New Dimensions In Terrorism

     I wish I could honestly say I was surprised by this story:

     Jacksonville police said a van crashed into a Republican party tent where volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon.

     Jacksonville police say a driver intentionally crashed a van through a tent where Duval County GOP volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon.

     Nobody was injured in the 3:45 p.m. incident at the Walmart Supercenter, 11900 Atlantic Boulevard, near Kernan Boulevard in the Sandalwood neighborhood, Lt. Larry Gayle of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office told reporters at the scene.

     Several Duval County GOP volunteers were working at the registration tent when a white man in his early 20s driving an older — possibly 1980s — brown van pulled up toward the tent.

     He then drove through the tent, endangering the lives of the workers and damaging the tent and tables, Gayle said.

     The driver then stopped, got out of the van and took a video of the scene before he “flipped off” the victims and fled, Gayle said.

     ...but I wasn’t. And before we get to the “Fran” part of this tirade, add the above to this story:

     Tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin,” Pope Francis said Wednesday in a passionate address calling for international wealth redistribution. “Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the pontiff told participants in a Vatican seminar, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”

     “Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     My juxtaposition of the two is more than a mere Curmudgeonly caprice, I assure you.

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     Allow me to ask you a question whose answer you think “should” be “obvious:” What is terrorism? That is: What are its genus — the superset of phenomena to which it belongs – and its differentia — the characteristic that distinguishes it from the other elements in that superset?

     There’s disagreement about the genus. Many people would say that terrorism must include violence, or at least a credible threat of violence. Indeed, most well-publicized acts of terrorism do include violence. But others – myself included – argue that terrorism is defined entirely by its object: the inducement of terror in a targeted population. That end need not require violence, or a threat of violence to come.

     An act of terrorism is one that is intended to terrorize: to create terror among its targets. Nothing else really matters.

     But why would anyone want to terrorize anyone else? Why, to get the people in the targeted group to comply with a particular agenda: i.e., to do, or not do, some particular thing. There may be real-life Jokers out there who just like to terrorize people for its own sake, but for our present purposes we can neglect them.

     To terrorize a man, you must target something he values greatly. “Temporal terrorist” Smith would target Jones’s life, his health, and his loved ones. But while such terrorists are relatively well known and understood, they’re not the only variety. “Spiritual terrorist” Davis would target the fate of Jones’s immortal soul.

     The unidentified Jacksonville driver mentioned in the first cited story, who employed violence to silence or scatter Republicans, conservatives, and Trump supporters, is a temporal terrorist. Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, a.k.a. Pope Francis, is a spiritual terrorist: i.e., he has implied that unless you support his political prescriptions, your immortal soul is in danger of damnation. Granted that Bergoglio’s threats require that his targets be Catholics, but that’s an awfully big target group: about 75 million Americans and over a billion persons worldwide.

     In both cases, the terrorist is using terror to induce compliance with an agenda. Both are evil, though Gentle Readers may differ on the magnitudes involved.

     Bergoglio is not the first of his kind. There have been others, including several previous popes, of whom the same could be said. If you believe in the bifurcated afterlife of the Christian creed, then anything that endangers your prospects in that life is a tremendous threat: a terror. And all too many preachers, aware that their flocks look to them for wisdom and guidance, have used that terror to induce compliance with an agenda for which there is no basis in the Gospels of Jesus Christ.

     For a supposed Christian leader – indeed, the highest such in all the world – to resort to terrorism to promote an entirely non-Christian agenda is a crime that beggars my powers with words.

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     I’m not the first to say this, nor is this the first time I say it: Christianity is the Gospels. All else is commentary by fallible men. Some may have been divinely inspired. Some may have been articulating the principles of the Gospels in a fashion we didn’t grasp before they came along. But only what is entirely consistent with Christ’s teachings in the Gospels may we defensibly call “God’s will for Man.” The root of it all, as I have written many times before, lies in the Two Great Commandments:

     But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
     Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. [Matthew 22:34-40]

     I have resisted the calls to label Jorge Bergoglio an anti-pope...until now. I shall do so no longer.

Faces

     [The following first appeared at Eternity Road on September 11, 2003. -- FWP]

---

     On September 11, 2001, two airliners rammed into two office towers and, ultimately, destroyed them. How did that happen? Office towers are exceptionally strong structures. Wouldn't it take a hellish explosion to cause them to collapse as they did?

     Well, yes and no. The Twin Towers were built around a central support spine and an extended web of struts from that spine. If the struts could be made to give way, the buildings would fall. The total energy release of the airliners' impacts was quite sufficient. Here are the numbers:

• Approximate gross weight of each airliner: 50 tons, or about 50,000 kilograms.
• Approximate speed of airliners on impact: 300 knots, or about 150 meters/sec.
• Approximate fuel load of each airliner: 5 tons.

     The kinetic energy released by the impact alone comes to about 560 million joules: roughly the explosive energy of 200 pounds of TNT. That's equivalent to about 133 million calories of heat, which is enough to turn over a ton of ice to steam -- instantly.

     But it wasn't principally the impacts that brought down the Twin Towers. Had that been the case, they would have fallen sooner after they were struck. The killing blow was the heat transfer from the immense quantities of burning jet fuel, a highly energetic substance.

     Jet fuel is engineered to burn safely, and relatively slowly. A tremendous amount of thought and labor has gone into making it as safe as something that potent can possibly be made. And indeed, on Black Tuesday two years ago today, we watched it burn for nearly an hour before Two World Trade Center surrendered to its fury.

