US who made their way to fight for ISIS or Al Shabaab.
One would think that the children of immigrants would be particularly unlikely to want to cause to harm to their country. Their parents, after all, got lucky when they were able to come here. That is something they should know and a message they should pass on to their children. (Those feelings are something to which I can attest; on my father’s side, I am a second generation immigrant.)
But that decency and gratitude is clearly more than some people will show to their compatriots. And that is becoming more and more of a problem, particularly now that the terrorists have become vile enough to directly target children.
(Before you decide this is something we brought on ourselves by provoking people through our behavior abroad, bear in mind two things. The first is that pacifist countries like Sweden get the same treatment we do. The second is that Osama bin Laden told us a decade and a half ago that one of his goals was the “liberation” of al Andalus.)
Of course, none of this is to say that we don’t have atrocities committed by people who aren’t 2nd-gen-immigrants. We do, and too many at that. No decision made at the INS in the last few decades would have saved Americans from Dylan Roof or John Allen Muhammad. On the other hand, without the signature by an immigration officer a generation ago, Omar Mateen’s 49 victims would still be alive.
Now, we have the population we have. The next Mateen is already in the US, and the next Abedi is already in Europe, and they will kill more of us, and more of our children. But there is another Mateen and another Abedi that are a little farther out. They haven’t been born yet, and their parents are currently somewhere far away. For the sake of our descendants we had better figure out how to recognize not just those evil enough to perpetrate callous acts of violence, but also those who don’t have the decency to teach their children not to be evil themselves. And we damn well better make sure we don’t let them into the country.
This should be labelled op-ed Mike…and it appears you are venting in a rather self-indulgent way, without addressing the complexities that are obvious.
Bad Seed Theory of recognizing them as they are born?
I agree with Dan.
It is an Op Ed but with respect, if there are complexities I do not see them. This is actually something to which I have given a lot of thought for a long time. I have been worried since 9/11 that terrorists would eventually realize how easy it is to specifically target children. That time, apparently, has arrived. And it is vital for our society’s survival that we figure out how to minimize the damage that is to come. Because adults will put themselves into harm’s way for their country, but they will not tolerate a social structure that they feel won’t protect their children.
Okay…bad parents produce potential terrorists. And you are feeling your family is threatened (children in particular) and in some way feel the social structure allows or encourages this particular kind of harm. I understand the impulse. But how does current terrorism threaten our survival.
Keep in mind that kids and family development are a specialty of mine, and that the Boston marathon bombing was personal and up close (4 families of friends were a half block away from the finish line). I have extensive experience with bad parents as well and am still trying to figure out what it is that catches the imagination of a young person to become a terrorist.
I am confused that your sense of being threatened and unable to control the situation translates into particular policies.
Run,
The post is not about bad seeds. It is about bad parents. You have a better chance of recognizing those who will teach their children bad behavior than those whose children will simply be bad seeds.
I cannot imagine the grief of a parent whose child has been killed…for any reason or by any perpetrator. In 2013, over 12000 murders were committed in the United States. Why can we not predict who these murderers are and prevent the crimes?
I am not sure why we should focus our fears on the few who die on account of the broad category called “terrorism” and not on the many who are killed on a continuing basis.
There is even a theory that when terrorists kill innocents it is a sign of their weakness…of their inability to initiate real conflict. And given the steady progress against ISIS, we should not be surprised if they engage in desperate acts.
We cannot look into the future, we have no crystal balls. And closing the gates is locking us in with the perpetrators of the 12000 per year we already have. Maybe the new citizens really aren’t that big of a risk.
Apparently more Americans die in bathtubs than from terrorism. These bathtubs have already gotten into the country. What are we going to do about it?
“The United States ranked seventh in the world (behind Nigeria, Brazil, India, Congo, Mexico and Ethiopia) in global homicide figures among ages 0 to 19, with over 3,000 youth homicides recorded in 2012.”
“….the United States took the top spot among 34 Western democracies, with an average of four adolescent homicides per 100,000 people in 2012.”
https://www.rt.com/news/185256-us-unicef-children-homicide/
Of far greater importance and relevance than terrorist suicide bombers… doncha think? Possibly having something to do with the fact that we just love our guns and heaven and god forbid that we can'[t have them if we want them.
