Terrorists: The Immigration Side of the Story

I think the war on terrorism has taken a turn for the better. More on this below or later. First, I have to give my immigrant’s reactions to the Boston Marathon assassinations aftermath.

As I pick it up from the Wall Street Journal and from what I glean on Fox, NPR and also TV5, the French language international channel, the suspects’ story does not quite add up.

They are Chechens who apparently never lived in Chechnya. Chechnya is a republic inside the Russian Federation. It was devastated by a civil war and by the ensuing repression from the Russian Federation. Note: I am a man of culture: When I say “Russia” I mean “Russia;” it means the same as the “Russian Federation.” If I wanted to say something else, I would say something else. A Chechen nationalist movement seeking independence from Russia is dormant but surely still around. One of its arms is a terrorist organization active in non-Chechen areas of Russia including in Moscow. The terrorist Chechen organization appears to be also a violent jihadist organization. Whatever its real goals are or are not, it does not mind killing kaffirs, including kaffir children.

The suspect brothers apparently obtained asylum in the US on the basis of their Chechen ethnicity. Their putative oppressors must have been Russians. I mean the majority population of the Russian Federation. They are people whose native language is exclusively Russian. If they are not Communists, they are Christian Orthodox or they are descendants of either, or they are Jewish. Their last names end in “ov” (or “ova”) or in “of” (or “ova”) unless they are German-sounding names. Their names never end in “ev.” That’s the suffix for a Muslim name.

I have a problem with the fact that the brothers were apparently never in Chechnya where they could have been oppressed. They obtained their asylum when they were living in Kyrgyzstan. That’s an independent, a sovereign republic. It’s not part of Russia. About 85% of the population there is Muslim. It’s not clear who would have oppressed the brothers’ Chechen family. It doubt it could have been the 10% Russians (see above minority) in the country. If they were that dominant, it would have come to my ears, I believe. There has been strife within Kyrgyzstan in the past between the majority Kyrgyz and the large Uzbek minority. But why would anyone give any sort of attention to a tiny number of Chechen refugees. What would be the point of persecuting them? I think, not one. Why did the brother Tsarnaev receive asylum in the US? Was there big-time lying involved?

To make things more complicated if no more unlikely, it appears that the brothers traveled to the US from Dagestan. That’s another small republic inside Russia. What kind of refuge is a country dominated by your persecutors? Why spend any time there at all if you don’t have to and you fear the persecution of those who dominate that small republic? And by, the by the way, both of the brothers’ parents, separately appeared to be living back in Russia, somewhere in the Russian federation when the events unrolled. Check this out: They had been granted US asylum and then, they fled their refuge to go back to the center of their alleged persecution.

Independently, both parents appear to be deranged. The father openly threatened the US on radios (“All hell will break lose” [if the police kills my second son.]) He was living in Russia, within easy reach of his alleged persecutors’ police when he said that. It does not add up.

The mother asserted categorically that her sons had been “set up.” Think about it. Even if you are the kind of person who likes conspiracies, who, what would set up young Muslims from a national origin not one American in fifty has heard of? What would be the point when you could set up someone who at least looked the part, a dark-skinned Pakistani, or a Palestinian with a checkered kaffieh, or a shifty-looking Saudi?

I hate to say this – again – but there must be thousands of cases of immigration gone wrong, some starting with lies. Many of those are bearing grudges. Some just return home. Others stay put, grudge and all, nursing their bitterness. Personal failure in this wide-open tolerant society is more likely to induce bitterness than does failure in a closed, traditional, frozen, economically stagnant society. Here, it’s your fault, period!

Of these thousands and thousands failed immigrants only very few turn to blind violence against the society that took them in. I can’t help notice that in this case, the young failed immigrant who turned terrorist also made his girlfriend cover up with Islamic dress. Some of my habitual critics will argue with a straight face that this is just another coincidence. Sure thing, a Lutheran who insists his wife wear a dress to church is just as likely to implode into terrorist violence!

Do the areas of darkness in this story of failed immigration call for a second look at the major immigration reform currently waiting in the wings? You bet! And did you notice any Mexican element in this story?

(More coming.)

My personal views on violent jihadism are expressed in a piece I posted on the occasion of the Benghazi massacre of Americans:

http://factsmatter.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/levelling-with-muslims/

The Thundering Silence Of Muslims: Important Correction to Response to a Friend.

A good friend of mine who is not a Muslim has been living in an all-Muslim country for several years.

He responded briefly by private email to my oped: “Levelling with Muslims” . He says pretty much the following:

The highly educated rational and internationally oriented Muslims I know simply refuse to go around affirming to the world that they are not (violent) jihadists. Besides, they think it’s useless,that they have already been adjudicated guilty by the court of western public opinion.

I hope I am translating my friend correctly. If I don’t, I hope he will correct me and do so promptly.

But I don’t know of any public clamor that request of ordinary Muslims to prove that they are innocent. My own oped does not require this at all. Perhaps, I was not clear. I have to give myself another try.