     I won't bore you with the calculations about the energy released by the burning fuel. My rough estimate is that each airliner's fuel load contributed another 4 billion joules, or roughly 1 billion calories of heat, to the twin infernos in lower Manhattan. Thus, after impact, each building absorbed enough heat to flash ten tons of ice instantly into steam, over the course of about an hour. And of course, that doesn't count the heat released by burning materials from the Towers themselves

     The support webs that radiated from the spines of the Twin Towers could not possibly have withstood such a conflagration. No building built to office standards could have done so.

---

     On board those two airliners were many innocent passengers. No doubt they were filled with apprehension from the start of the hijacking, but they probably assumed it was just another attempt to extort ransoms or political concessions from Washington. They could not possibly have imagined the fate they would meet, until the profiles of the Twin Towers swelled in the aircraft's windows.

     Imagine being one of those doomed passengers, peering through the window at the looming Manhattan skyline. What would you have felt? Rage? Terror? Regret? How much time would you have had, between the realization of what was to happen and the conclusion of your life, for any reaction to form in your mind? Perhaps not enough to register anything beyond a general bafflement. The last mile of that fatal flight would have occupied only ten seconds or so, during which full comprehension of what was to come would likely have eluded you.

     Had anyone been looking back through the window at you, he probably would have seen only a puzzled frown.

     Did any of the occupants of the Towers look out their windows and see the planes approaching? I have no idea. But if they did, if they saw anything the human mind could make sense of, they must have shared the passengers' incomprehension. Their faces would have reflected the same look of puzzlement tinged with disbelief.

     The hijackers, of course, knew what was to come. They'd indulged in extended debauches in the weeks before, reaping a last crop of earthly pleasures before embarking on their trip to Hell. Yet even they must have felt some fear of the end they'd chosen. So hot was their rage against a society that had rejected their murderous Islamic creed yet towered so high above their miserable stature that they couldn't dream of equalling its least achievements, that the only expression we can paint onto their faces in imaginative retrospect is a snarl of hatred.

---

     The most painful faces to picture are those of the three thousand men and women who fell with the Towers.

     To the end they must have struggled to nurture a thread of hope. There were firemen and policemen moving heaven and earth to save them. There were more emergency vehicles in sight than had ever massed in a body on Manhattan's streets. There were thousands of onlookers, all of them wishing and praying for the firemen's success at quenching the blazes and retrieving those who were trapped above.

     None of it availed.

     What must have started as shock turned quickly to fear, then to determination to survive. As the minutes ticked by, and the hope of rescue faded, some of those faces must have cracked into terminal terror, while others set into lines of resignation, acceptance, and the resolve to die well.

     Some chose the embrace of gravity, forced open the windows, and leaped to their deaths. Others fell to the searing heat and choking fumes. The last victims were crushed by the Towers themselves, as their integrity failed in a textbook "pancake" collapse, the floors above destroying those below them as they fell.

---

     About one group of faces I can speak with authority. I have no need to imagine them.

     I was in the World Trade Center for the last time in early June, for a job interview with Cantor Fitzgerald. The personnel officer who greeted me ushered me into his 103rd floor office, and smiled as I gawked at the Hudson River view through his picture window. His expression was benevolent, if a trifle amused. It said they all do that, and required no interpretation.

     His name was Scott. He was an uncommonly nice fellow with a sunny, open face, a fine, enthusiastic salesman for the virtues of his employer. He was one of the three thousand who died on Black Tuesday.

     In a sense, I watched him die, for I watched the disaster as it accelerated. I saw the second plane hit Two World Trade Center, after which it was certain that we were witnessing a terrorist attack. Given the target, there was no doubt where the blame should fall. When One World Trade Center collapsed, I thought of Scott, and the other Cantor employees with whom I'd interviewed three months earlier, and I wept.

     I spent the remainder of the day in a state better imagined than described. Suffice it to say that the whole Islamic world was supremely fortunate that Fran Porretto was not the Commander-In-Chief of America's armed forces on Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

     All the others with whom I had the good fortune to keep company that day were of the same mind. The universal sentiment among them was that mere death would be infinitely too good for those who had done this to their fellow citizens, their neighbors, their brethren and friends. You didn't have to ask them to know it. It shone from their faces like a nuclear flash, only much more sustained.

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     Other faces have become prominent in the days since then, most notably Osama bin Laden, architect of the atrocity and mastermind-financier of al-Qaeda, Islam's world-girdling terror network, and George W. Bush, whose job it was to hunt bin Laden down. Many others, some already well known and some rising from obscurity on the wings of calamity, have entered our national panorama to contribute to what's been inaccurately called the War on Terror.

     We do not make war on terror. We make war on those who seek to inflict it. To call them "terrorists" is to assign them an intention, not an identity. To pursue them and visit our wrath upon them, we must know who they are -- the thing they most ardently hope to conceal from us.

     We must learn all their names and faces.

     There is no doubt that we will prevail. Islam's terrorists are puny men, drawn from a failed race and devoted to a failed ideology. They couldn't have harmed us at all without first stealing four civilian airliners with which to do it. Against the will and power of the United States, they have no chance at all. To dedicate ourselves to their pursuit and destruction is the ultimate tribute to those whose lives they took, the most fitting remembrance we the living could give them.

     What a fulfillment it will be when we can assemble a complete collection of faces for our national hall of infamy -- the terrorists, their planners, their financiers, their state sponsors, and every miserable creature on Earth who ever gave them sustenance or encouragement -- and annotate each one with the single word:

DECEASED

     Never forget.

Threats Impel Decentralization

     The terrorist attack on the Berlin Christmas market has revived, at least for the moment, Europeans’ consciousness of their insecurity – and at least as important, European public officials’ consciousness of the rising tide of resentment their subjects feel toward them. However, if there’s been significant motion among those politicians toward genuinely greater security against the Islamic threat – and let’s not mince words on the feast day of St. Stephen, the first recorded martyr to the Christian faith – I haven’t been able to detect it. To this point, only a few dabs of cosmetic rhetoric have been applied to the scowling face of private European sentiment.

