National Security is in President Obama's Court
By Kathleen Parker
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101368.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
As the new year begins, two facts emerge: George W. Bush is officially retired as the fault-guy for the nation's ills, and Barack Obama owns the game.
Whether he wants to or not.
Every president deserves a year of grace to adapt to the job and adjust to its Himalayan learning curve. As Obama's first year ends -- almost with a bang, thanks to a lonely Nigerian who found love in jihad -- his grace period is up.
Indeed, depending on how he responds to the security breach that almost brought down a Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam, Obama's presidency is at risk of being rendered prematurely impotent.
If Bush could be blamed for the dot-connecting inadequacies that helped enable the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, eight months into his administration, then Obama can fairly be held responsible for the incompetence that allowed a disaffected jihadist to get explosive powder onto a plane.
The banality of our most recent would-be attack is almost too on-the-nose to exploit, but really. The son of a Nigerian banker, already a punch line to all who've been spammed by e-mailers alleging to be Nigerian bankers promising riches, packs his underwear with explosive material? Was this fellow computer-generated by a cartoon character?
If it weren't all so bloody horrifying, the incident would be ridiculous.
Which, come to think of it, is a fair appraisal of the Obama administration's initial performance when faced with a potentially catastrophic terrorist strike. The dots that needed connecting were all but performing the California Raisin dance. Were we ever justified in hoping for better?
National security was never considered Obama's strong suit. Back in September 2008, if I may be excused for quoting myself, I wrote: "I worry that Obama isn't serious enough about terrorism and free markets. . . . I worry about Obama's over-intellectualizing -- that he will get lost in a maze of deep thoughts and fail to be decisive when necessary."
Or lost on a golf course, as the case may be.
Obama's open-collared vacation response from Hawaii was delivered on Katrina time -- about two days too late -- and fell a few links short of reassuring. Something about humans and systems failing. Yes, well, that would about cover it.
Deep breath.
The cool detachment that was so attractive when political opponents were trying to rile Obama is suddenly becoming annoying. Preternaturally unflappable, his demeanor in these circumstances borders on inappropriate.
What does it take to get a rise out of Barack Obama? Not that we need bombast and flared nostrils. Calm in the face of potential disaster is laudable, but it's a fine line between executive tranquillity and passive nonchalance. Like a tone-deaf disc jockey, Obama plays elevator music when the crowd wants John Philip Sousa.
But action is being taken, we're told. Investigations are underway and reports are being tabulated. Soon decisions will be forthcoming as to whether we bomb al-Qaeda outposts in Yemen or insist that travelers liberate their inner Britneys and go panty-free through security checkpoints.
Full-cavity searches can't be far from the minds of bureaucrats looking for ways to create a faux sense of security rather than figuring out how to draw simple inferences from red flags, recently in numbers sufficient to spell out "Allahu Akbar" on a halftime football field.
The brightest among many was the perpetrator's own father's reports -- both in person (twice) and by phone to U.S. officials --that his son had become radicalized and might be dangerous. A CIA report describing those concerns apparently never made it through the Byzantine intelligence channels until after the foiled attack on Christmas Day.
Why? It was for just such coordination that the Bush administration four years ago created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which in April came under fire by its then-inspector general, Edward Maguire, days before he was replaced. Maguire's report may provide the simplest answer to what went wrong.
In addition to criticizing the amount of time intelligence chiefs spend briefing the White House and Congress instead of managing the intelligence apparatus, Maguire blasted the ODNI for bureaucratic fat and financial mismanagement.
In fairness to Obama, Maguire's findings were completed before the president assumed office, but they were not released publicly until April. Even so, Obama has had plenty of time to tweak the system he now blames for the underwear bomber.
It's his ball now; time to stop dribbling.
Pressure on Barack Obama to Reveal What Britain Said About Detroit Bomber
By Robert Winnett, Toby Harnden and Duncan Gardham
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6938334/Pressure-on-Barack-Obama-to-reveal-what-Britain-said-about-Detroit-bomber.htmlAfter initially denying that they had received British intelligence, senior American sources confirmed last night that they were "reviewing" what British information had been received on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
The admission is embarrassing for the White House and threatens to provoke a rift with Gordon Brown. The conflicting briefing over the shared intelligence also suggests that the transatlantic relationship may have weakened in recent months.
Confirmation that Abdulmutallab's name was passed to the US in 2008 would be a major blow to Mr Obama, although it could also open up accusations that George W Bush's administration failed to collate intelligence properly.