It is also simply not the case, even after hundreds of acts of jihadist terrorism world-wide since 9/11 that westerners assume all Muslims are more or less fanatics. This may be surprising but I think most Americans who are other than Muslim tend to give everyone ample benefit of doubt. However. Muslim silence, at home and abroad erodes this tendency. This erosion is not conducive to peace.

I would like to know that my friend’s Muslim friends are talking about moral responsibility. I would like to know that they are talking to one another and to those less well situated educationally. I would like to be told that many are disgusted by the criminal barbarity of murdering envoys in Libya. I would also like them to take a position on this kind of question: Is it a greater sin (or crime) for Muslims to bomb from the air apartment houses occupied by Muslim families with small, children in Aleppo or for non-Muslims to mock the Prophet Mohamed? To what extent does Islam require that the faithful get killed and kill policemen to protest blasphemy against a man of faith who took care to insist that he was only a man, with no shred of sacredness attached to his person?

The only way I will know whether this sort of conversation is taking place among Muslims is if Muslims or those who live among them, such as my friends, say it loud and clear.

I would like many Muslim voices to say loudly and clearly about acts of terrorism by those who call themselves Muslims: This is not done in my name. This is contrary to my religion.

What their governments tell me for their own reasons, I discount heavily. I want to hear Muslim civil society if and where there is one

I hear barely a whisper.

Muslims are telling us in practice: Leave us alone. Our everyday life is difficult enough. We merely want what you want. We want a chance to build our lives and to raise our children without interference. Those Salafists, those violent jihadists, we have nothing to do with them. They are your terrorists as much as ours.

Sorry, they are not. If Lutherans started bombing other people’s churches because they did not like their beliefs, if Baptists blew up car bombs in front of hotels to protest child baptism, if Catholics cut caricaturists’ throats because of cartoons of Jesus Christ, you can be sure that loud Lutherans, Baptists, Catholic voices would be raised in clear denunciation.

I repeat what I advanced in the previous essay: Peaceful Muslims are not clear in their hearts about right and wrong. That’s why we don’t hear them, even under the cover of anonymity. My oped “Levelling with Muslims” has had dozens of hits from predominantly Muslim countries and from countries such as India where here are many Muslims. Not a peep! Please, tell me I am wrong.

Of course, anyone can answer me and perhaps prove me wrong by posting a pertinent link at as Comment on this blog.

Update one day later: My friend says I did not render his statements properly. I think I did. I invited him to post corrections here in any form he wishes, in English or in French.

Update and correction on 9/21/12

My friend eventually  sent me links to four French newspapers  each of which led to op-eds by writers with Muslim names that indicated a clear attachment to freedom of expression while they disparaged the violent mob actions in several Muslim countries and the murder of the American personnel in Benghazi. My friend said it took him little time to find those items.

Then, I asked him if conversations about the importance of freedom of expression vs blasphemy were also taking place in the Arabic language press. In response, he sent me a link to what he said was an op-ed in Arabic dealing exactly with the topic of my question. He invited me to use one of the on-line translation tools. I was not able to open this last item. The fault lies entirely with me, I am sure, with my bad computer equipment and with my shamefully bad skills. I read nothing into it, of course.

So, at this point, I stand partially corrected. Contrary to my allegations, people with Muslim names do condemn the alleged reaction to the alleged blasphemies of that Internet video. The evidence available to me however all seems to come from France. It makes sense when I think about it.

As a colonial power in Africa and in the Levant, France has  had a Muslim immigration for a long time ago. It seems to me that this makes it possible to have Muslims and descendants of Muslims who have lived in the French context long enough to be appreciative of freedom of speech and of other allied freedoms.

Nevertheless, a leader of a French Muslim organization asked the French government recently on television to do the needful to ensure that Islam enjoys the respect that Muslims have a “right” – “le droit” to expect. A little wobbly, still! The French constitution does not accord a right to respect anymore than does the US Constitution. The French cabinet minister who answered pointed out that courts of law -rather than the executive  branch- where the proper venue to pursue such matters. Lately, the French have shown us how not to be weak-kneed. What do you know!

By contrast with the French case, the immigration of significant numbers of Muslims into the US is relatively recent. American Muslims and Muslims who live in America have had less time to become acculturated to the freedoms associated with democracy. Or, it’s possible that American institutions don’t do as a good a job as do French institutions in this respect. Subjectively, that would not surprise me, by the way.

At any rate, I still don’t hear or read of Muslims, or especially, of Muslims that seek to represent other Muslims condemning the assassinations and the riot. Fouad Ajami had a good piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. You can always count on him to be the voice of reason and lucidity on Middle-Eastern affairs. Somehow, I don’t think he speaks for many Muslims. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

At this point also,  I have no evidence that the defense of freedom of speech against religious fanaticism is currently taking place in any Arab country or, indeed, in any Muslim country. (And, again, it’s not because my friend did not try.)