     Frankly, I don’t expect much more than that from Europe’s political elite. The European ruling class is like the American one, except more so:

• Its members arrogate even more power and privilege to themselves;
• They’re even more disdainful of the rights and prerogatives of private Europeans;
• And they’re twice as unlikely ever to admit a mistake, much less to make amends for it.

     So my prediction for the near-term future of Europe is that nothing substantive will change. There’ll be more rhetoric about the problem. There’ll also be an enhanced degree of both self-exculpation and finger pointing to go along with it. But with very few exceptions – Hungary appears to be one – the rulers of Europe’s nation-states will not act to stem the Islamic invasion of their realm, much less to expel those who are already inside the gates.

     The consequences that must follow will involve sharp reductions in Europeans’ willingness to participate in large gatherings. Despite attempts to render them visibly more secure, the Christmas markets have already suffered a decrease in patronage. I would expect other public gatherings – e.g., sporting events, political rallies, and the use of large shopping malls – to be similarly affected.

     For once, Europe will be the trend leader, though in time America will surely follow.

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     Unless forcibly prevented from doing so, people respond to changes in their environments. The change introduced by Eurocrat foolishness about the Islamic influx evoked the aforementioned reduction in European participation in mass gatherings. That change will evoke further changes: to the ways Europeans work, play, and socialize.

     We may confidently expect that technology will play a part. Of course, in one way it already has: the Internet has changed the ways in which private persons worldwide communicate. We don’t send physical mail nearly as often as we once did. Neither do we spend as much time on the telephone...even though ubiquitous cell phones and cheap voice communication have been around for some time already. But more is surely coming.

     Consider the business meeting. Meetings among persons normally widely separated in space are steadily trending downward in favor of teleconferences that involve no travel. The advantages here are many, and businesses worldwide have been quick to exploit them. But until recently, there’s been little reason to replace meetings by persons who normally work on the same campus (or in the same building) with teleconferences. I predict that the drive toward reducing the frequency and size of concentrations of persons that might attract a terrorist attack will be felt there, quite soon.

     The need to congregate for work of various kinds will be less tractable, though the problems are not insuperable. Repetitive assembly-line jobs are steadily being taken over by robots; some of those that demand a human operator can be performed by a teleoperator manipulating a group of waldoes. Now that fear has been added to persons’ disincentives to commuting, we may expect these developments to accelerate.

     Capital costs and allocations will have their effects. Over the past few decades, people have become ever more expensive while inanimate capital of most sorts has become less so. Companies that contemplate expansion or large-scale renovation will look ever more favorably on approaches that prefer the inanimate to the animate: more machines and fewer (but smarter and more versatile) workers. The political impact will be considerable, but then, much of the increased cost of human workers can be blamed on political interference in the labor market.

     It’s likely that I’ve only scratched the surface here.

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     The above developments will cut into the supply of terrorist targets over time. However, we cannot expect that terrorists, who have as much interest in perpetuating their influence as anyone, will retire peacefully from the field. They, too, will change their ways.

     A determined terrorist that can’t attack people with bullets or explosives will seek other ways of harming them. He’ll explore biological methods: poisons, gases, and microorganisms. If he can, he’ll attack the food supply of his intended victims. Populations that get their water from centralized sources will remain vulnerable to him. And of course, we all get our air from a common source...at the present.

     Other forms of terrorism will become more significant. The possibility of attacks on our digitally controlled infrastructure has recently loomed large. The more of our underpinnings are held together by a common medium such as the Internet, the more havoc a clever cyberattack could conceivably wreak. Persons who’ve surrendered to the lure of the Internet of Things already have reason to fear this.

     Further decentralizations, or efforts toward them, will arise. Instead of a single Internet with billions of persons and devices on it. I predict that multiple digital mass communication paths will emerge. Some will specialize in financial transactions. Some will specialize in automation and numerical control. Others will support person-to-person communications or meetings. Where gateways from network to network are created, security will be the foremost consideration, as such linkage points would themselves be tempting targets.

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     There will be peripheral consequences that no one will like. The costs of these developments will be significant; to the extent that they involve governments, they’ll be extortionate. We’ll see each other in person much less often; we’ll take less pleasure from our gatherings, especially those that involve hundreds or thousands. The capital retrenchments I foresee will displace workers, especially those with the lowest and least transferrable skills. And regardless of political developments, we’ll all feel a little less free.

     Not a pleasant outlook for the immediate future, is it? But this is the crop we’ve reaped by permitting the civilization of the First World to be penetrated by that of Islam. It should never have happened; indeed, it should never have been allowed. You cannot treat the gentleman and the savage as equals without ugly consequences.

     Perhaps as the rigors of advancing decentralization begin to chafe us and confine us ever more straitly, we’ll unlearn the folly of multiculturalism on which all the more obviously destructive follies are founded. We can only hope it will not be “a lesson too late for the learning.”

Quickies: Trouble In Paradise?

     I could say a thousand highly critical things about the Dishonorable Charles Schumer (D, NY), but I must give him this: he does fight for New York when the occasion demands it:

     Sen. Charles Schumer is slamming a White House proposal that would reduce funding for counterterrorism programs across the country by nearly $300 million....

     Schumer notes that the cuts to the Urban Area Security Initiative were included in the proposed 2017 budget released last week by the White House. The initiative helps fund programs in cities across the U.S. to prevent extremist attacks, or respond to and recover from them. The proposed budget would cut the funding from $600 million to $330 million.

     "These proposed cuts are ill-advised and ill-timed and they must be reversed. End of story," Schumer said in a statement to The Associated Press. "In light of recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and the vow by our extremist enemies to launch more attacks on our shores, it makes no sense to propose cuts to vital terror-prevention programs like UASI."...