Aaaahhh, yes, Mr. Kimel and I’m sure multitudes of others yearn for the good ol’ days again when terrorist didn’t target us.
Like the Salem Witch trials weren’t called terrorism, but that’s what it was in fact.
Then there were the terrorist operating to promote US independence long prior to the actual revolution…. one of those secret terrorist groups was referred to as the “Sons of Liberty” but there were many, many others burning down loyalst’s houses, barns, & killing their livestock, threatening death. Those must have been the “good” terrorists I suppose.
Or the massive terrorism by the U.S. native American Indians against the innocent settlers who were just taking native American land from the inhabitants… and the US military wasn’t conducting terrorism against the native Americans at all… no innocent women and children were massacred, or woman raped. Nope that wasn’t terrorism.
And then we can get back to the good ol’ days when the KKK was cleansing our nation of the black males raping our women and those black people that didn’t know their place….. that wasn’t called terrorism either, I suppose because the KKK didn’t use bombs preferentially… rather burning to death or hanging or just a single shot to the head were the means.. not to mention burning crosses .
Yep, the good old days when terrorists weren’t attacking in the US. .
The whole point to terrorism is to get peoples’ panties in a twist, so that they start hating on immigrants.
Craig,
1. One reason to focus on terrorism is that the terrorists would, if they could, kill very large numbers of people, and the means to do so are getting more accessible. By contrast the average murderer seems to have one or two targets in mind.
2. I believe the Ku klux Klan is as weak and insignificant now as at any point in its history. By your logic we should be seeing an awful lot of Black organizations getting bombed. We also don’t hear much from a lot of formerly active terrorist organizations ranging from the PFLP to Puerto Rican liberation organizations? Why? Because they are weak or wiped out, not because they are strong.
3. Some of the new citizens are a risk, some aren’t. But having natives that commit violence is not a justification for importing more violence. That would be like eating an asbestos sandwich every day just because you got lung cancer from smoking.
Joel,
The leading form of death in the US is heart disease. By your standards of not worrying about terrorism because bathtubs kill more people, you should stop worrying about cancer (or anything else) because heart disease kills more people.
One other flaw in your reasoning: if you cease trying to stop terrorism, deaths by terrorism will go up exponentially. Not true of bathtubs.
Also – do you really believe the entire point of terrorism is to get people riled up about immigration? Seriously?
Dan,
The fact that we cannot, at the moment, identify precisely who will be a terrorist is no reason not to put effort trying to figure it out.
Also… from what I can tell, security is the thing that governments of any sort sell. If they can’t sell that, they have nothing.
Your reply is a non starter. I said nothing About precisely nor not to put effort into it. This is bullshit Mike. Your answer is far from a response and resembles a trolls response.
Mike
yep. and the Reichstag fire was set by a Jew. So we better damn sure get the Jews out of the country.
my apologies to anyone who thinks i mean that. i am only trying to put Mike’s logic in a way that might help him see the fallacy.
i doubt if anyone notices that we are creating terrorists by smart bombing their relatives in the name of preventing terror. in any case i don’t hear anyone arguing to stop that.
And just btw, does anybody realty think the “shock & awe” campaign wasn’t a massive dose of terrorism?
Or how about Dresden and Wurzburg? Pure terrorism by design and intent.
Terrorism is a tactical method of intimidating and demoralizing the opposition in a conflict…. instilling fear in a specific population or segment of it. The objective is to possibly force the governing body or opposition leaders to reconsider or be overthrown or even give the general population reason enough to oppose the gov’t or leaders and withdraw public support. It’s also used to intimidate by fear to get any opposition to stop opposing or even reverse and support the terrorist’s cause.
It also demonstrates a high degree of resolve … the more extreme the terrorist acts, the more of them, the more resolve is demonstrated or perceived to be.. which is the whole point of terrorism… perceptions. .
Coberly,
Marinus van der Lubbe was Jewish? You should inform historians as this is new information.