Incidentally, I wonder how many predominantly Muslim countries even bother to guarantee freedom of speech in their constitutions or in their other basic laws. It goes without saying that I will immediately publish here any response that contradicts my suspicion in this respect.

In conclusion: The impression that started this oped, here on this blog, has been partly falsified. An important fraction of my initial impression has been successfully  contradicted because someone took the trouble to respond. I stand corrected.The Internet world is enormously better than anything preceding it. Nowadays, no one is condemned either to drag around the same old fallacies for a lifetime or to become an expert in whatever is ailing him. Others are able to come to the rescue credibility and the world is little bit better for it, maybe. I only regret that  none of the fair number of readers who look at this blog from Muslim countries has commented. I understand that in many cases, they have good reasons to fear intervening. I wish them well all the same.

But, I ask again: Is it a greater sin (or crime) for Muslims to bomb from the air apartment houses occupied by Muslim families with small, children in Aleppo or for non-Muslims to mock the Prophet Mohamed?

I would like the response of a religiously well-educated Muslim.

Somalia and Famine: Déjà Vu

Tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands in danger of starvation according to several United Nations agencies. Where? In Africa, in Somalia exactly. Sounds familiar? Yest, it happened before, in your lifetime if you are over 20. That’s famine, of course. It occasioned an ill-planned US intervention that ended in disaster with this country running with its tails between its legs. Now as then, the famine’s cause is not Mother Nature’s sudden anger. It’s man-made through war and possibly a deliberate tactic of war. (I am not sure of the last one.)

If you are only about twenty and the name “Somalia” sounds familiar, it may be because that’s the country from which pirates prey on international shipping. Some operate hundreds of miles from shore and take large ships and their crews to ransom. Speaking of tails, the major powers combined plus China, Turkey etc have not had what it takes to put an end to this. The country that has acted most energetically so far appears to be India. Once, just once, the US Navy blasted some Somali pirates out of the water (Or one pirate). It won’t happen again: too decisive, too normal, too rational, too politically incorrect.

One thought leads to another. So, now, I am on to political correctness. Until 1960, Somalia was under British administration with different administrative formulas for the north and the south of the country. Does anyone remember famines under British colonial rule? Is there any record of famine under British rule? Was there any famine? In the sixties most of sub-Saharan Africa was freed from European colonial rule. With a small number of interesting exceptions (interesting exceptions), “freedom” has been an unmitigated disaster for those countries. This is the case in spite of billions upon billions in foreign aid. I mean that both quality of life and the life chances of ordinary people have worsened since Europeans stopped “exploiting” those countries. Life chances include such things as dying as a baby of easily preventable infection or of hunger. Public commentaries on this horrible state of affairs are rare because the people in that part of the world are mostly black. It would be racist to point out the obvious: They have not been able, by and large, to manage their affairs as well as the colonizers managed their affairs for them.

Somalia itself does not seem to me, subjectively, a country that worth respecting as an independent entity. I mean the country, the polity, not the people. People everywhere are brothers. Aside from famine and piracy, it’s the kind of country where nearly 100% of little girls are subjected to violent and grotesque sexual mutilation. (You can find pictures on line if you have a strong stomach.) Violent jihadists are fighting for control of the country with brave but inadequate troops from the African Union. That’s another manifestation of political correctness, of course: It’s OK for black soldiers to kill black Islamist extremists at great cost in blood to themselves. It would be unseemly for soldiers with white faces to do the same with minimum casualties.

Of course, we have to help again. You can’t let people starve to death. Yet, there is blackmail involved; we all know it. One small step in the direction of calling off the blackmail is to name things accurately: Black Somalis are, through their actions, causing black Somali babies to starve to death. They are savages.

I hope my Libertarian friends (capital L) who are on a “no war at any cost, in any case” kick are paying attention to developments in Somalia. It’s a country with truly minimal government. That’s a fact neither they nor libertarians (with a small l) like me can ignore.

Osama and Obama

I have already congratulated the president and the head of the CIA for the execution of Osama Bin Laden while he was resisting arrest ( Bye, Osama). Let me add that I am glad he chose the dangerous military method he chose. It was calculated to minimize collateral damage. It did not succeed completely. A woman, who may have been one of Obama’s wives, died serving as a human shield for one of his brave warriors. Given the esteem in which fundamentalist Muslims hold women’s lives, I am not surprised. Women caught in such circumstances are innocent by definition.

Update May 6th: It appears now the woman was not killed but wounded. (The story from the administration keeps changing.) The assertion that she was used a shield has not changed though. There is a possibility she is one of Obama’s wives. Nice all-around guy.

Now, I am puzzled again. “Buried at sea” ? Why would anyone do anything that stupid? One, the world, including me, wanted proof of his death beyond what the President and a handful of agents can affirm. A good picture worked for Che Guevara, it worked for that Columbian drug dealer, what was his name again? If the administration was too sensitive to incur the disapproval that met George W. Bush when he exhibited Saddam’s sons’ cadavers, he still shouldn’t have done it. That’s second: Bin Laden has family, a large family, in fact, most of whom are innocent. The president could have looked magnanimous by allowing a funeral. Funerals are for the living anyway; the dead don’t care. The concern voiced in some government circles that his grave would become a shrine is stupid. It shows again the administration’s parochial ignorance. Islam strictly forbids any cult of the dead including of reputed “saints.” While the interdiction is often violated in some Muslim lands, in North Africa, for example, fundamentalist Muslims are very unlikely to ignore it.

