From a comment by Brock at Belmont Club:
I’ve been saying this for some time. The American people are (largely) not suicidal, and will demand to know who is responsible, and they will therefore seek out the variable with the highest degree of correlation. But if some of the variables are hidden by law, they’ll use the (less precise) visible ones: race, ethnicity, gender, religion, national isotretinoinofficial origin. Every Leftist and Imam professes to be afraid that Ethnic Profiling or Religious Profiling is coming, but if they continue to prevent the rest of American from engaging in Ideological Profiling, then Ethnic Profiling is what we’re going to get. Lots of innocents will be harmed, but Americans will feel safer and think “It’s the best we could do in a bad situation.”
The trouble with ideological profiling is how rapidly it turns into stuff like Gadsden Flag Bumper Sticker Profiling and Tenured Radical Profiling. Some kinds of violence may correlate well with extreme beliefs, but extreme beliefs predict violence very poorly.
On top of that, we’ve already seen DHS defining “extreme” in arbitrary and politically convenient ways.
The US government has an obligation to guarantee a republican form of government. I would submit that the worldwide Caliphate is not a republic and its governmental form cannot be republican. The US government has an obligation to suppress this idea just as it would have an obligation to suppress thuggee had the british not done the job before we ever started letting in sufficient indians for it to become a domestic problem here.
I suspect a republican caliphate would be a different beast. I would never support such a thing but it would not be so fundamentally incompatible with our institutions that it would need the sort of suppression that should have been applied to Maj. Hasan. This would create enough space for the safe sorts of Gadsden flag or tenured radical people as should be created.
Retardo,
The trouble with ideological profiling is how rapidly it turns into stuff like Gadsden Flag Bumper Sticker Profiling and Tenured Radical Profiling.
I can’t but note that no one seems to have trouble ideologically profiling neo-nazis, Klan members, members of militia movements etc. Indeed, the recently passed “hate crimes” legislation is based on the premise that you can assume the motive of a crime based on the perpetrator’s ideology.
The other problem with this PC avoidance is that it offers no support from the larger community for the moderates in an afflicted community.
Every community has a spectrum views in it and has an internal dynamic to police those views. Moderates have to not only fight radicals but the much larger group of people on the fence who aren’t radicals but when forced to choose between supporting insider radicals against the outsiders will support the insiders. The moderates have a harder time convincing the fences sitters if there is not accountability from the greater society. If the fence sitters pay no penalty for enabling or tolerating the radicals, they have no incentive to go against the inclinations.
Putting pressure on the entire community helps the moderates to ostracize the radicals as threats to the community itself.
Consider the following possibility when the worm turns:
The Democrats have insisted, in the name of equality, on giving foreign terrorists attacking us all the Constitutional rights afforded American citizens at home. So, when the Democrats are faced with an overwhelming demand to cease giving terrorists Constitutional rights, to better protect ourselves at home from Islamic terrorism at home, the Democrats will offer the folloiwng compromise:
All Americans should give up their Constitutional rights too so terrorists will be treated equally.
While I understand what the quote says, I’m not sure it is correct in its conclusion. If this seemingly endless series of murderous attacks continues, and especially if more significant weapons are used to cause mass casualties, the response will not be limited to ethnicity or religion, but will encompass any and all who are then perceived to have aided and abetted the attacks.
What the islamists and their various enablers don’t seem to understand is that they continue to exist only because the western cultures they are attacking are restraining themselves from responding with the full power which they possess. At some point, and I fear we are approaching that point in the current situation with Iran, the crude, rude, blue collar views of the people who never get interviewed on the Sunday talk shows because they have no concept of, nor interest in, diplomatic niceties, are going to re-assert themselves.
These are the men and women whose families have been Marines and soldiers/sailors/airmen for gernerations. The blather of the chattering classes bounces off them with a shrug, and they have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in endless debate and analysis. They react, in the same way, and with the same fury, as any ordinary man might react to someone assaulting his wife, or a mother protecting her child.
In this last century, several formidable opponents have made the same mistake the islamists are making now—underestimating the potential danger of attacking the “decadent” west, and misunderstanding the hesitation of the “nation of shopkeepers” to resort to a violent response.
If the islamic world does not come to its senses, and if the western enablers and apologists for these repeated massacres do not cease their fifth columnar activities, there will come a day when the last follower of islam will die screaming he is not really muslim, and the last western apologist will feel the noose around his neck as he prattles on about the lessons of imperialism, and the latest slogans of victimology.
There has never been on the face of this earth a more deadly and destructive force than that wielded by the US and her allies. The peril that awaits these fanatical islamists, and their entire culture, as they dance ever closer to the abyss, is truly beyond their most feverish delusions.
Yamamoto understood. Hitler shot himself rather than face up to his errors. Too bad Hirohito is also dead, he could explain to the mullahs the meaning of having to “endure the unendurable”.
Even though it might mean a century of guilt and self-recrimination, I fear the bewildered hesitation of the west may soon be coming to an end, and the end of islam as a religion and a culture may soon be at hand.
As the book says, “He who has ears, let him hear.”
“….no support from the larger community for the moderates in an afflicted community. ”
Shannon, it would take a supremely rational group of people to make the change you suggest. The “afflicted community” (more like, what, the barbaric? community?) can’t be modified. The idea that it can be ignores the key problem of doctrine; the precepts of the Islamic law. The moderates will not renounce the doctrine that the so-called radicals act upon. The doctrine will live on forever and be continually passed on to the children of “moderates” and perhaps (as in the example of the the ft-hood murder) the moderate Muslim himself at some point in their lives.
“I can’t but note that no one seems to have trouble ideologically profiling neo-nazis, Klan members, members of militia movements etc.” (S. Love)
This is a good observation and reveals to us who the establishment truly fears.