Tag: terrorism

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Accountability general freedom national politics & policies responsibility too much government

It Didn’t Last

September 11, 911, unity, U.S., trust, confidence, government

“September 11 is one of our worst days but it brought out the best in us,” proclaimed Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander.

Today is the 16th anniversary of that terrible day … arriving as Hurricane Irma smashes into Florida and with fresh memories of so many acts of kindness and heroism by first responders and minuteman citizen volunteers alike rescuing folks from the recent flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey.

“These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat,” then-​President George W. Bush told the American people that frightful evening. “But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.”

He was correct about the people of this country. All kinds of folks stepped up in a myriad of ways to help. 

But what about the government?

Well, the “public’s trust in government,” according to Pew Research, “which was mired in the 30% range through much of the past decade, doubled in the wake of the attacks.”

That uptick wasn’t to last. Public disgust with the federal government reverted to form. By 2015, reports Pew, “Only 19% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (3%) or ‘most of the time’ (16%).”

What happened?

Well, have you met the Washington politicians?

And can our country really be “strong,” as Mr. Bush declared, if government cannot earn the trust of even one of every five Americans?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Another Push for Censorship

Great Britain, Tory, Prime Minister, PM, censorship, terrorism, internet, web

It’s almost as if politicians are hell-​bent on expanding government at the expense of our freedoms … and grandstanding to ‘look like they are doing something.’

The two proclivities are not unrelated.

Take Theresa May, Great Britain’s Tory Prime Minister. After yet another terrorist attack in her country, this time on the London Bridge, she re-​iterated her party’s intent to censor the Internet.

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” May said on Sunday. But this “safe space,” she went on, “is precisely what the Internet, and the big companies that provide Internet-​based services, provide.”

Now, blaming ISPs and social platforms is a crude form of business scapegoating — something I would expect from her opponent in the upcoming elections, Jeremy Corbyn, the much-​loathed (but inching ahead in the polls) top banana of Labour. 

As a conservative, May should understand markets and the limitations of government interventionism a bit better than a near-communist. She might recall that previous attempts to regulate the means of communication almost never to work, and, in those few cases when they do, never stay scaled to the original target issue. 

They expand. To cover more than just terrorism, as in this case.

What’s more, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group makes the case that such a move would likely “push these vile networks into even darker corners of the web, where they will be even harder to observe” — scuttling the alleged purpose of the Conservative Party’s longed-​for censorship. 

May knows this. But she is a politician. She has power, and she wants to keep it.

It’s almost as if power corrupts or something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly ideological culture moral hazard nannyism responsibility

Walk on the Wilders Side?

Muslims, Islam, Sharia law, Netherlands, Dutch, Theo Van Gogh, terrorism, immigration, Europe

The Dutch were among the first to witness Islamic extremist violence against free speech. The November 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent — a man whose first name, Mohammed, almost no one thinks is merely coincidental — stirred the nation.

And the world.

Van Gogh made a short film, with Somalian émigré Ayaan Hirsi Ali, about the unjust treatment of women in Islamic countries. The film criticizes Islam as well as the Muslim majority countries, and was considered an affront by many Muslims.

After van Gogh’s death, Ms. Ali fled to the United States.

This event is only the most famous of many similar conflicts between free-​speech Dutch values and regulated-​speech Islamist ones. The fact that the country has anti-​blasphemy and anti-​insult laws on the books, and these have been directed against a popular politician, has exacerbated the growing antagonism.

That very politician is today’s big news. According to The Atlantic, the “center-​right People’s Party (VVD) for Freedom and Democracy is projected to win 24 seats in [today’s] election, slightly ahead of Geert Wilders’s far-​right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), which is expected to gain 22.”**

The Dutch center-​left, like similar ruling groups in Britain, Germany, France and Sweden, often seems weak and timid before the rising illiberalism of Islamist terrorism and Sharia law.* Many suspect that the recent decision to block Turkish ministers from speaking at rallies in Holland, before Turkey’s referendum next month, is designed to counter this narrative.

Meanwhile, though Wilders is generally liberal (not “far right”) on most cultural issues, his “de-​Islamization” program seeks to close mosques and outlaw the Quran***.

One extreme to another.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* This is not just a bugaboo. In 2006 the Minister of Justice floated the possibility of incorporating Sharia law into the constitution.

** The projection is within the margin of error, and with mass immigrant Turkish protests taking place over the weekend, the chance of a Trump-​like upset is more than possible.

*** Geert Wilders compares the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

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folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Stockholm Syndrome?

Ami Horowitz, Sweden, Tucker Carlson, terrorism, terrorist, violence, immigrants

Can we handle the truth? Governments and media professionals don’t always think so.

Journalist Ami Horowitz, whose interview with Tucker Carlson caught President Trump’s attention last week, noted that, despite what he learned (and recorded) at street level in Sweden, Swedes in general and government personnel in particular* seem resistant to acknowledging the levels of violence in Muslim migrant communities.