One more time, President Obama manages to sound fishy. I resist and usually combat views of the world based on wild conspirational ideas. The President’s own actions make the task difficult. One hundred years from now, there will be pseudo-scholars arguing about whether Obama was really killed on on May 1^st or 2^nd 2010. Someone will look for him in Argentina thirty years from now and beyond.

Now, I need to set the record straight again because I gather from what I hear on talk radio that many people have a bad memory. NATO invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to overthrow the Taliban religious dictatorial regime for refusing to turn over the mass terrorist Obama Bin Laden. (That the Taliban were in the habit of executing women on soccer stadiums at intermission only made the mission more attractive.) The fact that Obama finally met his fate does not mean that all his forgiven. We have to indicate strongly to everyone in the world that if you help those who kill Americans, there is a fair chance you will be in trouble for a long time to come. The fact that we are still failing to follow this sound policy with respect to the murderers in Syria, for example, does not make it any the less precious: “If you fuck with us, you should worry; you will never sleep soundly again.” The additional fact that some of our NATO allies are getting weak-kneed makes it even more imperative that we stick to this doctrine.

I don’t know what president Obama will do in this connection, the current military action in Afghanistan. It’s hard to tell because, in security matters, he rarely does what he says he will do, fortunately. Incidentally, if I were a left-winger of the peacenik persuasion, I would be livid at the man I elected: The president instituted a policy of massive assassination of suspected enemies, including in a country with which we are not at war. This policy caused the death of many innocent by-standers, there is no doubt of that. Yesterday, he executed a suspect without trial after locating him on the basis of information extracted from untried detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison established deliberately to avoid the judicial safeguards of the American legal system. Of course, it’s more than likely that the information was extracted with the help of water-boarding or other forms of “torture.” It’s even possible that the information providers spent some thought-provoking time under conditions of foreign rendition. The other possibility is that Khalid Sheik Mohamed and other high-placed Al Quaida members sang like two-bit pimps or car-thieves at a Bronx police station.

Those who deplore in any way the head killer’s execution are not our friends. They don’t mind the deliberate assassination of American civilians. They are not our friends, wherever they are, including right in this country.

The rotten, failed state of Pakistan, where most people hate America, has much egg on its face, of course. How could no one in government know? We are told we can’t make do without them. At some point, when a friend is eating your liver, you have to reconsider the relationship, whatever the cost. I am also wondering what we owe that opportunist cheat we set in power, President Karzai of Afghanistan.I don’t know why we have to squander our energies on state building among people who don’t want a state. It seems to me it would be easier to kill the Taliban and their local hosts. Hang for a lamb, hang for a sheep! They always have the option to surrender, after all. The way we treat our enemies, they will probably end up in Bermuda.

Obama’s War

President Obama did the right thing, in the nick of time and under pressure from America’s traditional allies, and under pressure from the Arab League, (Go figure!) At least he did. Attacking Ghadafi is one of those cases where our national interest and common decency converge. Can’t let them go to waste! We couldn’t very well let the Libyan rebels get massacred. We couldn’t very well let me Ghadafi put his threat into action of going house to house to murder his opponents. Yes, I know that we don’t know which of the rebels are seekers of liberty and which are Jihadists. Again, I have to refer to the dog that did not bark. The Islamists seem remarkably absent from rebel-held areas. After all, the western press had free rein there to look for them, to find them, and to interview them live on television. That’s for common decency, for humanity, for morality.

As I keep saying, I wish there were another sheriff in town but the fact is that there isn’t. My position here may sound exotic because I come from a different ethical tradition. Under French law, there is actually a crime called: “non-assistance to a person in danger.” The underlying doctrine is that if you can help while running only a reasonable risk, you are obligated to help. That’s pretty much where we are with respect to Ghadafi’s decrepit air force and his obsolete air-defense system.

Now for our national interest in the anti-Ghadafi operation. It comes in two forms. First, we owe Ghadafi for years and years of terrorism. Almost certainly, we owe him for the deliberate assassination of 300 over Lockerbie . If we were not sure, it would be easy enough, it’s still easy enough to execute an international arrest warrant against him and to try him in the Netherlands. We can always apologize if he comes out innocent. If he does not comply with the warrant then, of course, we can kill him while attempting to arrest him.