The Prime Minister's spokesman disclosed on Monday that MI5 information had been shared with the Americans more than a year ago. Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, confirmed this in the House of Commons yesterday. The information is understood to have detailed Abdulmutallab's contacts with radical preachers but did not give warning that he might be a terrorist threat.
White House sources are thought to be furious over the British intervention, with Mr Obama already under pressure over intelligence failures concerning the thwarted attempt to blow up the US airliner.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister's spokesman played down the rift. Both British and American officials insisted the intelligence would not have prevented the attempted attack.
However, there are growing questions as to why Abdulmutalab was granted a US visa and why his name was not on a US watch list.
In an official briefing on Monday, the Prime Minister's spokesman said of the Detroit bomber: "Clearly there was security information about this individual's activities and that was information that was shared with the US authorities."
A US counter-terrorism official did not deny that information on Abdulmutallab had been received from Britain but told The Daily Telegraph: "It's wrong to think that there was, from any source, information that identified Abdulmutallab as a terrorist, let alone a terrorist who was planning to carry out an attack in the United States."
Yesterday morning, the Prime Minister's spokesman issued a revised statement that said: "There is no suggestion that the UK passed on information to the US that they did not act on." He then said that Downing Street would not be commenting further on intelligence matters.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: "This is the second time in a week that Downing Street had given false information to the US about the nature of its discussions with the United States about over terrorist issues.
"For a Prime Minister to behave in this way is nothing short of a complete disgrace. These are highly sensitive issues of national importance and should be dealt in a manner that is free from political opportunism and spin."
Who Is the Enemy?
Victor Davis Hanson
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjYyYzhlZWM3NGViOTEwMmE1NGNlY2M5MGMxMzM4ODY=I don't think anyone knows quite what this administration's anti-terrorism policy is. Last August, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, lambasted the Bush administration, citing "the inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole and intellectual narrowness that has often characterized the debate over the president's national security policies" and criticizing the conduct of counterterrorism during the eight years following 9/11.
But more than one-third of all terrorist plots since 9/11 transpired in 2009 — despite loud chest-thumping about rejecting the idea of a war on terror, reaching out to the Muslim world, and apologizing for purported American sins. A non-impoverished Major Hasan or Mr. Mutallab (or Mr. Atta or KSM) does not fit with the notion that our enemies act out of poverty or oppression or want.
In fact, what we are witnessing is a strange mishmash. On the one hand, after repeatedly trashing the Bush protocols in 2007–08, Obama has quietly adopted most of them — keeping the Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, the concept of tribunals, Predator attacks, forward offensive strategies in Afghanistan, and the Bush-Petraeus timetable in Iraq.
But on the other hand, the Obama administration has embraced largely empty symbolism — promising to "close Guantanamo within a year," mouthing euphemisms such as "overseas-contingency operations" ("this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.'"), and "man-made disasters," while announcing showy new politically-correct moves (such as a public trial for KSM) and subjecting CIA operatives to legal hazard.
In both the Major Hasan and Abdul Mutallab cases, the administration has shown initial confusion about the nature of the danger and security breach. The simultaneous announcement of both more troops and a withdrawal date from Afghanistan did not correct the image of confusion and hesitancy.
What to make of all this?
Apparently, the Obama administration came into office in January 2009 thinking that the notion of a "war on terror" was archaic and largely had been an excuse for the Bush-Cheney nexus to scare the nation for partisan political purposes. Given the long period of calm after 9/11, the somnolent "good" war in Afghanistan, and the sudden quiet in the "bad" Iraq theater, Obama preferred to focus on Bush's constitution-shredding rather than on national security. What vestigial danger remained could be changed by the charisma of Barack Obama, the obvious appeal of his ancestry to the Muslim world, and the ritual demonization of George Bush.
But Obama has discovered that there really are radical Islamic threats; that Bush's record of seven years of security was no accident; and that the "good" war is heating up. Obama has been forced by events to quietly find ways of emulating Bush's successful anti-terrorism formula, while making loud but empty declarations to mollify his liberal base (which so far seems pacified that Guantanamo is "virtually" closed, and that KSM is "virtually" facing an ACLU dream trial).
Radical Islamists sense, fairly or not, that this administration is angrier at prior officials who kept us safe than it is at those who wish to destroy us for who we are. Given his adoption of the Bush protocols, Obama might show the same magnanimity toward his predecessor that he does toward the Muslim world.
