The terrorist attacks in Paris have caused much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth but not much discussion of the responsibility and the cure of what is now happening all over the world. Where does the responsibility lie for these barbarous actions, how can the reasons for them be cured, how can they be stopped?
Despite all the various commentary and all the pundits talking about the causes and what to do about them, there has actually been very little intelligently put forth on these subjects. Sure, everyone wants to say how horrible and unacceptable these acts are and I’m sure it makes people feel better to make these statements but all that rhetoric really doesn’t accomplish much. The real question; what to do and how to do it? A million people marched in Paris this Sunday and there were probably half a million signs saying, Je suis Charlie, but none that I saw, saying do this or do that and stop this.
It has been pointed out that the French had these guys on their radar much like we had the Boston bombers on ours and of course the outcry is immediate. Why didn’t you do something before they did something?
Well, gang it’s just not so easy, at least not in a democratic country. If either of these countries were Russia, China or Saudi Arabia the authorities would just throw these young men and women in jail and forget about or kill them, but thankfully we’re not supposed to do that here. Not being able to do that we must understand that it takes up to ten operators to maintain surveillance on one suspect. Even to the slowest among us it should be obvious that this is a practical impossibility. Even our incredibly bloated Homeland Security Department doesn’t have the personnel to maintain this kind of surveillance.
So what to do? Well we seem to know who these guys are. We have approximate numbers both here and in Europe. We can’t do anything about those in Europe but how about some kind of legislation that says if you travel to certain proscribed areas, without a federally approved permit, you will be denied readmission to this country. If you try to sneak in after being denied readmission you will be committing a federal crime and go directly to jail. This will give the government a tool that will allow them to legally pull these guys out of the general population and hold them for whatever the term of the law requires.
I believe we did something like that with Cuba for a long time and no one from Cuba was blowing up stuff here. Now there is not much you can legally do retroactively to deal with the situation but we probably could get something passed, that was constitutional, that would allow for anyone who had visited any of the proscribed areas in the last, say five years, to have to acknowledge that fact and file some kind of registration. This alone would be a detriment to any unlawful activity because the suspects would always have the sword of surveillance hanging over them, whether or not it was actually present. It wouldn’t stop them altogether but it would give the feds another tool to deal with the situation.
And of course there is the overwhelming question of what is acceptable to say or not say about others. Yeah, I just had to get into it. Was Charlie Hebdo politically correct? Hell no, but that doesn’t mean that some asshole should come through their front door and start shooting them. And there’s a reason why I say that. Look, I’m not a true believer, but even I understand that nobody wants anyone else making fun of them, or their religion. But sometimes religions ask for it and I don’t just mean Muslims. Of course Muslims ask for it big time, when they act like animals toward their own people and when they do grotesque things to those who don’t believe the way they do.
Any number of people have come out and declared that Charlie Hebdo was out of line in insulting the Muslim religion. Sure they were, Common courtesy tells us that, but they must have the right to be insulting because that’s what free speech is all about. When the press and comics jumped on the Catholic Church because their priests were molesting kids, the guys from the Knights of Columbus didn’t start knocking off reporters. Okay Bill Maher, here’s one for you…Bang! That’s the difference between civilized and uncivilized people.
I was listening to a couple of Muslim speakers recently and both of them came up with the same interesting fact. All the terrorist groups, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Haram and the rest, all trace their lineage to Wahabism, the fundamentalist strain of Islam promoted by a religious sect in Saudi Arabia. I find it interesting and not so funny that all our right wing politicians who have come out screaming about how we can’t hook up with Cuba because they commit human rights violations, don’t think there’s anything wrong with us allying ourselves with Saud Arabia, the place that supplied the 911 terrorists, that has recently sentenced a man to 1000 lashes with a cane and 10 years in jail because he opened a website that espoused freedom of experssion, a state that has supported terrorism ever since we can remember, just because they have oil.
But back to freedom of speech.
We all have to understand that every religion was started by somebody; somebody who told everybody else that God had spoken to him. He then wrote a lot of things or made up a lot of rules and laws that God supposedly gave to him. He wrote or taught those things in the time he was alive. Those things were usually very pertinent to that time and sometimes some of them turned out to be pertinent to other times or all times but only some of them.
We are facing a situation where various groups of criminals, including but not exclusively, al-Qaeda, The Taliban, ISIS and Boko Harem have realized that they cannot achieve their desires in a twenty first century society and are trying to take their people back to the seventh century by any means available to them.
This will never work, but it will not be stopped today or tomorrow because that’s just not the way things happen in this world. In this country and in many of our allies, the policies of dealing with terrorism are too often driven by political or financial motivations. The mess in the Middle eat was created by the Europeans and somehow, through political ineptitude, corporate greed and military aggression we have inherited it.
No you don’t make any friends by killing civilians with drones or any other weapon but you also cannot just stand aside and allow the kind of atrocities in which the sub-human monsters of ISIS and Boko Haram routinely engage. They must be stopped and in order to accomplish that there will, unfortunately, be collateral damage. We cannot expect the people of Iraq, Syria or Central Africa, starving and downtrodden as they are to fight back against trained killers with significant weapons. That’s where we, and the civilized nations of the world come in. We broke it. We have to fix it. Like anything in this world it will never be one hundred percent effective, mainly because there will always be trends and events that will revive it but at least we can hope to reduce it to an insignificant level.
These criminals, mostly but not exclusively Arabic, and all claiming Muslim authenticity will continue their atrocities and desecrations of humanity until they and their organizations are all crushed and that will take some time but ultimately those who they are trying to bring onto their cause will fall away, mainly because man is basically good; we all recognize inhuman activity and eventually move to thwart it. That is the hope of man and the ultimate solution to this problem. The great religions of the world that have survived to this time have done so because they believe that God is good and they have attempted, not always successfully, to emulate that goodness in their practice. The above named Wahhabist entities, although they give great lip service to the fact tat God is good, have not given any examples that they understand, at all, what this means and that will ultimately be their downfall.