The second package for our national interest is the spectacle of irresoluteness America gives under Obama’s guidance. With respect to any tyrant, you can say nothing or if you say something, it cannot be just an opinion as long as you are, like it or not, a superpower. Obama declared almost a month ago that Ghadafi had to go then, he sat on this hands. If the French had not pressed the issue, it’s not clear he would have done anything at all. It’s not a matter of swaggering like 20-year old on Red Bull. It’s just that others who are actually dangerous to us are watching. That would include the insane leadership of North Korea and of Iran. That would include also the thoroughly corrupt, unprincipled, ever-opportunistic Chinese Communist Party of China. I don’t even put it past the Kremlin gangsters to try something a little daring against us if they sense that we are weak.

And then, there is Arab opinion, the “Arab street” that was high on the list of liberals’ concerns when President Bush initiated the liberation of Iraq. Either you care about the street or you don’t. I think it’s reasonable not to care although it’s cynical. If you profess to care – by making a big speech in Cairo, for example – then, you cannot reject an opportunity to show friendship. And you cannot allow a situation where Arab opinion, the segment of Arab opinion you care about, democrats, says thing such as, “The French are the real friends of the Arabs; the Americans only pretend to like us, sometimes, for our oil.” Incidentally, the revolutionaries and the Ghadafi partisans alike seem to credit French air strikes for stopping the imminent offensive against Benghazi. It’s not surprising given our dithering and the Brits’ silence. And maybe, the French did it all by themselves, I mean that raid that destroyed tanks on the edge of the city. They had an aircraft carrier in the vicinity.

Speaking about oil: A reminder to liberals and progressives who have not yet apologized for screaming that Bush went into Iraq to steal the oil (“No blood for oil!”): There is still little oil coming from Iraq. The first two licenses for exploration and for exploitation to be approved by the democratically elected Iraqi government went to a Chinese company and to a French company, respectively. American oil companies are notably absent. I am not suggesting the Iraqi government discriminates against them. Whatever the reason, their absence surely undermines the Left’s simplistic slogans of 2003.

President Obama’s piousness about not exceeding the UN mandate appears sillier by the day. Someone bombed one of the places where he might have been in Tripoli, twice, I think, as I write. In fact, everyone believes that his whole fascist regime will dissolve when he dies or flees. Then, the parties will sit together and cobble something approximating a representative transitional national union government. The final truth is that, like a rabid dog, Ghadafi is too dangerous to be allowed to live. It’s not just my opinion, it’s a description based on his past. Would he blow up civilian planes over the busy Mediterranean skies if he had a chance? Well, he did it for a much smaller threat to his power. Here is an intriguing thing about the man I don’t hear discussed: When he took power in 1969, he was 27 and quite handsome. He is almost exactly my age. I am well aware of the ravages of age on a handsome guy’s face. I know I would not win that many beauty prizes today. But look at Gadhafi: He has become spectacularly ugly. Simple aging might not explain the transformation. I keep wondering what medication he is on that causes the repulsive swelling of his face. Medication might help explain his madness.

The president did the right thing in my opinion, which is surprising, even if he hesitated a lot. It’s surprising because he has spent so much of his adult life paling around with American terrorists and with his black racist pastor Wright. From them, he learned that American is the greatest source of evil in the world and possibly, at least indirectly, the only source of evil. Thus, there was nothing in his simple-minded leftist playbook from 1968 about what to do against a self-evidently greater evil than America, and you have the power to stop it, and probably, no one else will. Well, as I said, at least he did. And though I am skeptical, I am not against letting the Europeans take the lead in determining what goes on on their back doorstep.

I see one big danger in the way President Obama handled this affair and it’s not a major escalation. I am pretty sue it’s not going to happen. There will be no American occupation, and no direct attempt at state-building. The Europeans will be forced to hold the bag if this does not end quickly. The big danger is of a political and ideological nature. By insisting on waiting for a Security Council approval, Obama has taken a significant step toward having the UN appear like a world government. I believe this is completely unacceptable, of course. I don’t want to live in a world where policy is made and/or implemented by dozens of banana dictators and where China and Russia have equal influence with the US and the United Kingdom.

It’s hard enough living in a country whose laws and policies emanate partially from the likes of Chicago and New Orleans.

And, by insisting also on approval from the buffoon Arab League, the president lent more legitimacy to it than he received. And, predictably, the Arab League began whining within twenty-four hours that the coalition was going too far anyway. As I write, only one member of the Arab League out of 20 member states, most armed to the teeth, Qatar, has promised four planes to help the coalition. No other member state has offered a tank, or two, or even a mobile kitchen, or a single ambulance. The Arab League is the organization that gave the dictator of Sudan its official blessing in the middle of the Darfur on-going massacre. President Obama made them look more real and purposeful serious than they are, another gross step against the progress of democracy in the world.

With all this, we have almost forgotten Israel. For years, I gave the PLO that runs the West Bank the benefit of doubt. Two weeks ago, one of its affiliates cut the throats of four Israelis settlers. One “settler” was two months old. There is no doubt left for me unless the assassin is caught and executed by the PLO. Nevertheless, I am optimistic about that corner of the Middle East. For one thing, the insane hatred of Israel among Arabs can’t get much worse. For another thing, democratization never fails to bring a circulation of ideas and of facts. It’s like airing a room. More Arabs will come to realize their madness in this matter. More Arabs will be slightly more willing to admit that they don’t hate Israel day and night, that they have a life too. I have yet another hypothesis. For the past thirty, forty years, many Arabs felt deeply ashamed about their abject subjection, about their cowardice. To avoid hating themselves they threw all their frustration at the scapegoat Israel that was continuously being offered by the same tyrants responsible for their subjection. With tyrants gone and preferably hung, some Arabs, at least, are liable to begin acting like free men.