The Terror War and the Double-Euphemism
Roger L. Simon
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2010/01/03/the-terror-war-and-the-double-euphemism/It should be no real surprise that the relatively-unknown John O. Brennan – rather than putative Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano – was called upon to defend the administration against Dick Cheney’s criticism of terror war weakness on the talk show circuit Sunday. Napolitano has probably disqualified herself forever with her inane comment that the “system worked” on December 25.
Still, Brennan’s defense was pretty lame – no more than insisting that Obama was strong on terror because, well, Brennan says so and he’s an expert. Well, expert or not, I can safely predict he will be completely ignored outside the punditocracy. Even there, he won’t get a lot of attention. Reason? No one really believes Brennan, not even the president’s staunch defenders who watch nervously as their leader’s poll numbers tank at a record speed.
And why should they? If they are faintly honest with themselves, they know that the president has never been terribly interested in the War on Terror, almost to the point of wishing it would go away. Last March, in an interview with Der Spiegel, his same Homeland Security secretary equated the “t-word” with “man-caused disasters,” of all euphemisms, as if terror acts were similar to someone forgetting a rivet on a bridge.
Not that the “War on Terror” is an accurate appellation in the first place. “Man-caused disasters” is actually a euphemism of a euphemism, because the “War on Terror” itself has no real meaning. Terror is a method, not an end or a place. Fighting a “War on Terror” is like fighting a War on Cannons or Airplanes. Meaningless.
But we all know that the “War on Terror” is actually a euphemism for the “War on Radical Islam.” But nobody says it. Nobody official anyway. (Bush did say something like that once in a speech, as I recall, but was quickly shouted down by the nabobs of political correctness.)
Does this matter? Well, in two words… Hell, yes! Using euphemisms to describe what we are doing in this instance assures that we will continue doing it for years and decades to come. It does this by telling our troops in this war – from the soldiers in the field to the intelligence officers in Langley to our own people in the cities and towns of America, whose support is the most crucial of all – that we are fundamentally unserious, that we think this is all an unimportant issue that is better off ignored. The president’s campaign message got through this once. He ran on soft-pedaling the War on Terror. That was one part of the “hope and change” we all understood.
I know there are those who thought that this soft-pedaling of this war would calm down the Islamic world and make things go away, but by now events have shown them to be wrong. From Sana’a to Somalia, from Detroit to Ft. Hood, and most importantly on the streets of Tehran, things have by now, if anything, heated up, morphing to new, and often more complicated, locations.
Yet still we dare not speak the name of the War on Radical Islam. Still we fear to offend. Perhaps we need a new euphemism. For now I would suggest the “War on Ourselves.” It looks to be becoming dangerously successful.
The Spin Factory Goes Haywire
Jennifer Rubin
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/211201Deep into defensive spin mode on the Christmas Day bombing plot, the Obama team is fanning out with talking points. “The system works most of the time.” Yikes. OK, there is this one: “It is only in retrospect that the clues are clear.” Yikes again. (Isn’t this why we have people looking at clues prospectively?) The worst: “There was no smoking gun.” That one set off Charles Hurt, who writes:
"Of course there was 'no single piece of intelligence' that spelled it out. You have to put the pieces together, genius. Anyway, we’re not talking about a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle here. This was more like one of those children’s puzzles with four giant pieces that have to be laid out of the floor, and each piece gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re looking at."
Really, do the Obami imagine that they bear no responsibility unless they get a note with the date, time, and place of the next attack, or that they only need to catch 75 percent of the plots? I suppose they can try to convince us of that, but there must be some voice of sanity cautioning against this nonsense. Right?
The Obama spinners who have descended on radio- and cable-news shows seem conflicted. They dare not defend the president’s shabby handling of the incident. The more candid of them concede he is “struggling to find the right tone,” but they plead that he’s really being treated oh so unfairly by all of these second-guessers and partisans who insist on finding out what went wrong. So the Obama supporters retreat to Napolitano-like talking points: no system is perfect, we are doing everything we can, and we have to learn to live with the inevitability of one of these bombers succeeding. (Just not on a flight with them or their loved ones, I suppose.)
It is rather cringe-inducing. Suggest that an independent commission look at this? Oh, you’ll hear howls (where were they during the Bush years?) that these commissions never really work, that creating new systems is a process fraught with unintended consequences, and it’s all a counterproductive blame game. In their book, no one should get fired, no real reforms are needed, and the real problem is all the Republican criticism.