     "New York City remains terror target number one and the NYPD relies on these programs to keep us safe," he said.

     Yes, Schumer’s an unprincipled, self-aggrandizing whore, but he’s right about New York City being the terrorists’ #1 target. If anti-terrorism efforts are to receive federal funding – there are good arguments on both sides of the question, but this is not the time nor the place for them – then the Big Apple should remain at the top of the list.

     (Not to mention that it’s just plain refreshing to see a top Senate Democrat lash into The Won. It doesn’t happen nearly often enough.)

Make Obama Furious

     ...by circulating the following video:

     Few American politicians came out of 9/11 looking good. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was one – and what he has to say in the above should be disseminated far and wide.

     Giuliani made New York City a place whose residents could take pride in it once again. It was his desitny to oversee the city’s response to the Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Here he is with Mark Steyn, to remind us about the facts of that day, and other matters of the present that could prove equally weighty.

Quickies: There’s That “Security” Business Again

     If you thought I was kidding about “national security,” I suggest that you take a look at this easy-to-digest summary of The Won’s most recent TV appearance:

     [Obama] made yet another pitch for barring anyone on the no-fly list or terror watch list from purchasing firearms. He simply ignored any of the objections, whether it’s the lack of due process or judicial review, the arbitrary, foggy nature of how someone gets on the list, or the fact that 280,000 people with no recognized terrorist group affiliation are on the list.

     He ominously declared, “this is a matter of national security.” Yet for some reason, all of those people on the no-fly list and the terror watch list who allegedly represent a national-security threat aren’t being arrested. Earlier today Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at the Department of Homeland Security also “were on the terrorist watch list.”

     At this point in our national devolution, any time a politician invokes “national security” for his purposes, we should reach for our pitchforks and dip our torches in some fresh pig fat. There hasn’t been a single sincere use of that shibboleth since January 20, 2009...and damned few before that.

     The policy change that would most conduce to Americans’ security in any sense would be the complete repeal of every gun-control law – state or federal – and an absolute ban on any new ones. Likelihood? Somewhere between all the air collecting in one corner of the room and Angelina Jolie demanding to have my love child.

     Terrorism being a diffuse, decentralized threat, the only imaginable counter is a diffuse, decentralized defense: an armed populace. But don’t expect any politician to propose that; it would weaken the miasma of fear he and his ilk need to maintain control of us. No, what we’ll hear – and not exclusively from persons on the Left – will be garbage about “gun violence,” as if the little darlings could wander the streets reaping lives while their owners sleep.

     We have another year of this to suffer. Stay staunch.

Quickies: The Heart Of The Matter

     There’s been some comment from the FBI to the effect that the San Bernardino massacre “might” have been terrorism. It might surprise some Gentle Readers, but I don’t think so.

     I think this was jihad, pure and simple: the killing of the greatest possible number of “infidels.” Enhancing the sense of insecurity we feel was a secondary priority at most.

     The “very religious” Muslim couple who perpetrated these killings might have been ISIS or al-Qaeda affiliates, but at this time such a connection has not been made. But they were devout Muslims, and the Qur’an explicitly instructs Muslims to do what they did when the opportunity presents itself:

     Qur'an, Sura 8:12: "I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them."

     Qur'an, Sura 9:5: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem..."

     Qur'an, Sura 9:29: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, of the people of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued."

     Jihad is the religious obligation of any Muslim with the opportunity to strike a blow at Dar al-Harb. Syed Farook and his “wife” deemed themselves to have such an opportunity. They acted on it – and we should draw the appropriate lessons before any of their co-religionists do more of the same.

Human Arithmetic

     Ponder, if you will, the following snippet:

     If lawyers had had to approve our World War II target lists, we couldn’t have won. War is never clean or easy, and the strictures imposed on our military today just protect our enemies. Collateral damage and civilian casualties are part of combat and always will be. The most humane approach is to pile on fast and win decisively — which results in far less suffering than the sort of protracted agony we see in Syria.
     The generals who won World War II would start by leveling Raqqa, the ISIS caliphate’s capital. Civilians would die, but those remaining in Raqqa have embraced ISIS, as Germans did Hitler. The jihadis must be crushed. Start with their “Berlin.”
     Kill ten thousand, save a million.
     Unthinkable? Fine. We lose.

     [ Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters]

     In essence, this deems the civilians in Raqqa “human shields,” much like those Saddam Hussein hoped would defend him against the assault that ultimately toppled him. The lives of those used thus in Iraq might well have been lost in the invasion that followed. In deciding to strike anyway, President Bush had to accept that possibility. It was one of the things for which he was vilified in the aftermath, even though no “human shield” was killed in the course of the action.

     Colonel Peters has taken a comparable stance, though the numbers are higher. Is the approach he advocates “savage and conscienceless,” or is he merely being “realistic?” Have your reasons ready.

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     The problem of the “human shield” and what is licit in dealing with a villain that employs them is one that’s bedeviled philosophers and just-war theorists since humans began to treat with moral questions. No less a giant of moral philosophy than the late Robert Nozick, in his masterwork Anarchy, State, and Utopia, deferred the consideration of “innocent shields” and “innocent threats” to a subsequent discussion that would never arrive.