Don’t Grope, Profile!

I am taking a break from my step-by-step series on the harmfulness of protectionism to comment on current events. Just a break, I will go back to the series soon.

Try as I may, I can’t get exercised about the new airport security measures that are currently being decried all over the media. Being seen naked by strangers in another room and even being patted down by a person of the same sex (who might be a homosexual, of course but what the hell!) do not rank high on my list of catastrophes. That’s especially true if it decreases the probability of a real catastrophe. By the way, the experts I hear on this are far from enthusiastic about the new procedures’ effectiveness.

I suspect there is a “subtext” to this story, as my post-modernist academic friends would say. People are not really pissed off at the indignity of nakedness before strangers, or at the indignity of being groped by strangers. They are furious about another kind of collective, national indignity: We have become such wusses in this country that it makes us collectively stupid. How low we have gone! Almost everyone sees the obvious: The airline that is certain to be the number one target of violent jihadists and of other, non-religious, terrorists, has never had a serious safety incident. I am speaking of the Israeli airline, El Al, of course.

The secret to this huge Israeli success is not a secret. Everyone in the airline industry, everyone worldwide who has security responsibilities knows what it is: El Al does not rely on increasingly sophisticated, increasingly intrusive, yet necessarily imperfect high technology. Instead, its security people profile systematically, relentlessly and, more importantly, remorselessly. They ask more questions of a 25-year old, male, Arab, Muslim college graduate than they do of a 90-year old Orthodox rabbi. Jews are so clever!

Since it seems I have to spell it out, here is how American profiling would go: 95% of deadly terrorist incidents in the past ten years have been committed by Muslims. I don’t care if they were good Muslims or bad Muslims. I don’t care if their interpretation of Islam is correct or not. I would prefer to be able to do it but only mildly because what I propose to do is not cruel, disfiguring or irreversible. I am thinking of a mild degree of discomfort that does not seem to be appreciably more severe than what Muslim travelers are already suffering, not as Muslims, but as travelers.

Here is the proposal: Give special attention to travelers with Muslim names. It turns out that Muslim names are distinctive irrespective of country or language. I refer, here to the combination of first name, second name and third names, as the case may be. As I write, it would be difficult to find a single Muslim named Peter Smith, or Pierre Dupont, or Giancarlo Lambini, or Hans Gut.

Of course, as the most alert among you will have noticed, violent jihadists and other Muslim terrorists can always change their names. They could go from, say: Abdul Mohamed Hamid to John Woodpecker. That’s fine, let them. It’s such an unusual measure, it’s processed through such narrow administrative or judicial channels, that any Muslim who does it will inevitably draw attention to himself or to herself. It would be like lighting a red light on his or her head for security services to follow. Any such Muslim name changer detained for anything, such as spitting on the sidewalk, would have some explaining to do with respect to the name change. Anyone charged with terrorism before a jury would essentially be forced to plead guilty because there is hardly an innocent reason for a Muslim to change his name to a non-Muslim name. In fact, it’s a kind of minor apostasy from an Islamic standpoint. (I am no making a theological assessement but a cultural remark based on good observation.)

So, my plan call for inviting would-be passengers with Muslim names to step into a separate line and then to ask them questions, observe them and give them a choice between a body scan and a pronounced pat down, as in the current plan for all passengers. Focusing on fewer then 5% of passengers ( I am guessing) rather than a 100%, TSA could do a real thorough job. It would have the resources to follow through on hunches that make much of the success of other security personnel such as cops and customs officers. At least, violent male jihadists in burkas and face covering would have a fair chance of detection! TSA could also allow its bloated, soon unionized work force of tenured, overpaid high-school graduates to atrophy naturally. Or it could re-deploy them where they would to more good, inspecting cargo ships before they enter American harbors, for example. Another idea would be to make them un-inspected cargo that now flies in the planes are body-scanned and groped passengers.

Of course, many Muslims would be outraged at first. TSA could point out calmly and repeatedly that this economical approach to terrorism prevention protects Muslims as well as other passengers, and Muslim children as well as Christian, and even Jewish children, traveling by plane. Personally, I believe that any Muslim passenger who would argue that protecting Muslim children is not worth the small inconvenience I describe would designate himself as a potential terrorist. Muslim organizations would raise a great cry of discrimination that should be ignored. The moral basis for doing so is that they either represent Muslims in America or not. They may not protest about the Muslim woman who was insulted casually on a bus in the South one time because she wore the hijab and then argue that the Pantie bomber, the Time Square Bomber, Major Hasan, all explicitly Muslim mass murderers, are none of their affair. They might sue with the silly geese of the ACLU, probably. I say, let them and let them pay the corresponding price in public opprobrium. So far, they have gotten off easy with their passivity.