I suspect all of this will crumble as Congress returns and hearings get under way. Democrats in Congress can’t appear to cover for the festival of incompetence or forfeit the national-security issue to the other party. At some point, even Democrats must concede that the White House spin is not only unbelievable but enormously counterproductive.
Boy, How He's In Real Trouble: Obama Administration Revokes U.S. Visa of Accused Nigerian Bomber
Andrew Malcolm
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/01/nigerian-underwear-bomber.htmlUnder the category of looks-like-about-12-days-too-late, the State Department has announced it is revoking the U.S. visa for suspected Nigerian underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
That will show him and who knows how many others that the Obama administration really means business.
The 23-year-old al-Qaeda-trained terrorist was on a terrorist watch list because he had traveled to Yemen for training. His father also warned U.S. officials he was dangerous. President Obama admitted Tuesday that U.S. intelligence experts knew much about the man but "failed to connect the dots" causing a "potentially disastrous" situation.
"Intelligence was not fully utilized and not fully leveraged," the Democratic president said sternly. "We have to do better, and we have to do it quickly." Obama said he found the lapses "unacceptable." And he ordered even more reviews.
The president also announced that after consulting with Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, he had decided not to send any more Guantanamo Bay prisoners to Yemen due to the unsettled situation there. But this would not affect his determination to close the prison someday.
The would-be bomber from Nigeria is in jail accused of the blessedly botched bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day that could have killed almost 300 people. The fuse fizzled in his explosive-laden underpants.
Passengers had to hit the young male there many times to put out the fire.
The suspect is no longer talking on the advice of his court-appointed attorney.
On Tuesday State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley announced that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has subsequently been stripped of the government visa that allowed him to fly to America on a one-way ticket purchased with cash.
Crowley said others have also lost the right to visit the United States now that officials have been checking existing lists for potential terrorists, but he would not name or count them. "It's more than one," Crowley said. "But I don't think it's fruitful to get into a scoreboard."
Flying With The Enemy
If there's a good way to stop terrorism, let's hear it.
By David Harsanyi
http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_14133197When comedian Joan Rivers was booted off a flight from Costa Rica to Newark this past weekend, it was not because she had perpetrated crimes against the human appearance. Rather, it was because she was a potential security risk.
In a recent column, my assertion that airport security should ignore most of us and focus on bad actors (not the Joan Rivers variety of bad actor, though one sympathizes) who tend to originate from disagreeable locales (not Hollywood) and affiliate themselves with a religious denomination (not Scientology), provoked a torrent of livid e-mails to land in my inbox."
One perturbed writer, an American Muslim, encapsulated the thoughts of many by accusing me of "encouraging ... racist profiling," calling that "inexcusable and ignorant." This sentiment was also found in the progressive blogosphere as a reaction to any mention of ethnic or religious profiling.
Evidently, the Barack Obama administration — despite unleashing a barrage of euphemistic
rationalizations — is also a nest of boorish, racist sentiment, as it instructed airports to profile travelers en route to the United States from 14 countries, most of which share some vague thematic connection. They include Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
It is a shame that anyone has to endure questioning or pat-downs or worse at airports, but the fact is that those who are behind terrorism have, by large margins, originated from these nations. (Islam, incidentally, is not a race, it is a faith, so there is nothing "racist" about criticizing it or its adherents, most of whom — need it be repeated — are peaceful.)
No serious person in this nation has insinuated that Islamic religious freedoms be infringed or curtailed. Yet, if these indignant letter-writers were interested in unearthing honest-to-goodness inexcusable ignorance, widespread dehumanization and institutionalized xenophobia, they could find it in abundance in any run-of-the-mill Muslim theocracy, monocracy or autocracy. There are many to choose from.
That reality, of course, is none of our business, as a matter of policy. Protecting citizens from foreign threats, on the other hand, is.
Understandably, this has unfurled a complex situation. Are we overreacting? What is an appropriate level of interrogation? When is war justified? What rights do enemy combatants have? Fair debates, no doubt.
But a person can oppose water boarding or war or foreign entanglements or nation building and still accept that certain countries and religions harbor "militants" — even if such militants make stopovers in Frankfurt.