Also… as I noted in the post – terrorism seems to strike in places like Sweden, which have no involvement in bombing anyplace. That fairly obviously isn’t the motivation for terrorism.
Additionally, when that POS Anders Breivik engaged in his act of terrorism, I bet you didn’t say to yourself: “Hey, just because one right wing extremist shot up a bunch of innocent kids doesn’t mean we should watch out for other extremists who follow the same ideology.”
Heck, think of a case closer to home. Here in the US, for reasons I will never understand, a lot of people have an affinity for the Confederate Flag. They claim it has nothing to do with racism, etc. And yet, when Dylan Roof shot 9 Black parishioners, the fact that he venerated the flag and in his mind, it was actually tied to racism, was enough to create a backlash against it. The flag came down from the capitol in South Carolina despite the fact that a whole lot of people insisted it had nothing to do with hatred or terrorism.
If you have a reason why we should treat extremists who aren’t right wingers less severely than we treat extremists who are right wingers, particularly when the former have done a lot more damage in recent years than the latter, then I’d like to hear it.
Mike
you do go off.
I have no idea whether he was Jewish or not. But the Reichstag fire was blamed on “the jews” by the Nazis. Or maybe my memory has gone bad. But the point remains.. it is bad logic to hold an entire race responsible for the acts of a few.
As a matter of fact I don’t react to right wing terrorism any differently that I react to islamic terrorism, or left wing terrorism. So don’t wait up nights waiting for me to explain why I think we should treat islamist terrorists less severely than right wing terrorist. And that wasn’t the question anyway. The question was whether we should deny immigration to a whole race of people because of the acts of some of them.
Your Breivik analogy would have been closer to your argument re Moslems if you had said ” doesn’t mean we should exclude Swedes from entering America.
As for the Confederate flag and war memorials, I think the Left is making enemies it doesn’t have to. Very few people who fly Conf. flags, or put them on the wall in their room, or put flowers on a confederate grave are thinking of slavery. But a lot of them have been taught to hate “the gummint” and of course “the left.” Just the way you are urging us to hate them.
And to step on my own line in reply to Longtooth, I don’t think the batch of terrorists you have cited are motivated by any rational ideology or strategic intent. I think they are demented people who have latched on the symbols of their identity group to justify in their own minds their “revenge” against … well, against the identity group they have projected their neurotic hate on to.
Longtooth
Yes, and another motive for terrorism is to provoke the governent to retaliate against innocent people and create more recruits to the cause.
But I think… as i said to Mike… that most of the terrorism we are seeing today is not motivated by any strategy. It is just sick people wrapping their psychosis in a flag of “patriotism” .
Coberly,
1. Breivik is Norwegian, not Swedish
2. The reason we don’t get alarmed about Norwegian terrorists is that Breivik seems to be a one-off. A rational person in the US worries more about Heart Disease than Kuru.
A few decades ago, during the Lebanese Civil War, it became a popular pastime for some of the warring gangs to kidnap foreigners. For a while people were saying – “well, sure, they’re kidnapping Americans/French/British who are sort of goading things on over there.”
But then eventually a few Irish hostages were taken, and one or two from Switzerland, and several were with charitable organizations. It didn’t matter to the hostage takers.
What did matter to the hostage takers was the Soviet reaction after Soviet citizens were taken hostage. Benny Morris of the Jerusalem Post broke a story about a KGB hit team castrating a cousin of the leader of the group that had taken the Soviets and sending the leader his cousin’s testicles in a box. Whether true or not, everyone believed it. The hostage taking of foreigners, including neutral countries like Switzerland and Ireland continued, but nobody messed with the Soviets.
This is not to recommend the Soviet approach, but merely to note that this nonsense that the terrorists are merely reacting to violence we perpetrate has been peddled before.
Mike
well, gosh. you got me. my memory is not what it was. so the Jews are safe, but we need to kill all the communists. As for that Norwegian what was he doing in a paragraph about Swedes?
I am glad you have sorted out all the non essentials so you can feel that you have proved the moral necessity of excluding Moslems… that was your original point, wasn’t it?
ok, Mr. Kimel. I’ll bite.