     Here is essence of the problem, set forth by the late, great Jack Vance, one of the profoundest thinkers ever to write speculative fiction:

     Xanten made an airy gesture. “A.G. Philidor, you oversimplify grievously. Do you consider me obtuse? There are many kinds of history. They interact. You emphasize morality. But the ultimate basis of morality is survival. What promotes survival is good; what induces mortifaction is bad.”
     “Well spoken!” declared Philidor. “But let me propound a parable. May a nation of a million beings destroy a creature who otherwise will infect all with a fatal disease? Yes, you will say. Once more: ten starving beasts hunt you, that they may eat. Will you kill them to save your life? Yes, you will say again, though here you destroy more than you save. Once more: a man inhabits a hut in a lonely valley. A hundred spaceships descend from the sky, and attempt to destroy him. May he destroy these ships in self-defense, even though he is one and they are a hundred thousand? Perhaps you will say yes. What, then, if a whole world, a whole race of beings, pits itself against this single man? May he kill all? What if the attackers are as human as himself? What if he were the creature of the first instance, who otherwise will infect a world with disease? You see, there is no area where a simple touchstone avails. We have searched and found none. Hence, at the risk of sinning against Survival, we—I, at least; I can only speak for myself—have chosen a morality which at least allows me calm. I kill—nothing. I destroy—nothing.”

     [From Vance’s Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella The Last Castle]

     The subject, sometimes called lifeboat ethics, is inherently fascinating. Though it thwarts all attempts to define an absolute, acontextual moral-ethical rule, it might well be the key to the survival of Mankind as our technology of construction and destruction advances.

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     Immediately after the terrorist siege on Paris New York City Commissioner of Police William Bratton provided his perspective:

     The city’s top cop called the terrorist attacks in Paris a “game changer” Sunday morning and said the NYPD is training to deal with a similar event.
     “The idea that every one of these people were apparently equipped with a suicide vest reinforces the idea that if they take hostages, you have to go in because they’re going to kill them,” NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said on ABC’s Eyewitness News.

     Bratton surely understands that both hostages and policemen would be numbered among the lives lost by acting immediately. In contrast, the French police hesitated to storm the garrisoned concert hall even as the terrorists were murdering them. By delaying their action, they reaped an outcome that was nearly as bad as if they’d done nothing at all. Why?

     There are several possible explanations. The most cynical of them would be that they regarded the lives of the concert-goers as less important than their own immunity to subsequent condemnation should their attack “go wrong.” Sadly, given our Pollyannaish notions about negotiating with Islamic terrorists and the degenerate state of our conceptions of “justice,” this is more plausible than most of the alternatives.

     Bratton’s predisposition to action is predicated upon an assumption that’s proved accurate in terrorist actions to date: that the terrorists are prepared to die as long as they can take a satisfying number of lives in the process. In such a scenario, the innocents taken as “hostages” aren’t really hostages at all; they’re victims-to-be whose deaths have been deferred in the hope of adding to their number. The only constructive thing you can do when faced with such a situation is charge into it, praying that by doing so you can save some of the endangered innocents.

     The Israelis have acted on that assumption since Entebbe. Three “hostages” died in that raid, but dozens of others were saved. It’s unlikely that any better outcome was possible.

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     The arithmetic approach to terrorism and similar phenomena is confounded by a premise that’s built into us at a very deep level:

     How often have you seen a headline like this? — TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
     Poor arithmetic...but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.
     Weakness? It might be the unique strength that wins us a Galaxy.

     [Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers]

     No one’s ever said it better than RAH. It’s reinforced by the existence of our all-volunteer military: a force unmatched in potency anywhere, staffed entirely by men and women who know their service could require the sacrifice of their lives. That prospect can hardly be equated to the prospect of post-enlistment college-tuition benefits.

     Chesterton and others have noted that “a rational army would run away.” So also would a rational policeman. Yet we have both before us. So also do we have evil before us: Islamic terrorists willing to kill without limit, and willing to die in the act, if by doing so they can terrorize us into submitting to their madness.

     No arithmetic reckoning can encompass either of those attitudes. No, they’re not unanimous among men. But they’re real and critically important to the human condition in this Year of Our Lord 2015.

     Colonel Peters might not have the right of it in one particular:

     Civilians would die, but those remaining in Raqqa have embraced ISIS, as Germans did Hitler.

     Some of those civilians might be unwillingly bound in place, as were Saddam Hussein’s “guests against their will.” The greater question is whether a lawyerly approach to the campaign against ISIS, and by extension against all Islamic lunacies, would shed even greater amounts of presumptively innocent blood.

     Food for thought.

Quickies: Unexpectedly, Or Inevitably?

     Last night’s terrorist attacks in Paris were perpetrated by an organized team of Muslims, most of whom shouted Allahu Akhbar! as they slew. Given Europe’s trajectory over the past forty years, this was not unexpected in any significant sense. No, the moment of the attack could not be predicted, but the attack itself was inevitable...as are many more such. They will redden the streets of Europe until one of two responses occurs:

• Europe surrenders to Islam and the Caliphate-a-borning; or:
• The Europeans strap on their spines and eliminate Islam from their continent.

     One more thing is inevitable. Watch for it in your morning news feed. Barack Hussein Obama will take to the airwaves to instruct us all that the attack “had nothing to do with Islam.” The preparatory steps are already being taken by the Main Stream Media. There’s no safer bet except perhaps for death and taxes – and while Washington can’t currently make death worse year after year, I’m sure someone in the alphabet agencies is working on it.

     Remember that you read it here first. For my part, I'm going to pray. Back later, I hope.

A Most Significant “Gaffe”

Has everyone finally recovered from his New Year’s Eve revel? Good. Here’s the choicest plum of the day:

A Muslim cleric who preaches from certain passages of the Koran could be caught in the “broad” net of the government’s new anti-terror law, Islamic leaders have warned.

Grand Mufti of Australia Ibrahim Abu Mohammad and the Australian National Imams Council have called for the offence of “advocating terrorism” to be removed from the so-called Foreign Fighters Bill, currently before Parliament.

Wait: haven’t we been told repeatedly that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are “moderates” who abhor terrorism just as much as any Christian? Then why...oh, I see:

It is documented the al-Qaeda handlers of the 9/11 suicide pilots had urged them to dwell on passages in the Koran in which God promises to "cast terror into the hearts of those who are bent on denying the truth; strike, then, their necks!"...