Yet ... the excuse-making. The tiptoeing. Terrorism is now a "man-caused disaster." The Fort Hood terrorist was just stressed out after learning about a deployment to Iraq — you know, after he voluntarily joined the Army.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, was, according to the president, an "isolated extremist" — which is true, if he means the extremism is isolated to a few million people.
Then, Obama went on to talk about the "crushing poverty" of Yemen, insinuating that neediness was a root of man-caused disasters — though the underwear bomber came from a wealthy and educated family and the "crushing poverty" of Haiti has yet to compel those nation's young men to stuff explosives down their pants.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee complained that singling out a group of people was "extreme and very dangerous. All of a sudden people are labeled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from."
Well, I hate to break it to them, but Americans already relate terrorism to the nations that terrorists seem to always come from. And if there's a better way to keep extremists off planes, I'd love to hear it.
Profiling Whole Nations
by Tunku Varadarajan
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-04/full-body-pat-downs-are-not-enough/The Obama administration has announced that citizens of 14 selected countries—as well as travelers whose itineraries have taken them through any of these countries—will be subjected to enhanced scrutiny before they board planes to the United States, including full-body pat-downs. The countries comprise four "state sponsors of terrorism" (Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria) and 10 "countries of interest," a euphemism for terrorist breeding grounds. These last are Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen.
If this new security policy is an indication—however embryonic—that the president is beginning to get serious about tackling Islamist terrorism, then millions of Americans will permit themselves a glimmer of gratitude. Let's call it the "Underwear Dividend," after Farouk Omar Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who was apprehended in mid-air on Christmas Day with a bomb secreted in his nether parts.
On a macro level, one has to wonder about the commitment of a president who invariably prefers to use the word "radical" to describe a "terrorist," and whose secretary for Homeland Security cannot easily bring herself to utter the word "terrorism," preferring instead a phrase—"man-caused disasters"—that should make most American jaws drop. (Of course, it may be that the one way to ensure a grassroots Democrats clamor for action against terrorism is to call it "anthropogenic"…)
The macro story is, alas, one of broader ideology, which tends to remain fixed in the course of an administration. We cannot expect Obama to fight terrorism with the zeal of a Bush, especially when it's clear that he regards his predecessor as a destructive Ahab obsessed with an Islamist "Moby-Dick." Obama is Starbuck, not merely more pragmatic than Ahab but immeasurably wiser: His mission is to keep the Pequod—America—out of harm's way.
No, President Obama cannot change his natural course, so the best we hope for is a minimization of political correctness in the daily, practical matter of keeping us secure from Islamist terrorists. So whereas any formal use of "profiling" as a tool may be politically unthinkable, we have made a useful start with this latest list of tainted countries.
Of course, the great majority of Muslims—whether here or abroad—are peaceable, and it is devilishly difficult to design a protective system that separates murderous jihadis from a nonviolent majority without chafing against some civil liberties. But the question many now ask is whether we are worrying too much about those liberties and not enough about saving lives.
Obama cannot say, formally, that our most pressing problem is with Islamist terrorism, even though incidents of terrorism by non-Muslims are trivial these days. And as we, as a society, are still bound fast to our proprieties, we cannot formally say that we are afraid of radicalized Muslims getting on planes to kill us. We cannot, formally, segregate Muslim passengers from the rest in airport security. We cannot, formally, say that the intellectual author of this terrorism is Saudi Arabia, and the main logistical base is Pakistan. Why, these last two are our dear friends. However, we have put those countries on a tainted list; and the taint is a soft form of profiling, since we really do not trust people who fly to America from those two countries. If we can’t profile people, we can, it seems, profile entire nations.
A few practical proposals, going forward: Why not station police on board all flights? El Al, which adheres to such a practice, has not had an on-air incident in three decades. (Edward Jay Epstein made precisely such a suggestion, two weeks after September 11, 2001, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.)
Next, make it more cumbersome for people in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to get a U.S. visa, and institute an immediate review of all visas issued to males under 40 from the 14 countries. Revoke all those that don't pass a "smell test." As Abdulmutallab demonstrated, a U.S. visa is a precious al Qaeda asset. In the same vein, introduce a form to be filled by all who pass through immigration at U.S. (air)ports, one that asks all travelers—irrespective of where they arrive from—if they have visited any of the countries on the list in the last two years. If they have, they must state the purpose of their visit. (How else do we scrutinize, say, the Dutch national of Somali origin who may have been in Somalia with the Islamist "Shabaab" six months ago, but who is, in this instance, flying directly to New York from The Hague? People will lie, but subsequent detection will help in deportation, or prosecution.)