You said:
“For the sake of our descendants we had better figure out how to recognize not just those evil enough to perpetrate callous acts of violence, but also those who don’t have the decency to teach their children not to be evil themselves. And we damn well better make sure we don’t let them into the country.”
For our descendants — presumably you mean those of present day US residents? — we (meaning the US public at large? Individual residents? the US law enforcement? Academic psychologists? US technological inventers?) need to learn how to recognize both evil people and also parents who aren’t decent — decent being defined as teaching their offspring to not be evil.
Is this pretty much the same as saying for the sake of our descendants we need to make humans behave the way we want them to… where the way “we” want them to behave depends on who “we” actually is?
There are only two ways I’m aware of how this has been done … impose severe penalties for not behaving the way “we” want…
1. Capital punishment being the limit… or perhaps preceding this with drilling their teeth or cutting their eyeballs out with a dull pocket knife… or attaching them to a rack. Even making this a public spectacle.
2. Using positive incentives to obtain the behavior “we” want others to have.
History of humans however doesn’t support method #1 as being effective in achieving the desired ends. So that’s not going to work.
That leaves method #2 as the only other option. However, the positive incentives have to align with who’s providing the incentives and then we’re back to who you mean by “we”.
And then there’s this other slight problem: Somewhere else not associated with who you mean by “we” there are other “we” groups who have a completely different idea of what behavior is correct and acceptable…. and history is very clear on this…. there are always other “we” groups who have completely different beliefs about appropriate behavior, very often in fact diametrically opposed under some even many circumstances.
There’s this to contemplate. Everybody’s selection of who belongs to “we” isn’t necessarily the same at all. Your “we” and my “we” are certainly different for example and then considering the other 300 million residents just in this nation alone… not to mention the other few billion of the planet’s humans.
So do you have some fail-safe selection method and criteria n mind for the “we” you want to include in what you believe the behaviors of “we” need to be for the sake of our descendants?
I can recall for example several other guys who knew what the selection criteria was for inclusion in “we” to define the behaviors applicable for their “we” group. I’m sure you know these examples well yourself — A guy named Stephens, is one of them. Another guy named Duke comes to mind immediately also. Then there’s Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein, as well as one called Jesus, another who went by the name Muhammad, and we can go on and on.
So who’s your “we” group Kimo Sabe?
If this discussion provokes anything it is that there does not seem to be convincing arguments for an overarching solution to the issue of terrorism.
I am fairly certain that the wipe out the scum is not achieveable. Given the “yelling” I am a certain we have not had a rational discussion nationally. Is driving all points of view underground advisable? Maybe religious freedom is the problem?
Heim,
Nobody is arguing that there is an overarching solution to terrorism. But presumably we can do more than we are doing.
Also, the freedom of religion is not absolute. We don’t let people sacrifice animals on public altars which pisses off Santeria worshippers.
Heim and Coberly,
And some people believe killing abortion providers is part of their faith. Most of them are not immigrants or second generation immigrants. But if we had a spate of second generation immigrants from, say, Spain, going off and killing abortion providers, we’d be asking would-be immigrants from Spain their views on the murder of abortion providers.
Also, I am not sure this is about all of Islam. I suspect, for example, that Sufi Muslims are not over-represented among terrorists relative to the larger population.
Coberly,
Here’s an easy way to decide whether there’s an us and a them. If there’s a group of people who says, “we are OK, but we should exterminate everyone who isn’t part of our group” then consider that the “them” and the rest of us “us.”
I am not arguing for exterminating people whose stated goal is to subjugate or kill everyone else. But I am arguing it makes sense to keep people who want to subjugate or kill everyone else far away.
Mike, I will at least give you the courtesy of threading this:).
MIKE: 1. One reason to focus on terrorism is that the terrorists would, if they could, kill very large numbers of people, and the means to do so are getting more accessible. By contrast the average murderer seems to have one or two targets in mind.
CRAIG: Assumes knowledge of motivation not in evidence anywhere. I do not presume to know this. I would be interested in your evidence to support this assertion.
