Terrorism

Rhetoric, Comp & Juan Williams

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The mishandled and snarky firing of Juan Williams has been widely commented upon & here I do little but sum up. Companies may dismiss as they wish I hesitated and was quite often wrong in doing so. But I was not supported by tax money; my complaints were of what someone had done, not what was thought. While I don’t intend to more than mention it in class, I hope our assignments will lead my students to a useful historical context. For anyone who doesn’t know of the incident or needs refreshing, 3 Youtubes: Juan Williams’ words, his response and Vivian Schiller’s definition of journalistic ethics & integrity.

Let’s review the controversy.

What Williams said many (most) feel. Of course, he wished he didn’t feel it. But the response was prompted by experience: not only was 9/11 done in the name of a religion, but so were a series of often incompetent but sometimes successful (think Fort Hood) efforts by Soldiers of Islam. In court and openly, perpetrators claim connections between these scattered events – the first shots in a coming religious war. To ignore that is to shut our eyes and ears. Only a society asleep, unconscious, dead – or purely ideological – could so discount experience. An unthinking mob may be a tool some desire, but this is not a virtuous desire. The motives behind such desires are perhaps most beautifully exemplified by Frederick Douglass, who counters our initial state (one the plantation owners desire to be life-long) with one of virility and manliness, characterized by restlessness, curiosity, independence, autonomy. Another 19th century writer, Thoreau, talks about the pleasure of a “fact.” When facts are taboo, so is thought.

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The left’s romance with terrorists.

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It is a bit peculiar how the left seems to be fond of terrorists. Bill Ayres and his wife, of course, are prime examples but not the only ones. Some of them have adoring books written about them. Naturally, Sarah Jane Olsen had become a “community activist” in her new identity.

Now we have a new example disclosed today by Andrew Breitbart. Bradblog is a left wing blog that has become very successful while attacking such people as James O’Keefe of the ACORN tapes, and it has spun numerous conspiracy theories about the right and election fraud, etc. It turns out that one half of the blog, which has received over $1.3 million in donations from such sources as Teresa Heinz’s Tides Foundation, is a convicted murderer and terrorist. His name is Brett Kimberlin although he was once known as the “Speedway bomber” as he terrorized a town in Indiana. He was also a drug smuggler and dealer and he eventually ended up with a 50 year prison sentence. He was paroled after only 13 years but, when he refused to make any payments to the widow of one of his victims who had won a civil suit against him, he went back to prison for four more years.

Today he is a prominent figure on the left and his story of how he went to prison, a total fabrication, has made him even more of a hero. It’s pretty interesting reading.

Mini-Book Review — Ross — The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad

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Ross, Michael with Jonathan Kay, The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2007. 278 pp.

Recommended by Ishmael Jones, author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Culture, reviewed here on chicagoboyz.

In late 1982, 21 year-old Michael Ross arrived in Israel to escape cold weather. After a three year hitch in the Canadian Army, tackled right out of high school, he was on vacation. Backpackers visiting Europe on a budget often traded their wintertime labour at Israeli kibbutzim for free room and board. Michael was soon headed for one in the Beit Shean valley.

Hailing from Victoria, British Columbia and a mildly Anglican religious background, even being in Israel was a stretch. Far more likely that he’d be kayaking, or mountain-biking, or growing dope up in the Rockies. Short of the North Island of New Zealand, or perhaps Marin County, California, there’s hardly a more heavenly place in the English-speaking world than the Gulf Islands between the city of Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It’s “Lotus-land” to eastern Canadians. A young man just out of an army should have found all the pleasure and excitement he could want in the Pacific Coast lifestyle.

Michael’s background certainly didn’t suggest a future in one of the most respected, yet constantly imperiled, clandestine services in the world — the Mossad. Nor could it predict that he would take a side in one of the nastiest confrontations between the modern industrialized world and its neighbours. Yet for almost two decades “Michael Ross” was to serve in a variety of military and intelligence roles for his adopted home under conditions of unimaginable danger. How he came to do so is both fascinating and rather unsettling.

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Free Speech Under Attack

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Molly Norris is–or was–a Seattle cartoonist, best-known for coming up with the idea of “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” as a way of asserting American First Amendment rights. She has been threatened with murder for having violated Sharia law, and the threats against her have now reached such a level that–on the advice of the FBI–she is changing her identity and going into hiding. Her cartoons, at least for now, have stopped. The terrorists have silenced an American citizen.

This is not the first time that American individuals and institutions have been subject to intimidation by radical Islamic zealots, but it is one of the most blatant and serious.

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Judging 9/11

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One of the things that even the right seems to have forgotten about 9/11 is that these attacks, all of them, are the enforcement of judgments of religious courts. The US came to grips with the Taliban, ejected Saddam from power, reworked world finance to track terrorist finance but we’ve never seriously come to grips with the Islamic judges who condemn us to death and invite all Muslims to enforce those judgments by way of violent jihad.

Nine years after 9/11/2001 do we even have a list of who are these judges? How many of them have condemned us? Which ones of those have followings of sufficient size as to be a problem?

For all the good that the Bush administration did, it shrank away from doing this basic analysis and educating the public how Islamic courts are a serious problem. The Obama administration is no better and, in fact, considerably worse.

This is depressing.