We have to create—increasingly—two classes of traveler, those that get normal checks and those that are subject to intensive checks. Inevitably, this will open up fissures, but these are fissures we must learn to live with. As Melik Kaylan wrote recently, " the world will likely undergo a period of de-integration or rather a new kind of integration in which mutually sympathetic cultures grow actively closer while others get slowly excluded." Eventually, if the pressure is applied long enough, the innocent majority in the watch-list countries will decide that it is in their own interest to root out the radical Islamists. In any event, the list shrinks the umbra of anonymity in which jihadists conceal themselves. It is likely that certain countries will not get off the list for decades, which may mean that they don't care enough, or are just too ramshackle and corrupt, to get their house in order. It may also mean that they are perennial enemies. Pertinent, here, is the one silver lining in the Abdulmutallab case: that the father reported his own son to the authorities. We have to encourage such people to go after their own fanatics.
Finally, we have to accept that this isn't a problem that can be solved through ever-increasing security measures. It is, as Robert Kagan has written in the latest issue of World Affairs, a problem that requires a robust combination of political and military responses. Perhaps some Democrats may even learn that Islamist jihad has a pedigree that predates George W. Bush.
Another part of our response should be to counter the spread of radical Islam in the West, particularly in prisons, where proselytizers have access to people who are vulnerable to being "saved." These are the sleepers who threaten us at home. We can tighten visas and other forms of restrictions to hinder the very active and well-funded missionary work done in the West by Islamist groups drawing upon personnel, money, and ideas from tainted countries. It won't be fully effective, but it would make it easier for the moderate, civilized majority to fight the conflict within the Muslim community against the better-subsidized fanatics.
To conclude, there are three under-acknowledged factors involved here, all of them cultural in character (and our culture inclines us to overlook them). First, when the White House and Congress are in Democratic hands, a slight and silent sense goes out over all the bureaucracy that national security is not all that important or interesting. Second: Bureaucracies reward inertia and do not punish ignorance. They are also—no news here—deeply compartmentalized. Three: Every educated American under the age of about 40 has been indoctrinated into the view that the worst thing imaginable is to be judgmental, because to make a judgment is, per se, to be intolerant.
Put all these together and you have a society almost perfectly unable to discern deadly threats to its existence—a society in which, it would appear, profiling people is more odious than mass murder.
While Europe Sneered
Kurt Westergaard and other brave critics of Islamic fanaticism continue to fend for themselves
Bruce Bawer
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0105bb.htmlYesterday, a friend sent me a link to an article entitled “Eurabian Follies” on the website of the journal Foreign Policy. The author, Justin Vaïsse, took to task several authors, including me, who have warned in recent years of the Islamization of Europe. Vaïsse countered these authors’ mountains of hard facts with a big helping of the usual supercilious sneering. His thesis: Europe is chugging along just fine; Islam poses no real challenge to the continent’s freedom and prosperity; after all, the “experts” say so. Never mind the draining of European welfare systems by Muslim families, the explosion in rapes and gay-bashings and Jew-baitings, the proliferation of honor killings and forced marriages and no-go zones; never mind the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh by fanatics who objected to those men’s positions on Islam; never mind the threats directed at critics of Islam, such as Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Robert Redeker, which have obliged them to live in hiding or with round-the-clock bodyguards.
The timing of Vaïsse’s article was unfortunate—for him, anyway: it appeared around the time of the Christmas Day terrorist attack on Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253 and the New Year’s Day assassination attempt on Kurt Westergaard, creator of the famous Mohammed-in-a-bomb-turban cartoon published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. (Only a bathroom that had been converted to a panic room in Westergaard’s house saved the artist from an axe-wielding Islamist maniac.) Let’s not even mention the over 1,000 cars torched in French cities on New Year’s Eve, which is becoming an annual tradition among that nation’s Muslim youth.