MIKE: 2. I believe the Ku klux Klan is as weak and insignificant now as at any point in its history. By your logic we should be seeing an awful lot of Black organizations getting bombed. We also don’t hear much from a lot of formerly active terrorist organizations ranging from the PFLP to Puerto Rican liberation organizations? Why? Because they are weak or wiped out, not because they are strong.
CRAIG: For the KKK, I would argue that the period of diminishing power and weakening was from 1930-1970, and yes there was a bit of terrorism of persons of color and black organizations in those days. As for other terrorist orgs (PFLP or Puerto Rico Liberation for example), the end game is either political engagement or violence transference (see Hamas). Let’s let the dust settle in London before we start considering exceptional measures.
MIKE: 3. Some of the new citizens are a risk, some aren’t. But having natives that commit violence is not a justification for importing more violence. That would be like eating an asbestos sandwich every day just because you got lung cancer from smoking.
CRAIG: My point is that we are woefully unable to predict or prevent violence either among natives or immigrants. And if we are going to enact extraordinary measures, maybe we should start with the larger threat.
Dan,
Sorry you find it to be BS. Let’s try again:
This comes straight out of Locke’s second treatise, which, if qualifies as an inspiration to our Constitution if anything at all does. Government’s exist, and continue to exist, only to the extent they have the consent of the governed. And as I stated in earlier, I am pretty sure the most primal thing for most people is the survival of their children. If a government demonstrates it is unable to protect its society’s children, that consent will disappear.
Governments fall. Countries fall. Sometimes peacefully (Czech Republic and Slovakia) but usually not.
But we know a lot. Subscribing to an ideology that says others are inferior, or must be subjugated, and taking it seriously matters. Sure, not everyone who looks down on others is going to be violent and antisocial, but some will, and it seems that most recent terrorist acts have been perpetrated by people with that sort of ideology.
As an example, there’s an Imam in Australia who has lately started saying Islam needs to be reformed because there are still a lot of Muslims who take seriously parts of the Koran when analogous parts of the Bible are no longer taken seriously by most Christians and Jews. Stating something like that used to be permissible and was widely accepted perhaps a decade ago,but these days it gets you tarred as a racist.
Honestly, I don’t understand this line. Responding to my best guess as to what you mean, when a population feels threatened, it demands policies to protect itself. Doubly so, I would imagine, if the population feels the lack of said policies threaten its children.
Craig,
I’ll start here:
You are right that so far the risk of death from one’s fellow Americans > risk of death from a terrorist. But… there are a few problems with your arguments.
First, say somehow you know with certainty that an American named John Doe is going to kill people. Perhaps he has a thirty page manifesto and a plan with diagrams. You still can’t prevent him from moving in next door to you, or chatting you up on the street. The law doesn’t allow it. But John Doe is a foreigner who has written the same manifesto, he can be prevented from setting foot in the country. In other words, in theory it is legally much easier to reduce damage by foreigners. (Perhaps this is less true after today’s circuit court ruling.)
Second, you should be more likely to be killed by a larger group than by a smaller group. That’s just numbers. Proportionality matters.
Third, if the guy down the street kills his wife/kid/parent, it doesn’t mean that if given a the opportunity he’d kill you too. If whoever made Abedi’s bomb had the wherewithal to build a nuclear weapon (to use an extreme example), he would have flattened most of Manchester. Omar Mateen would have wiped out most of Orlando.
You dispute something like my last point, stating this assumes knowledge of the motivation of killers. You are wrong. It merely requires observing behavior. Unless, of course, you are assuming that folks like Abedi and Mateen are simply more competent at butchery than the average killer of one victim. I’d like to see evidence that the average guy who goes to jail for murdering his wife was planning to blow himself up in an auditorium full of kids before I believe it.
Then there’s this:
Why? Action was taken against the Puerto Liberationists, and the violent part of the movement collapsed. Why let the violent players continue to kill innocent people? As to Hamas, in the Benny Morris story I noted upthread, I believe it was Hamas that kidnapped the Soviet citizens. The Israelis aren’t willing to do that, but they have found that having a wall, and retaliating hard reduces the number of bombs they deal with. Those are exceptional measures. Letting the dust clear won’t work, since there will always be more dust from more bombs if you don’t stop the bombers.
