Donklephant points to an ABC report of four "unemployed civil or chemical engineers" who have been arrested by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Newark, NJ under interesting circumstances:
FBI and law enforcement officials told ABC News the five men — four illegal immigrants and one law enforcement fugitive — were arrested Sunday night following a tip to the Newark Police Department. In addition to the subway maps and video, the men had train schedules and $8,000 in $20 and $50 bills.
The four are "set to be deported," says the report, though it's not clear whether the deportation rule was standing before their arrest.
It's good that these men have been detained so that the authorities can discern if a plot was being formulated. If not, no foul. If so, we have averted another attack which should reinforce the notion that we're still a big target for jihadis.
Meanwhile, many are jumping on the scrum at the bottom of which sits Tom Tancredo. Congressman Tancredo, who has been making all sorts of enemies because of his tough talk about illegal immigration, has now angered just about everybody except maybe Osama bin Laden by suggesting that a nuclear attack on the United States by jihadists would result in the retaliatory nuking of sacred sites in Muslimdom (please, no epithets. I coin the phrase because, you know, I'm being sarcastic).
Horrors resounded throughout the media, the bloggers and radio, especially Hugh Hewitt, across whose mind, I gather, the glassing over of Mecca has never crossed. I can't speak for anybody but little ol' me but I'm willing to bet that there is a substantial population in America who would say (anonymously, for obvious reasons) that to consider the destruction of a "Muslim" city in response to a nuke attack on an American city isn't that far of a stretch.
By the way, why do Muslims get to have their own cities and countries? Okay, there are still those in the West who refer to Christendom, but no one really considers Washington, DC a Christian city. And even though Great Britain has a state church, the UK is not generally identified as exclusive Christian territory. Indeed, one would be hard put to name a Christian of Jewish site or city that has such important standing among believers that the very attack on it would anger Christians worldwide to fight against the Muslim hordes. But we're not just talking about any Muslim city; we're talking a Muslim holy city. Still even if the Vatican were leveled by a jihadist nuke, it's doubtful that Catholics worldwide would be likely to mobilize en masse. Why? Because we're civilized, that's why. Western citizens would require their governments and armies to do the requisite killing instead of taking the matter into our own hands.
And therein lies the ugly truth revolving around Tancredo's statement. The great ill-defined mass of Islam scares the living hell out of us. While the left and the right bicker over who is to blame for bad news from Iraq, the fact that the situation in Iraq is confusing at best only adds to growing paranoid resentment, which then finds its outlet in apocalyptic scenarios from both the far left and far right.
Oddly, these scenarios are strikingly similar. They tend to end with some version of Muslim Global Caliphate. The difference is in how we get to the end point. The far left insists that the West has inflamed "the Muslim world" by treading on their property, killing and gasp! humiliating their people and insulting the Koran, and thus will receive the justifiable wrath of Islam and Allah. We're begging for it.
The far right expects the same terrible outcome, but places the blame on the heads of the media (for not reporting enough good news), the Democratic Party (for Dick Durbin) and Hollywood (for being way too easy a target). The thinking here is that all the jihadis are waiting for is the go-ahead from the DNC before pushing into Peoria.
Wrong and wrong. Islam may be undefinable to the western mind, but at least in my experience it isn't so clear in the minds of all Muslims, either. For instance, it's impossible to measure how many Muslims follow or practice taqqiyah, a kind of Islamic dialectic wherein the dhimmi is never allowed to know what is on the Muslim mind. In other words, institutionalized lying. As if we don't get enough of that already. But that isn't the point. Islam need not be defined, nor defended, nor vilified for a cataclysmic terror attack to occur.
On the surface, Tancredo's bellicosity sounds uncomfortably close to that of Chinese General Zhu Chenghu when he threatened the US with nukes, only it's not. The Chinese know that the American government would first take the safety of its citizens over Taiwan, so the threat stayed on the news for about twelve minutes. Where Tancredo makes his mistake is in assuming that announcing Mecca as a legitimate retaliatory target holds any sway over Islamist eschatology.
Where everybody else (and I mean everybody) stumbles is when we pretend to be shocked at Tancredo. If LA or DC or NYC were obliterated, you can bet that many of those now recoiling in horror at the mere suggestion would insist on a massive counter attack. So who's practicing taqqiyah now?
Crises require attention and demand to be dealt with. Pretending that everything is sweetness in Iraq only allows the conflict to fester. And admitting that there are some huge unanticipated problems is not a sign of weakness but resolve. Adversity requires strength and honesty from every one of us. Tancredo was wrong, but he was honest.
Those against the war should allow for the possibility that mistakes naturally happen and not use them as a cudgel. Those for the war should acknowledge that events aren't exactly always going our way all the time and not try to hide that fact under recrimination.
If those men now arrested in Jersey turn out to have been plotting an attack, they will be among the many who watch us argue among ourselves, laugh and then get down to the business of killing.
See Desperate Situations and The Suicide Strategy.
Posted by: pbswatcher | July 27, 2005 at 06:51 PM