The recent escalation of the TSA demonization of the American public in conjunction with the most recent failed Islamist terror atrocity illustrates a(n unnecessary) conundrum. While we continually ratchet up our defensive measures to ensure that no terrorists get onto airplanes (and may eventually spread such measures to trains and buses soon enough; after all, they are more tempting targets now than airplanes are) the actual terrorists who attempt attacks are increasingly seen as, for want of a more accurate word, losers. Jeremy Lott at The American Spectator explains why the terrorists tend to have their greatest success with their first success:
Latest Mad Muslim Would-Be Bomber Blows It
Four years ago in these cyber pages, I coined Lott's Law of Diminishing Returns on (Islamic) Terrorism. For some reason, I noticed, a pattern had emerged in Western nations following September 11, 2001. Jihadist terror networks would get one really big bang for their buck, followed by a series of screwups and failures. This was true in the U.S. (9/11), the UK London Metro), Spain (Madrid), and Australia (Bali).
Moreover, I speculated why that was the case. I argued the world political situation had changed so that Islamo-terrorism now sets a six-part process in train:
(You can read points 1-5 in his post; for my purposes, the outcome, number 6, is what is most relevant.)
Six, what the neighborhood division of the forces of darkness has left over is mostly the bottom of the barrel: would-be bombers with fantastic imaginations but zero expertise, loners, and screw-ups like Mohamed Mohamud, who couldn't even wipe that smile off Santa's face.
One point that is implicit in what Jeremy Lott describes is that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies can do a terrific job if allowed to use all the tools at their disposal, albeit with some risks to our civil liberties. That brings up the second half of the equation: In order to protect the Civil Liberties of non-terrorists who merely fit the profile of a terrorist, everyone's civil liberties must be equally impinged upon, with no actual increase in our safety. If we refuse to use all of our tools to protect ourselves proactively, we will necessarily use inferior tools to protect ourselves reactively; further, our diffidence means that the risk of a successful attack increases in proportion to how safe we feel. If our police and intelligence agencies do a good job, the actual risks are decreased; when the bottom of the barrel Islamist terrorist is caught, and the Media pile on their critiques of his mental status (a predictable result of their attempt to "understand" the motivation of those who have little problem telling you, repeatedly, what motivates them) the result is to convince the professional Civil Liberties lobby to try to minimize our ability to use the very tools which protect us. The administration is left in the unfortunate position of trying to square the circle: protecting us without the profiling that is the best way to protect us. (Please note that by profiling I mean something much more sophisticated than simple ethnic profiling; profiling for terrorists will work best if accompanied by good intel internationally and domestically. Every terrorist that has been caught, and most who were successful, had been identified before their attempted attacks, but the information was not acted upon under the rubric of Civil Liberties. Continuing to find these needles in our gigantic haystack means that we must monitor all sorts of communications, as per FISA, and do good policing in Muslim neighborhoods.)
[This is not dispositive but suggestive that relaxing our guard does encourage more terrorist attempts: Politically correct Portland rejected feds who saved city from terrorist attack:
In 2005, leaders in Portland, Oregon, angry at the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror, voted not to allow city law enforcement officers to participate in a key anti-terror initiative, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. On Friday, that task force helped prevent what could have been a horrific terrorist attack in Portland. Now city officials say they might re-think their participation in the task force -- because Barack Obama is in the White House.
Read the whole thing.]
Consider a few interesting anomalies in the case of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the Somali immigrant who decided that his life would have more meaning if only he could murder hundreds of people, especially women and children, in Oregon at a Christmas tree lighting. The New York Times headline is priceless:
Suspect in Oregon Bomb Plot Is Called Confused
Mohamed Osman Mohamud had seemed to be a well-adjusted American teenager: a solid student whose interests included basketball, girls and the night life at Oregon State University, where he studied engineering.
But those who know him say he changed in recent months. He dropped out of school and stopped attending mosque. And, perhaps most telling, he began lying about his plans for the future.
“He seemed to be in a state of confusion,” said Yosof Wanly, the imam at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, which Mr. Mohamud attended while at college. “He would say things that weren’t true. ‘I’m going to go get married,’ for example. But he wasn’t getting married.”