A small technical note: Muslim organizations are already arguing that being patted down or subjected to a full body scan is a special affront to Muslim women. This is total bullshit, of course except that I have noticed that many fully covered Muslim women seem overweight at an early age. That would explain some of the sense of affront; women are women, after all. Eighty-year old celibate Catholic nuns probably don’t think it’s cool, to show their bodies either. (I am just guessing.) There is an easy and cheap solution that calls their dangerous bluff: Recruit a small cadre of heavily scrutinized Muslim female TSA agents to watch traditional, tribal, Muslim women’s bodies on the scanner and to pat them down under the chador or burka. If Muslim organizations reject this solution, they will be demonstrating their complicity with violent jihadism.

For reasons pertaining to some primitive beliefs associated with Islam, most observant Muslim women go to the baths once a month. There, they spend hours naked in the company of many other naked Muslim women. Vigorous exploration of pious, observant Muslim women by other Muslim women would also have the advantage of detecting any illicit weaponry hidden under the chador or burka including but not limited to guns and explosives. (If you know what I mean.) Given the extreme prudery of fanatical Muslims, the practice might even deter reliance on this particular form of concealment by male terrorists. Incidentally, I think we use far too little for our protection the cultural weapons available against fanatics.

The problems of security confronting us have mostly common sense solutions. Unfortunately, we have reached the point in America where applying common sense takes uncommon courage. We began manning up in the last election. I trust this collective recovery will continue. We must get rid of left-wing Democrats because they are extremely dangerous both for what they do and because of what they don’t do. Don’t the recent cowardly TSA “airport security” measures show this with blinding clarity?

The War Obligation: Afghanistan

As the nation’s attention is passionately riveted to the death rattles of Pelobama Care, some of America’s main business goes unattended.

Several months after being informed of General McChrystal requirements, two months after the general went public to force a response (thereby risking his career), the President has not said if he had made up his mind about what to do in Afghanistan. The argument that he was awaiting the results of the Afghan elections does not hold water anymore. No, Afghanistan is not Switzerland. Yes, it’s a pity there was so much cheating. But, there is no doubt that the winner was really the winner. The runner up Abdallah Abdallah never said otherwise, I think. In the UK, or in Germany, or in Italy, the winner would have gone on to form a government, even without 50% plus one votes.

In the current issue of the Weekly Standard (Nov. 9 2009), Donnelly and Sullivan opine that the President is going to announce an option McChrystal “lite,” 20,000 additional troops instead of the 40,000 requested. That falls short of everyone’s wish. There is mounting pressure from a segment of what is usually defined as the conservative side to leave Afghanistan altogether. Not all of the pressure proceeds from childish petulant desire to do to Obama what the Left did to Bush. Opposition emanating from my Libertarians friends, led by the Independent Institute, is principled, coherent, based on moral convictions, and thoroughly blind, in my opinion. Fortunately, most libertarians (like me) are not Libertarians. Here is a summary of what’s at stake.

The people threatening to take over the Afghanistan are the same people who sheltered the 9/11 assassins. I am not making this up. They are not hiding it. They are the same Taliban movement that was reduced to next to nothing by the flash-quick combined NATO, Northern Alliance victory in 2001. That was the price they paid for refusing to turn over for trial the Al Quaida Arabs responsible for 9/11. By the way, the invasion of Taliban Afghanistan was authorized by the UN and still is. (I don’t care much myself about this fact. I mention this for those of you who are concerned about the fiction of international law.)

There are four additive reasons for Americans to want the Taliban defeated. They are separate and perhaps of unequal importance but they point toward the same US policy. First, there is no reason to believe the Taliban leadership has learned any lesson from its removal from power. It sheltered the criminals who killed 3,000 American civilians even after they had no excuse to not know what happened. They hate kuffar, infidels, and they care nothing about international principles of justice or of peace. There is no reason why they would stop any future attempt to plan one, two, three, four, five, six, or more 9/11, on us, or on our partners. The potential victims are not all in the West. Note that predominantly Muslim countries struggling to become or to remain democratic such as Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey make especially attractive targets.

I am not just imagining things. 9/11 was superbly planned, superbly executed and must have cost little more then $500,00. There are more 9//11 where it came from, given a place where the plotting can be relatively well sheltered from intrusion. Afghanistan remains a prime location for such activities because of its geographic inaccessibility and because of its very backwardness.

Let the Taliban take over again and hunch your shoulders! I am not referring only to unacceptable loss of life but to the economic devastation that would follow multiple attacks of the same type as 9/11.

