Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Tony Ryan, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, writes: “LEAP’s first ever billboard now showing at 108th and I street in Omaha, NE. It is up high, where many can see it, and it shows a new website for us which we can use to measure response and effectiveness.”
Cross-posted at the Explorers Foundation blog [link].
Commenting on this outrageous story, about which Glenn Reynolds
and Brendan Loy make the obvious (and correct) points about the need for more accountability, Rand Simberg says:
Should ignorance of the law be an excuse for this man? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that those enforcing the law should be much more responsible for knowing it than those who are being oppressed by ignorance of it.
I would add another question along these lines. Why is it acceptable not only that ordinary citizens (particularly members of racial and ethnic minorities) must behave with extreme discretion, and often show humiliating deference, to avoid being abused or arrested when dealing with police, but also that a significant fraction of police are power-abusing bullies with hair-trigger tempers? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that those enforcing the law should be selected for thick skin and the ability to defuse adversarial situations rather than make them worse. Many police behave decently and even admirably, but there are also so many who are hot-headed jerks that it’s obvious that the police culture has systematic management problems.
UPDATE (July 16): Brendan Loy posts an update to his original post.
Long time readers know that I run a charity self defense course for violent crime survivors. I’ve been doing it for so long that word of mouth brings me more work than I can handle.
But it wasn’t always like that. When I was just starting out, decades ago, I would visit encounter groups and seminars to pass out some business cards and let people look me over so they wouldn’t be so self conscious if they dialed my number. Some of these seminars were more crowded than others.
The first seminar I ever attended for male rape victims was at one of the local hotels here in Columbus, Ohio. I was shocked to see how many people were there! It was standing room only, with men leaning against the walls and sitting in the aisles between rows of folding chairs.
I recently posted about Jihadi theorist and practitioner Abu Musab al-Suri, in response to a recent review essay about a biography of al-Suri.
Zenpundit opined that al-Suri appears to be the Islamic terrorist movement’s “John Arquilla, William Lind and Louis Beam rolled into one”, and that “he probably would have made a fine blogger had he not also been – well – a sociopathic nihilist.” Agreed, though I would expressly add “homicidal, sociopathic nihilist”.
Several facts stood out about as-Suri. One was that his politico-military thought is not so much Islamic, and certainly not traditionalist, as a mélange of Islamic themes mixed with other revolutionary and radical thinking originating in the West. Also, he encouraged a massively decentralized Jihad, cell-based, self-starting, networked but not hierarchical, with al Qaeda as a source of inspiration and doctrine but not command and control. Only such a hyper-dispersed effort could wage a bottom-up struggle against the USA and its allies, which enjoy so many advantages in terms of surveillance and destructive power.
With this on the mind, I was therefore struck by the following passage from a review-essay which discusses Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam: The Search for the New Ummah
Islamic militancy has become infused with Third World theories, Marxism, fascism, and nationalism. It cannot escape the whirlwind of ideas that has drifted over the decades into the Middle East. All militant websites seemed to urge for a peripheral jihad in the frontiers (Chechnya, the Philippines island of Mindanao, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir) and for an imaginary ummah (Islamic society) in which they hold dominion under the guise of piety. He points out that many of these websites originate not from the periphery but from Europe, Malaysia and even North America areas in which there is access to technology. This is a key observation: for the Islamic militants, a cell requires access to free societies and western technologies to propagate and acquire tools for their rejectionist movements.
The Jihad cannot be based in the lands of the existing Ummah. If it is limited to the technical means, and even the intellectual means, available there, it is doomed. First, it would be trapped in a backwater, waging a struggle against the ruthless police states of the “Near Enemy”, where it has already repeatedly suffered defeat. Second, without the network-enabling technology which is densely available in the developed world, as well as useful non-Islamic-derived ideas, an effective strategy such as the one al-Suri was seeking cannot be developed and executed.
The developed countries can only be effectively attacked to the extent their enemies are permitted a lodgment within their own borders.
Sending Western troops to fight Jihadis in Waziristan may or may not make the USA and its Allies more secure. But rooting out the Jihadis in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Munich is essential.
UPDATE: My copy of Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri
The link above will take you to a report about an Ohio native that conspired to use “Weapons of Mass Destruction against tourists in Germany”. Let us take a look at the implications.
Places like Columbus, Ohio were what the sophisticates had in mind when they coined the phrase “flyover country”. Natives here call Ohio’s capitol city “Cowtown”, and it isn’t always meant with wry affection. I personally like to put a positive spin on things and claim that it is the world’s largest small town.
Yet we have a native son who was not only working to assemble something which would kill indiscriminately but he planned on setting it off in another country, located on another continent.
Aiding him in this endeavor were two immigrants who had plans of their own. The guy born in Kashmir wanted to help al Qaeda destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, while the other from Somalia was interested in setting off bombs in an Ohio shopping mall during the Christmas season. Both of the immigrants had been recruited by al Qaeda while overseas, and one of them had even received some military-style training at a secret base in Ethiopia.
So a guy from Somalia trains as a terrorist in Ethiopia before hooking up with a guy from Kashmir and a local in Columbus, Ohio. They plan on causing mass death in Germany, in Columbus, and committing an act of sabotage by destroying one of America’s most iconic landmarks located in New York.
Global War on Terror, indeed.
The only reason why none of these terrible plans came to fruition is because of Bush’s supposedly illegal wiretapping project. FBI agents approached the erstwhile bridge saboteur and managed to turn him. With a double agent in place, the evidence gathered was sufficient to convict them all.
If international terrorist groups like al Qaeda have plots hatching in the very heart of America’s heartland, what must it be like in those places where things are happening? How many terrorist cells are scheming and gathering materials for their dark work this very minute in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Washington, DC?
Just a thought to speed you on your way on this fine summer day.
(Hat tip to Glenn, Gateway Pundit, and I cross posted this essay at Hell in a Handbasket.)