There is actually nothing in the article that suggests he was confused; if anything it sounds like he was quite certain about his goals and intentions: [Emphases mine-SW]
Many questions remain about the extent of Mr. Mohamud’s connections to Islamic extremists, whom investigators say he wrote to and plotted with, as well as about the apparent contradictions in his personal life, as a studious, friendly teenager and a young man seeking to wage jihad within his adopted country.
“When you think of someone doing what he did, you think of some crazy kind of guy,” said Mohamed Kassim, 21, a fellow Oregon State student who knew Mr. Mohamud from around campus. “He wasn’t like that. He was just like everybody else.”
Many Muslims in Oregon worried that they would face a backlash. And on Sunday, local Muslim leaders emphasized that the case was an isolated incident.
“If this kid’s being radicalized, it’s not from the locals,” said Jesse Day, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Portland and Masjed As-Saber, where Mr. Mohamud sometimes worshiped.
The president of the center, Imtiaz Khan, shared that concern, and said in an interview that he worried that the mosque and Islam in general would be portrayed unfairly because of the arrest. On Sunday morning, a Portland police car was parked outside the mosque.
“We have women and children here that we want to protect,” Mr. Khan said.
But a sense of suspicion and worry prevailed.
Mr. Khan and Mr. Day said several people who worship at the mosque said that F.B.I. agents had knocked on their doors late at night on the day of Mr. Mohamud’s arrest, but that none had agreed to speak to the agents.
Here are all the usual problems that raise suspicions about the Muslim community. Their first reaction is to worry about a backlash and then, rather than engage in some reasonable self-reflection, they immediately point away from themselves at nameless others, and then compound their disavowal by refusing to help the authorities investigate the attempt. This does not instill confidence.
And what about the local mosque?
The mosque, the largest in Portland, has been at the center of controversy before. In 2002, the mosque’s imam, Sheik Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, also a naturalized American citizen from Somalia, was arrested at Portland International Airport.
Prosecutors said that trace elements of TNT were found in his luggage, though those tests were later said to be inconclusive and he was not convicted of any crime.
The tests could have been erroneous, there may be innocent reasons for having traces of TNT in one's luggage, but with so many atrocities being committed in their name it might be wise for the American Muslim community, just for public relations purposes, to adopt Caesar's rubric and remain above suspicion.
One last point: Typically in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or attempt by Islamist terrorists, there is a concerted effort made by almost everyone from the highest levels of the administration to the local news reporters to present the attack as the result of the psychological derangement of the individual perpetrator. This is a mis-use and misunderstanding of the Individual Depth Psychology which began with Sigmund Freud. Each individual who comes to Jihad in America may have particular failings of his own yet we will never be able to understand their motivation or behavior by referring to their individual psychology alone. Whatever constellation of psychological damage and vulnerability that leads one to violent jihad, their goals and methods are defined by their community, a sub-set of Islam that idealizes the murder of innocents in the name of Allah. Major Hasan did not kill his fellow soldiers because he was distraught over his impending deployment; many people, including many Muslims, are unhappy, even distraught, over deployment, yet a vanishingly small cohort elect to murder in response.
The Islamist community replaces the goals and aspirations valued by the larger community with pathological goals and aspirations valued by their insular community. For an American to adopt such goals and aspirations means that they have rejected this country, see themselves involved in a war against this country, and are no longer, in their self defined identities, Americans. For Mohamed Osman Mohamud, whatever the form of his psychology, he became a traitor to his nation and became a member of a transnational community dedicated to destroying this nation and killing innocent men, women and children (who, of course, were all guilty of being infidels, supporting a Nation at war with Islam, and therefore deserving of death.)
All psychopathology is delimited by the cultural values in which it can be found and must be understood in those terms. Mohamed Osman Mohamud can not be understood as an angry teenager expressing a more intense than usual teen angst. He can only be understood as an Islamist expressing his hatred.
[For a deeper exploration of how culture defines psychopathology, see Psychological Aspects of the "Lone, Psychiatrically Deranged" Terrorist.]
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