The second reason Americans should want to defeat the Taliban is that newly democratic Pakistan has finally shaken itself out of its impotent torpor. Finally, it’s going with some vigor after its own home-grown violent jihadists, including some who call themselves “Taliban.” Nevertheless, there is little reason to doubt that the average Pakistani sees the military action as more of America’s fight than his own. It does not matter how deluded a view that is. It would not be the first time that the most likely victims of a crime are the most blind to it. After all, most German Jews seem to have made no attempt to flee Nazi Germany, even after seeing SA lowlife marched past them singing something like” “I smile when I see Jewish blood.”

It cannot be said enough that Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons. Even barring a full violent jihadist take-over, there is grave danger in any sort of political accommodation with jihadists, even of their physical proximity to the weapons. After all, how difficult would it be for a powerful Islamist politician to get two of his grand-nephews on the female side hired as night janitors in a nuclear arsenal? Hint: Pakistan is part of the Indian sub- continent where family pull matters. (Why the female line? Think it through.)

If the US is seen as faltering in Afghanistan, a large segment of Pakistani political opinion will ask itself why Pakistan should do what the vastly richer and more populous US is unwilling to commit to. A coalition government with Taliban or some other Islamist elements will be next. The dream of every two-bit violent jihadist, including American ones, to get his hands on dirty bomb material will come very close to being realized. A single dirty bomb exploding in a major American city would have the capacity to set back the world economy by many years through a chain reaction. The Islamist terrorists know this. They are insane, not stupid.

The third reason to beat the Taliban is they they are a morally obscene group. When they were in power, they executed “adulterous” women during soccer game intermissions. Guess what “adulterous” means under sharia ? They denied male-administered medical care to women in a country with no female doctors and they kept little girls from school. In the middle-run, the product would have been this demented thing: self-genocide through the dying off of many women. Today, in parts of the country they rule, they throw acid in little girls’ faces to discourage them from going to school. Perhaps worse of all, the Taliban outlawed music. (That’s a good enough reason to kill them, in my book.) I am well aware of the serious arguments against the US acting as the world’s sheriff. (I don’t buy them but that’s another story.) Yet, once in a while, a country’s self-interest and common decency happen to coincide. This is one such opportunity. We should not waste it.

The fourth reason is that the many potential and actual enemies of Americans are watching our every move. Every time President Obama demonstrates weakness, they take a step forward. The enemies include several terrorist groups, of course, Iran, North Korea, and Russia and China if they get a chance. Russia is just a hoodlum country that will grab what it can. The Chinese leadership probably does not want our destruction but it’s ill-informed and prone to miscalculation. If we falter on Afghanistan, they will reach out for a piece of us. Most of our vacillating NATO allies are the way they have been for a long time, as they were under the Soviet threat. They have no stomach for a fight unless we push and pull and, above all, set an example of bravery.

(Note: I know I have not dealt with our casualties or with civilian casualties resulting from our actions. Both matter, obviously.)

In the meantime, my Libertarians friends develop principled arguments against continued US and NATO military action to repel the Taliban that are all about propriety, and also about property. I have no doubt that war increases the importance of government, its dominion over civil society. As a libertarian (with a small “l), I hate it, of course. But a broad terrorist attack would increase the influence of government even faster, more deeply, and more irreversibly. I am not about to join the Libertarian Party because of its blindness regarding defense. The Libertarian arguments, I would buy if I were reasonably sure my house is not about to be set on fire. Moral principles are here to help people live good lives, in every sense of the word. They do not exist to excuse passivity. Passivity in the face of evil is the greatest evil of all.

PS An Army psychiatrist, a major, murdered 12 people at Fort Hood, Texas, today. It seems he was having career trouble. All the same, I wish he did not have an Arab, Muslim name. It makes keeping things in perspective difficult.

CORRECTION: I WROTE IN A PREVIOUS COLUMN ( “THE A.A. PRESIDENT,” POSTED 10/07/09 ) THAT I DOUBTED PRESIDENT OBAMA HAD EVER PASSED THE BAR EXAM ANYWHERE ANY TIME. A FRIEND OF MINE, A GOOD LAWYER I HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME AND WHOSE UTTERANCES I TRUST SAID OTHERWISE. MY ATTORNEY FRIEND TOLD ME THAT THE FACT THAT BARACK OBAMA HAD BEEN ADMITTED TO PRACTICE BEFORE THE ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT PROVED THAT HE HAD PASSED THE BAR. THAT HE WAS SO ADMITTED CAN BE FOUND ON THE SITE OF THE ILLINOIS BAR ASSOCIATION. I ACCEPT MY FRIEND’S JUDGMENT IN THIS RESPECT. I AM STILL PUZZLED ABOUT WHY THE REAL ACHIEVEMENT OF PASSING THE BAR EXAM – WHICH CAN PRESUMABLY NOT BE EASED BY AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CONSIDERATIONS – IS NOT MENTIONED ON THE PRESIDENT’S WIKIPEDIA ENTRY. MR OBAMA ‘S LIST OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS IS SHORT AND THIN; THE BAR EXAM SHOULD BE THERE TO THICKEN IT. PERHAPS ONE OF THE PRESIDENT’S SUPPORTERS WILL DO THE JOB. I AM WATCHING.