As it happened, I received the link to Vaïsse’s article on the same day that I discovered that my dear friend Hege Storhaug had once, like Westergaard, been a target of violence, apparently because of her criticism of Islam. Hege is a former journalist and longtime women’s rights activist in Oslo whose concern about the treatment of women and girls in Muslim communities made her a pioneering critic of Islam in Norway. Time and again she has taken extraordinary personal risks to stand up for females who are confined to their homes, who are denied educations and careers, and who are the victims (or potential victims) of honor killing, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and sundry forms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
In 2006, her book But the Greatest of All Is Freedom: On the Consequences of Immigration became a huge—and controversial—best-seller in Norway. At the time, Hege lived in a neighborhood called Kampen, a part of Oslo that brings to mind the Haight-Ashbury or East Village of the 1960s. Hege notes that after her book began to sell big—and draw harsh media attacks—her neighborhood was papered over with posters featuring a photo of her with an X drawn over her face, along with the slogan NO TO RACISTS IN KAMPEN. Then one day—as Hege revealed in a powerful account posted yesterday on the website of Human Rights Service, the small foundation where she works—one or more people broke into her home, beat her, and left her bruised and unconscious in a pool of blood on the floor. Nothing was stolen. The date was January 1, 2007—three years to the day before the attempted murder of Westergaard.
At first, Hege kept the crime secret, for fear that publicizing it would discourage other critics of Islam from speaking out. Not until a month later did she report the brutal event to the police, and then only after a lawyer friend had secured a guarantee that the report would not be made public. But the steady rise in Muslim violence in Europe, culminating in the Westergaard attack, helped changed her mind about publicly revealing the assault. She also wanted to underscore the fact that many in the media—people like Vaïsse, I might add—were by their see-no-evil approach to the subject encouraging physical attacks on people like her and Westergaard. This state of affairs, she felt, needed to be addressed publicly and its real-world consequences made clear.
The fact is that for years Hege has been the target of a ruthless, tireless, and breathlessly mendacious campaign of criticism by the far-left Norwegian media. She’s become Public Enemy Number One among not only radical Muslims but also Communists, socialists (whose numbers in Norway’s capital are not insignificant), and what Hege calls “organized anti-racists.” These are members of Scandinavia’s many government-funded organizations who claim to be liberal opponents of racism but are in fact largely concerned with defending even the most illiberal aspects of immigrant cultures. Indeed, Hege doesn’t believe that her assailants were Muslims; she suspects that they were far leftists of the sort who proliferate in neighborhoods like Kampen and who have made common cause with European Islamists. Hege is also convinced—as am I—that the media’s concerted effort to identify her as a racist and Islamophobe influenced her attackers. This is not difficult to believe: it was, after all, the Dutch media’s demonization of Fortuyn that helped put him in an early grave instead of in his country’s prime ministership.
In her Monday post, Hege suggested that if all the influential newspapers in Europe had published the Danish cartoons, “it would have been much more difficult to build up the increasingly brutal climate we see now all over Europe: the fact that people are not just the subjects of attacks, and of attempted murder, but are denied virtually all personal freedom in their daily lives, so that Westergaard cannot set foot outside his home without the police on his heels, just as Robert Redeker is living underground in the homeland of Voltaire.” And she asked: “Will Europe manage to set its foot down strongly enough . . . that there will be no doubt that the continent never will give up its founding values? Or will the commentariat and political elite continue to give way, inch by inch . . . ?” Any of us, she warned, can end up a Kurt Westergaard if we dare to speak our minds. But don’t tell that to the “experts” at Foreign Policy.
After Attack On Danish Cartoonist, The West Is Choked By Fear
Henryk M. Broder
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,669888,00.html
A Somalian man broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard on Friday armed with an ax and a knife. He is accused of the attempted murder of the Danish cartoonist.
The attack on illustrator Kurt Westergaard wasn't the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Salman Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights.
In 1988, Salman Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" was published in its English-language original edition. Its publication led the Iranian state and its revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a "fatwa" against Rushdie and offer a hefty bounty for his murder. This triggered several attacks on the novel's translators and publishers, including the murder of Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi. Millions of Muslims around the world who had never read a single line of the book, and who had never even heard the name Salman Rushdie before, wanted to see the death sentence against the author carried out -- and the sooner the better, so that the stained honor of the prophet could be washed clean again with Rushdie's blood.
In that atmosphere, no German publisher had the courage to publish Rushdie's book. This led a handful of famous German authors, led by Günter Grass, to take the initiative to ensure that Rushdie's novel could appear in Germany by founding a publishing house exclusively for that purpose. It was called Artikel 19, named after the paragraph in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights that guarantees the freedom of opinion. Dozens of publishing houses, organizations, journalists, politicians and other prominent members of German society were involved in the joint venture, which was the broadest coalition that had ever been formed in postwar German history.