The media firestorm that followed Trump’s off-​the-​cuff comments seemed more evidence of the same, as did the Washington Post coverage of yesterday’s riots in Stockholm, in the 89 percent immigrant suburb of Rinkeby.

“Multiple criminologists in Sweden … said the notion that immigrants were responsible for a large proportion of crime in the country was highly exaggerated,” the Post report explained. “Nevertheless, the integration of immigrants into Swedish society is a problem that the government has been struggling to address.”

Yet, in the wake of a 2013 riot by migrants, David Frum noted that, “Sweden does not report data on crimes by foreign-​born people, only by foreign passport holders — meaning that an immigrant who has been naturalized will be counted as a Swede for statistical purposes.”

The media, like the Swedes, seem protective. Not of native-​born Swedes, but of the immigrant populations.

Swedes really are well meaning. But good intentions are not enough. In Sweden, as throughout Europe, Muslim immigrants have been let in but not assimilated. Unskilled, most émigrés cannot find jobs … and you know what they say about “idle hands.”

Bending over backwards to downplay problems, though, isn’t the answer. It prevents Swedes and others from coming to the correct conclusion: the best way to help others is not to put them on the dole in your (foreign!) land, but to aid them close to home.

And stop bombing and destabilizing their countries, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.  

 

* The policemen interviewed in Horowitz’s video have claimed they were taken out of context. Horowitz denies that charge here.

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folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

No-​Go Zones

Trump, Sweden, terrorism, attack, immigrant, refuge, terror attack

“We’ve got to keep our country safe,” President Donald Trump said last week at a rally in Melbourne, Florida. Hardly objectionable.

It was what he said next that baffled … some.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden — Sweden, who would believe this?”

Many news outlets ran with the official Swedish response: puzzlement. What happened the night before in Sweden? Was he suggesting a terror attack? There was no terror attack. Ah, President Trump: lying again!

Social media erupted with the usual anti-​Trump mockery.

Swedes were understandably confused. As Tucker Carlson noted, “The president ought to be precise in what he says.” But Carlson added that the “analysis” of numerous network news programs was “so stupid that it’s hard to believe it made it on television.”

One key job of professional journalists is interpretation.

When Trump uttered “last night,” he wasn’t referring to what happened, he was referring to what he saw the night before on Tucker Carlson’s show: an interview with Ami Horowitz, who recently produced an exposé on the violence in Sweden’s “no-​go zones,” enclaves of immigrants from Muslim-​majority countries.

Where even Sweden’s police fear to tread.

“Sweden — they took in large numbers,” Trump went on. “They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world.”*

The mass refugee surge into Europe is a huge problem.

But the American press assuming the worst regarding President Trump and reporting it?

It’s a problem, too.

Could reasonable interpretation itself be morphing into a “no-​go zone”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Trump went on to say, “Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris.” He is referring to terrorist attacks in those cities. He may also be referring to “no-​go” communities where police and non-​Muslims appear to be unwelcome, as reported in Germany, Britain, France and Belgium.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies privacy responsibility

In Plain Sight

terrorism, surveillance, privacy, fingerprint, targeted, illustration

The Berlin terrorist attack just a little over a week ago fit a noteworthy pattern. German authorities had investigated Anis Amri — the Tunisian man who drove that large truck into a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 and wounding 56 others — and found “links with Islamic extremists.”

Later killed in Milan, Italy, Amri had been wanted in Tunisia for “hijacking a van” and jailed in Italy for arson and a “violent assault at his migrant reception center.” And yet with all that known or easily knowable, the German authorities couldn’t prevent him from killing innocent Germans.

It’s not just a European phenomenon, either.

Consider Omar Mateen, this country’s worst mass shooter, having massacred 49 people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The FBI had spent ten months looking into Mateen.

Years before the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI had tracked Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombers.*

“In case after case … authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence,” the Washington Post recently noted. This was the case with the majority of recent lone-​wolf terrorism plots.

“If any lesson can be learned from studying the perpetrators of recent attacks,” a report in The Intercept concluded, “it is that there needs to be a greater investment in conducting targeted surveillance of known terror suspects and a move away from the constant knee-​jerk expansion of dragnet surveillance …”

Yet intelligence agencies are still grabbing our metadata in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That needs to stop.

The fact that known threats are consistently not being stopped suggests curtailing mass surveillance won’t hurt our security, but improve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The same is true regarding the Ft. Hood (work-​place) shooter, Nidal Hasan. Likewise, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), who was under the active eye of the FBI after returning from Yemen … until he opened fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting station killing one soldier and wounding another. Ditto Ahmad Khan Rahami, the less deadly bomber in New York City and New Jersey.

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terrorism, surveillance, privacy, fingerprint, targeted, illustration