Dan,
For some reason, Mike’s measured reasoning is not sinking in to you. So how about this: a significant number of Muslims are proven to want to kill us, subjugate us, destroy Western Civilization. What is so wrong with us not letting them immigrate, behind enemy lines?
What is so worthy of Muslim culture that we would benefit from their contribution as country? Granted they’re not the only threat, but when a shrapnel bomb goes off in a crowded place like Manchester, Boston Marathon, etc. what are the chances that it is not a Muslim jihadist?
Are we supposed to let Political Correctness prevent us from protecting innocent children,” ie. Islam is a religion of peace……”
As you might say; ” Please provide links……..”
Dan,
The Manchester bomber was a second generation Muslim immigrant. If England hadn’t magnanimously let his parent’s immigrate 100 of their children would not be dead or maimed. Yes that’s 100 innocent children.
I can’t imagine if my daughter was there and was a victim. Can you/?Libs are supposed to be the one’s who “care about the children.” Would it be worth the political posturing……….And the potential votes?
Sammy
Timothy McVeigh killed 162 people with a bomb in Oklahoma City. That would never have happened if we hadn’t let his parents into the country. And since we couldn’t tell who his parents were back then, we shouldn’t have let any Scotch-Irish into the country.
That is what your “thinking” amounts to. It is thinking about on the level of a bear that attacks all humans “to protect her cubs.”
The bear has an excuse. Humans are supposed to be able to think with a little more nuance.
Coberly,
McVeigh was an aberration. A rarity. You’re supposed to be this great numbers guy… the social security numbers guru. Do the math.
Although, as always, your math has to do with your private situation: a social security recipient selling “just a small tax increase that you won’t even feel.” so that there is no decrease in your check, sequestered away in Eugene OR with no threat of terrorist threat. Free to climb onto your soap box and “virtue signal.”
Sammy
well, I guess the bear is smarter than you. At least she doesn’t make up stupid stories to justify herself.
McVeigh was hardly an aberration. The Scotch-Irish have been murderers since they were invented by the British. We should never have let them into this country.
Mr. Kimel, you stated in response to Dan (May 25, 8:52):
“If a government demonstrates it is unable to protect its society’s children, that consent will disappear”
Can you square that statement with the fact that.
“The United States ranked seventh in the world (behind Nigeria, Brazil, India, Congo, Mexico and Ethiopia) in global homicide figures among ages 0 to 19, with over 3,000 youth homicides recorded in 2012.”
“….the United States took the top spot among 34 Western democracies, with an average of four adolescent homicides per 100,000 people in 2012.”
https://www.rt.com/news/185256-us-unicef-children-homicide/
So can you quantify or even qualify how many of our children who aren’t protected on an annual basis from death by homicides
“…a government demonstrates it is unable to protect….that consent [of the people governed] will disappear.”
The fact of the matter is that the gov’t continues to exist despite the fact that thousands and thousands of our children die by acts of homicide every single year, more by preventable diseases, and many other known and continual reasons. So your statement doesn’t stand the test of either rational reason or actual observation of evidence.
Longtooth,
Yes.
Mr. Kimel, in another statement you made in response to Dan (May 28, 8:52) you stated:
“But we know a lot. Subscribing to an ideology that says others are inferior, or must be subjugated, and taking it seriously matters. Sure, not everyone who looks down on others is going to be violent and antisocial, but some will, and it seems that most recent terrorist acts have been perpetrated by people with that sort of ideology.”
Since, according to you, we “know a lot” then do you mean by this that we can figure out a-priori who will act on an ideology with violence and malevolence to others and who will not?
If that’s what you mean, and I don’t know how you could mean otherwise, how do you justify freedom of speech since with that freedom we can and do espouse our ideologies, beliefs, acts we think should be taken, violent and otherwise. There are a few restrictions on freedom of speech… yelling “fire” falsely in a crowded theater is the most common cited type of restriction. But we have a few others… inciting to riot is illegal, and so is advocating for the violent or forceful overthrow of our gov’t..