In its submission, the Islamic Council of Victoria said the new law would incriminate Muslims who support "legitimate forms of armed struggle", including resistance to the Assad regime in Syria and the Palestinian conflict with Israel....

"Criminalising the act of 'advocating terrorism' adds another layer of complexity to this issue. The scope of what constitutes 'advocating terrorism' is unclear."

The council identified what it says is a double standard in Muslims wanting to go to Syria and Iraq to provide aid having their passports cancelled "while ignoring the travel of Zionist Jews wishing to travel to Israel – a state which illegally occupies Palestinian territory with intention of fighting in a war against Gazans and has been accused of war crimes".

So when Muslims commit violence intended to terrorize others into submitting to Islam and Islamic prescriptions, it’s not terrorism, eh? But when an American Jew travels to Israel, perhaps merely as a tourist, that’s terrorism!

This is a classic gaffe in the Kinsleyan sense: “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” It’s not quite as blatant as it might have been but it’s close enough to the American standard for such things, which casts a wide and “tolerant” embrace.

Applause to Keith at Crusader Rabbit for the link.

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine comments thus:

They have a point. It’s just usually one that they aren’t willing to admit in public. The Jihad comes from the Koran. Every act of Muslim violence that is religiously sanctioned, from terrorism to rape, is derived from the Koran. If you ban incitement to violence against non-Muslims, you criminalize the Koran.

No quantity of varnish can conceal the essential facts, which appear in every copy of the Koran every printed: Islam is a violent, irrational creed designed to seduce a violent, unthinking people. It is terroristic to its core. But style such a creed a “religion” and suddenly the whole schtick about “religious freedom” and “tolerance” comes into play. Imagine what Hitler could have achieved in America had he insisted that Nazism is a religion!

There’s a reason why the majority of converts to Islam in America come from our prisons…but no one wants to think about that for very long either, do they?

A moment, please. I need more coffee.

---

One of the factors that make it possible for Muslims to propagate the lie that “Islam is a religion of peace” is the general unawareness of the chronological development of the Koran over the course of Muhammad’s life. The suras are not arranged in chronological order, but in order of their length. That conceals the time spans and correlated events that distinguish the suras from the earlier “Meccan” period, before Muhammad added violence and conversion by the sword to his “religion,” from the later “Medinan” period, when he prescribed all manner of violence, fraud, and intimidation as acceptable – even mandatory – methods for enlarging dar al Islam. Nor are Muslims happy to discuss the Islamic doctrine of naskh or abrogation, under which the later suras supersede and nullify the earlier, more tolerant ones.

The great irony here is that according to Islamic doctrine, the Koran is the perfect and inerrant word of Allah himself, has existed throughout all of time, and is not to be interpreted by human agencies! Yet it contradicts itself in more than a hundred places, and invokes naskh to do so:

"We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth [one] better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?"- Koran, Sura 2, verse 106

The naive Westerner who reads an English-language translation of the Koran is all too easily made to overlook those contradictions. Helpful imams will rationalize them away, or steer the reader’s attention in some other direction, never, ever allowing the subject of the hegira and its effects upon Muhammad’s attitudes to come into the discussion.

You cannot get a Muslim to admit that the Koran sanctifies the enslavement of non-Muslims.

You cannot get him to admit that it says that lying to a non-Muslim, or breaking one’s promises to a non-Muslim, is acceptable.

You cannot get him to allow that sharia law, the political component of Islam, decrees adultery and homosexuality to be capital crimes.

You cannot get him to admit that Islam declares women to be too inferior to men to give trustworthy testimony before a court – or that four male Muslim eyewitnesses to the act are required to sustain a charge of rape.

You cannot get him to admit that murderous violence committed by a Muslim who shouts ”Allahu Akhbar!” as he kills has any slightest connection to the Koran, to Islam, or to the goals of the worldwide Islamic movement.

That “tolerant, peaceable” Muslim neighbor of yours? The one you keep referring to whenever your “Islam means peace” notions are challenged by someone like me? How does he treat his wife and children? Where do his “charitable contributions” go? What do you know about the mosque he attends and what’s preached there? Just how certain are you, should a jihadist demand his assistance in some violent campaign, that he would staunchly refuse it, despite the peril to him and his family?

And just how certain are you, should he and his co-religionists come to be as numerous here in America as they are in Britain or France, that their aggregate behavior and influence on American society would remain as “tolerant” and “peaceable” as he seems today?

Just a few warm, fuzzy, supremely “tolerant” thoughts to kick off the New Year.

Thoughts On Torture

"If hooking up one rag-head terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying little camel shagger will save just one Canadian life, then I have only three things to say: Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet.” – Don Cherry, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commentator and retired head coach of the Boston Bruins

Given the appearance of the Feinstein-led Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee report just this week, it occurred to me that a few words about torture, in both its historical and contemporary guises, might be appropriate.

The various “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA and condemned by the Feinstein report skate an uneven surface, historically. They were certainly meant to cause fear and suffering. They were certainly not meant to permanently injure nor kill the victim. In that regard, they were a far cry from torture as practiced by other cultures and times. But then, our culture is a far cry from those others: it concedes certain matters of principle as being beyond rational dispute.

The point of torture isn’t always interrogation. Sometimes the point is to demonstrate to the honoree’s comrades what could happen to them: i.e., pour encourager les autres. And sometimes – especially in the case of many historical instances of torture – the point is merely to enjoy another person’s suffering and degradation.

The American agents who employed those techniques appear to have been interested solely in information extraction. However, were the techniques deemed licit for continued use, the resulting dynamic would attract genuine sadists to such positions: persons who care only about the pain and terror they can cause. Thus, it was probably for the best that, once the immediate crisis was comfortably behind us, such techniques were ruled to be beyond the pale.