Sympathy for the Hurt Feelings of Muslims
Seventeen years later, after the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published a dozen Muhammad cartoons on a single page, there were similar reactions in the Islamic world to those that had followed the publication of "The Satanic Verses." Millions of Muslims from London to Jakarta who had never seen the caricatures or even heard the name of the newspaper, took to the streets in protests against an insult to the prophet and demanded the appropriate punishment for the offenders: death. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden even went so far as to demand the cartoonists' extradition so that they could be condemned by an Islamic court.
This time, however, in contrast to the Rushdie case, hardly anyone has showed any solidarity with the threatened Danish cartoonists -- to the contrary. Grass, who had initiated the Artikel 19 campaign, expressed his understanding for the hurt feelings of the Muslims and the violent reactions that resulted. Grass described them as a "fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act," in the process drawing a moral equivalence between the 12 cartoons and the death threats against the cartoonists. Grass also stated that: "We have lost the right to seek protection under the umbrella of freedom of expression."
"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," commented then-British Home Secretary Jack Straw, referring to the decision by several European media organizations to republish the caricatures. Meanwhile, Vorwärts, the party organ of Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party -- one of the country's two largest political parties -- defended freedom of expression in general, but gave the opinion that in this special case, the Danes had "abused" the freedom, "not in a legal sense, but in a political and moral one." For Fritz Kuhn, the then-parliamentary floor leader for the Green Party, it was a déjà vu experience: "They (the caricatures), remind me of the anti-Jewish drawings from the Hitler era before 1939." With his statement, Kuhn, who was born in 1955, demonstrated that either he had a sensational pre-natal memory or that he had never seen a single anti-Semitic caricature in the Nazi's Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper.
Like Eunuchs Talking About Sex
It was like listening to the blind talk about art, the deaf about music or eunuchs discussing sex based on hearsay. Because with the exception of the left-wing Die Tageszeitung, the conservative Die Welt and the centrist Die Zeit, every German newspaper and magazine followed the advice of Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth, who said "de-escalation begins at home," and erred on the side of caution by not republishing the cartoons. Prominent German psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter advised: "The West should refrain from any provocations that produce feelings of debasement or humiliation." Of course, Richter left open the question of whether "the West" should also refrain from the wearing of mini skirts, eating pork and the legalization of same-sex partnerships in order to avoid causing any feelings of debasement and humiliation in the Islamic world.
Had the Muhammed cartoons been reprinted by the whole German press, then newspaper readers could have seen for themselves how excessively harmless the 12 cartoons were and how bizarre and pointless the whole debate had become. Instead, the assessment was left to "experts" who had in the past defended every criticism of the pope and the Church as well as every blasphemous piece of art in the name of freedom of opinion, but who, in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, suddenly held the view that one must take other people's religious feelings into consideration.
But that argument was clearly just an excuse, a way of excusing the fact they had been silenced by fear. After all, a few things had happened in the time between the Rushdie affair and the caricatures debacle: 9/11, the London bombings, Madrid, Bali, Jakarta, Djerba -- events which some commentators have also interpreted as a reaction by the Islamic world to its degradation and humiliation by the West. Against this threat, it seemed more reasonable and, above all, safer, to show respect to religious feelings rather than insist on the right to freedom of expression.
Right to Offend More Important than Protecting the Offended
Very few people showed a willingness to break ranks. Among them was comedian Rowan Atkinson ("Mr. Bean"), who in the context of a debate over British proposed incitement of religious hatred legislation, declared that "right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended." And Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a secular Muslim woman then living in the Netherlands, responded with a manifesto that began with the words: "I am here to defend the right to offend."
But she was one of the few exceptions. Even the then-French president, Jacques Chirac, temporarily forgot that he represented the country of Sartre, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, and decreed that "anything that could offend the faith of others, especially religious beliefs, must be avoided."
Thus began the "de-escalation" that had been called for. The only problem is the other side isn't thinking about de-escalation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is still in effect, and the attempt to murder Kurt Westergaard last week wasn't the first attempt to carry out a death sentence for an instance in which no crime had been committed. Islam may be the "religion of peace" in theory, but it looks different in practice.
A German-Turkish lawyer who lives in central Berlin recently had to go into hiding because she became the recipient of death threats after publishing a book. The tome doesn't include any caricatures of Muhammad. It's just the title that serves as a provocation: " Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution."
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