But there’s no restriction on advocating an ideology or saying all [pick any group] people should be rounded up and shot or imprisoned or blown to bits. These are opinions and announcing one’s opinion is not restricted speech… no matter how absurd or distasteful those opinions may be to anybody else.
So simply “we know a lot” has no apparent or certain bearing on what we know meaning having knowledge that somebody will carry out a violent act in accordance with what they espouse in speech or writing.
Under what conditions do you decide to “take it seriously” when somebody “[Subscribes] to an ideology that says others are inferior, or must be subjugated…” .? I seem to see plenty of people in influential positions and with wide audiences who literally and unabashedly say blacks are inferior and must be / should be subjugated. There are literally tens of thousands if no millions even who openly say and write and promote these things. Not just about blacks, but also about Mexicans, and Muslims (rag-heads). I recall a time when the same was espoused openly about the “slant-eyes”, and “flat-heads” and then before my time it was the “kikes” and “wops”, etc..
So your statement has no merit and makes absolutely no sense at all in historical terms, nor in terms of having freedom of speech, nor in any real world condition other than perhaps in a police state where freedom of speech means only that which is condoned by the gov’t.
In other words your statement is irrational.
Longtooth
actually, the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” argument was used by the Supreme Court to justify putting people in jail who advocated resisting the draft in WWI (which amounted to depriving persons… the draftees… of liberty without due process…
so you can see how these things get out of hand and “rationality” may not be a reliable guide one way or the other.
Timothy McVeigh was certainly not an aberration if numbers out of southern poverty law center are to be believed except in the sense of numbers all at once. If every attack by so-called white Christians were defined through the lens of religion there would be a large number. That said in the US that 60% of the population COULD be defined as white Christian and only 2% could be definred as Islamic one could suggest there is an issue. IF one could ameliorate a lot of the justifications used for and by the attacking terrorist(Palestine, Iraq, Afgahanistan, a few and not all examples) it would seem to move one to higher moral ground? If we are at “war” with terrorism that would suggest they are at war with us no matter who started it. I would argue that we need freedom from religion and that all the name calling doesn’t help. If a million Iraqis were killed in the recent wars that would suggest statistically that at least 10 million still alive knew someone killed. And I would agree that something be done before western soceity is destroyed by the security apparatus set up to defend us all.
It seems to me that the problem is not “moslems” but a particular generation of moslems that have grown up in a world that increasingly exclusionist. Almost all the terrorists in the West have grown up in the West and have become in one sense or another failures. This affects people from all cultures but the nature of the response varies between cultures. But the problem is the same. An exclusionist society. Make the society more exclusionist, doesn’t seem a likely solution to me.
And Mike, it really isn’t that their parents brought them up to be Terrorists. If you read the history of most of the European terrorists, their religion is not that of their parents and most were not very religious when they were younger. Middle Eastern terrorism (PLO) was originally secular. Religion is just another name for ideology. These are lost people (most were criminals first) who are looking for acceptance. Wahibism offers them that. It would be better if something more constructive offered them that.
Coberly and Heim,
If we are bringing this on ourselves, or justifying retaliation somehow, I can only imagine what the Copts and the Yazidis must have done. The Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians of the Arabian Peninsula must have worse still. They’ve been ethnically cleansed for around 800 years.
Alternatively, we can go with Occam’s razor, which is that blame-the-victim is as silly when applied to terrorism as it is when applied to any other crime.
Not sure I trust the SPLC’s numbers. They don’t pass the smell test.
I have yet to see an interview where a Scott-Irish person was saying, “And when I heard about the bombing I was praying that when they found the perpetrator, it wouldn’t be someone called Murphy or Smith or whose last name started with a Mc or Mac.”
Reason,
In this millennium so far, it isn’t enough to be a disaffected loser to become a terrorist. There are a lot of disaffected losers. The vast majority of disaffected losers aren’t engaging in terrorism. We can even note that most disaffected losers who are Muslim do not engage in terrorism. But since the year 2000, at least, it does seem like most disaffected losers who do engage in terrorism seem to call themselves Muslim.