However, the striking contrast between the context of the CIA’s coercive interrogations and the historical use of those (and much worse) techniques should remind us of something:

Quite a lot of persons were eager to do the same and worse to every last American.

---

“Savages have no rights.” – Ayn Rand

Savages torture. Indeed, they maim, mutilate, and kill without moral scruple. Their ignorance and / or dismissal of individuals’ rights is the defining characteristic that sets them apart from civilized men.

They who have chosen to make war against us – against all of us, not merely our government or our military – are savages by that definition. As they grant us no rights, they cannot claim any rights. That frees me of any conscience qualms about what our forces might find it productive or expedient to do to “Islamic fighters” who’ve strained with all their might and cunning to kill us.

Sometimes it’s a good thing for Americans to be reminded of just how high a civilization we’ve built and inhabit. But such a reminder is nearly always by contrast with another, less advanced culture. In the Islamic movement of today, we confront a culture that’s willfully adopted norms 1400 years behind those of the First World, in obedience to the most vicious totalitarian creed ever circulated among men.

Yes, I meant that last sentence exactly as it sounds. Not even the Nazis or the Communists can equal the barbarism and bloodthirstiness of Islam. Those other totalitarianisms were at least animated by a positive-seeming goal. Islam’s goal is exactly and only the reduction of Mankind to uniform seventh-century squalor in submission to an imaginary god opposed to all freedom and temporal happiness.

Islam meets the definition of savagery in all particulars, without qualification.

---

It is often the case that a fictional character will say what a real man would never dare to express, no matter how ardently he might believe it:

    Souhi watched, ashen, as the crew was laid out on the deck. Many of them were dead and others were screaming in madness, trussed up with duct tape.
    “So,” the man who appeared to be the leader said, walking over to him, “I have a few questions.”
    “Go fuck a goat,” Souhi said, spitting at him. “What are you going to do? Send me to Guantanamo? I sleep, I eat, I wait for your Amnesty International and ACLU to free me so I can kill you like the goat dick sucker you are.”
    “No, I’m not going to send you to Guantanamo. Those poor boys and girls have enough dickheads to deal with including, yes, the ICRC, AI, and ACLU. Are you the diver or the assistant driver?” he asked, turning to Kahf.
    “You are a man who licks the cocks of camels,” Kahf said.
    “Oh, wrong answer,” the man said, drawing his sidearm and putting a bullet through the diver’s brain. “Oleg, got your first customer.”
    A winch was lowered down and Kahf’s feet secured to the winch. Then the diver was lifted up and lowered over the side.
    As that was happening, the dead crew were being lifted up, their feet secured to ropes, and then dropped over the side to rest in the water. A spotlight was turned on and two large men lifted Souhi up so he was forced to look at the water.
    “The sharks around here are notorious,” the man said, smiling. “Let’s see how long it takes one to turn up.”
    ...
    “Wanna talk?” he asked mildly. “Let me tell you something, you Islamic fuck. A woman I dearly loved was killed by your kind about two months ago. I can’t really be said to be over that. Now, I dearly want to add you to the frenzy, just push you over the fucking side and be done with it. But, as I said, I won’t kill you. If you tell me the coordinates. If you tell me now, you can leave this ship with all your limbs intact. But when I tell them to lift you up, you are going into the water. So you want to tell me? Come on, it’s just a few numbers. I know you know them. You’ve got them memorized. You punch them in and erase the track after you’ve done the pickup.”
    “No,” the driver said, whimpering.
    “God, you people are sooo stupid.” He straightened up and gestured.
    “Please!” the driver said as he was lifted into the air. “You cannot do this to me!”
    “Did I listen to any of the rest of them?” Mike asked as the driver was lowered over the side. “Do you listen to the pleas of your victims? To the men whose throats you cut? To the little girls that get raped for the sins of their brothers? Do you care for those you’re starving to death in the Sudan? Did you listen to the pleas of the pilots you dragged through the streets of Mogadishu? Did you jump for joy when the Towers fell? Did you, YOU CAMEL-SUCKING FUCK?”

That’s as good a statement of the rationale for torturing terrorists as I’ve encountered anywhere.

Note that “Souhi” was beyond any rational dispute a terrorist. He had just been captured while attempting to deliver a weapon of mass destruction – nerve gas – to the U.S. mainland, where it would be used by other Muslim terrorists to perpetrate a mass slaughter. He had no claim to any right a civilized man might invoke, having forfeited all his rights when he elected to participate in such a heinous program.

With the lives of unimaginable numbers of innocents at stake, would you hesitate to torture such a man for the information in his head?

---

Islam and its adherents aren’t the only such monsters in the world today. There are others, driven by other ideologies, that would deal death to innocent Americans with equal ruthlessness:

    "Your certainty is impressive," Ryan said. "It allows you to justify your faith in mass murder."
"It's not murder," she said, "when the violence is justified by the revolution. The bourgeois regime being attacked is criminal and inhuman and all who are obedient to it are complicit in its interminable violence. In acts of revolutionary violence against the enemy anyone complicit with the enemy who is killed is guilty of the crime of the enemy. It is not murder."
    "So riding a subway train to work," Ryan said, "is a criminal act punishable by death?"
    "When seen in its true historical context, it certainly is," she said confidently.
    "Everyone on the subway is equally guilty," Ryan suggested.
    "No, not if you go person by person, a maid or janitor is not carrying the same level of guilt as a stockbroker or corporate executive, but revolutionary violence sweeps with an inclusive broom. The statement it makes is bold and absolute and is a warning to all...."
    "And what do you believe in, soldier boy? Gawd?"
    "In the individual and his liberty," Ryan said, rising to the bait."
    "Oh dear, an American. You people are so charming, so quaint," she said, "always the perpetual football players running onto the field to the roar of the crowd and the bouncing breasts of the cheerleaders."
    "You're an American, aren't you, Ms. Garvin?" he asked.
    "Ah, no," she said. "I stopped thinking of myself as that, as an American when I was a teenager. That's what we call 'the normal maturation process' these days, soldier boy. Sorry you missed it."
    "So you're not an American," Ryan said. "What are you?"
    "I'm a citizen of the world," she said.
    "That's a big concept," Ryan said.
    "It's basic," she said. "You must have missed it while you were attending your ROTC meetings."
    "I guess I did," Ryan said. "That would explain why I'm still just an American with a silly belief in freedom."
    Garvin laughed.
    "Freedom? You think this America is free? You've got ninety percent of the people glued to their couches gazing like zombies into their televisions and eating non-stop. And then they jump off their couches for five minutes of history when a couple of tall buildings are knocked down in New York. That's the America I see. That's the America the revolution sees. This freedom thing you believe in, soldier boy, is a fairy tale, just like Gawd. History is unfolding right before your eyes and you're running in the opposite direction after the fairies of freedom and the goblins of terrorism. You should run in the direction of revolutionary violence, all of you should, get out in front of it, get off this America thing, because it is dead, a thing of the past. America no longer exists. You just haven't realized it. None of you have....
    "What you people refuse to understand," Garvin said, jumping into the silence that had fallen over the room, "is that this freedom of yours is no more than pitiful self-indulgence at the expense of others. What the revolution does is take the anger and frustration of those who hunger for justice in the world and shape that into purposeful violence. You try to deny that by calling it 'senseless violence' and "mass murder,' but I'm looking at your faces now and I can see those old defenses and the lies that support them draining out of you. You all look like children who have just been told that there is no Santa Claus, and you had really known that all along. You just needed an adult to make it official for you. Well, here I am, kids, giving it to you straight, what you already knew."

[From Martin McPhillips’s extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor.]

Other ideologies have, of course, demoted persons opposed to them to subhuman, rightless status. In every such case, the inevitable consequence is open, bloody warfare. The rules of war as civilized nations have codified them in the Geneva Conventions are of no interest to such ideologies. In their worldview, much like that of Islam, there are no rights and no noncombatants.

Were you to capture an Allison Garvin, knowing that she was a participant in a plot to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major American city, would you hesitate to torture her for whatever strategic or tactical information she might possess?

---

The efficacy of torture is questionable. There have been documented cases of men confessing to crimes they had never committed simply to get the torture to cease...and torturers aware of that possibility who resolved to continue on to the point of death. But that goes to the utility of torture rather than whether it’s ever morally justified.

When you know...
...that the person you hold is beyond doubt a terrorist...
...that he’s complicit in an ongoing plot to commit mass murder...
...that he would do whatever he pleased to you were your statuses reversed...
...and that he would derive both enjoyment and satisfaction from watching you suffer and plead...

...would you hesitate to torture him for whatever shreds of useful information he might possess?

I wouldn’t.

Think about it.

Quickies: "Racism" With A Side Of Semtex

Have a gander at this:

The State Department yielded to pressure from a coalition of Seattle and Washington state politicians, community groups, and advocacy organizations and agreed to withdraw at least one ad in the department’s Metro bus ad campaign in Seattle promoting the “Rewards for Justice” campaign. The program pays rewards to individuals who provide leads about the location of wanted terrorists.

Congressman Jim McDermott, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn, and King county councilmember Rod Dembowski joined forces with others in the community, as well as organizations like the ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), to raise concerns about the ads. Mayor McGinn reported at least some success in their efforts [emphasis added]:

[Arsalan] Bukhari [of the Council on American-Islamic Relations] worked with the ACLU of Washington State to convene a meeting that included Magdaleno Rose-Avila and Sahar Fathi of our Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. After a productive meeting, the lead investigator for the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program, Tim Corso, acknowledged our concerns with the ad that featured the language “Global Faces of Terrorism” along with photos of men from the Philippines, Somalia, Russia, Sudan and Algeria. He has agreed to take down this particular ad and to work with community advocates in doing outreach in Seattle going forward.

I take Ann Coulter's position: When 100% of the perpetrators match the "profile," it's no longer a "profile" but a description of the suspect. I know of only one white American terrorist whose acts have marred these shores: Timothy McVeigh of the Murragh Building bombing. All the others have been Muslim men -- either Middle-Eastern-swarthy or black.

But then, if it were otherwise, CAIR would not be up in arms about these ads. The facts would be well known as they are now...and they would speak for themselves.

It puts me in mind of the old gag about the beat cop on the night shift who comes across a drunk under a lamppost. The drunk is running his hands through the grass as the cop approaches.

Cop: Why are you doing that, sir?
Drunk: I dropped my keys over there (points to a spot about fifty feet away) and I'm looking for them.

Cop: But if you dropped them over there, why are you over here?
Drunk: The light's better over here.

We won't "find our keys" under the lamppost, and the Muslim mouthpiece groups know it.

Beware.

The Boston Marathon Bombings

There have now been three "uncontrolled" explosions. The most recent was near the front of the JFK Memorial Library.

Ball bearings have been found near the explosion sites.

According to scattered reports, the Boston police already have a suspect in custody: A Saudi national, estimated to be about 20 years old, who was seen running away from the bombing area before the explosions occurred.

Terrorism. At least two fatalities. Many injuries, including the complete loss of limbs.

Is anyone still unconvinced that we cannot share a planet with these savages?

Oh, by the way, a CNN commentator has suggested that "right wing extremists" might have been behind the bombings.

Words fail me.