By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 13, 2016
One of the great problems we face in our ongoing
confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism is that our enemies are rational and
we are not.
It is a mistake — one that we insist on repeating — to
tell ourselves that the jihadists and ISIS groupies who perpetuate terrorist
spectaculars such as the attack on the Pulse nightclub outside Orlando are
irrational, that they are mentally disorganized lunatics of the familiar-enough
sort exemplified by Jared Lee Loughner and John Salvi, who may or may not
believe themselves to be acting in the service of a particular cause. (Salvi
was an abortion opponent who believed that a Vatican-based
currency-manipulation scheme was shaping world affairs, and who believed
himself to have been targeted by, among others, the Cosa Nostra and the
Freemasons. Loughner, too, was obsessed with a currency-manipulation
conspiracy.) Lunacy is not what we are seeing with domestic jihadists. What we
see instead is the pursuit of specific cultural and political ends through acts
of violence directed at symbolically important soft targets.
We speak of “lone wolf” jihadists as though this phenomenon
were somehow independent of the wider Islamist project. It is not. The model of
“leaderless resistance” in the service of terrorist projects is not new, and it
has not been employed by the Islamists at random. Leaderless resistance has
long been a part of the thinking of neo-Nazi groups such as Brüder Schweigen,
and the Islamists have had a great deal of opportunity to develop that approach
in various insurgencies around the world. Equally important, the emergence of
the Internet as a worldwide medium for political communication and cultural
expression has provided 21st-century terrorists with opportunities that were
far out of the reach of their mimeograph- and fax-dependent predecessors a
generation ago. If Omar Mateen turns out, as expected, to have had little or no
substantive contact with organized Islamist groups, that fact will demonstrate
the success of their communication strategy rather than the limitations of
their reach.
We must be honest with ourselves about the enemy and his
characteristics. He is not crazy. He has goals, and we know what they are and
how he goes about pursuing them.
None of this is exactly new: Neither the methods nor the
targets are unique to our time. It is worth remembering that the worst massacre
at a U.S. school did not happen in the Columbine era but in 1927, and that it
involved no firearms at all — a failed political candidate in Bath, Mich.,
murdered 38 schoolchildren and six adults (and injured 58 more) with explosives
as an act of revenge against the community that had rejected his candidacy.
There has never been a time at which people in the United States did not have
the means and the opportunity to commit these kinds of atrocities. What has
changed is that the world now has a substantial population of willing
terrorists: a small but by no means trivial share of the world’s Muslim
population.
The world’s Muslim population is not the United States’
Muslim population — and it need not be. As I have been arguing since well
before Donald Trump brought his reliably beef-witted approach to the question,
preventing Islamic terrorism should be a main focus of U.S. immigration and
visa policy. That need not mean a blanket ban on immigration and visas from
Islamic populations, but it will mean substantial restrictions and
extraordinary scrutiny. We should forthrightly acknowledge that the plain
conclusion to be drawn from the European experience is that if a Western
country does not already have a large, poorly assimilated Muslim minority
population, it would do well not to acquire one. To pretend that Islam is, at
this moment in history, just another faith to be absorbed into the general
American ethic, as though Muslim distinctiveness were no different from Amish
distinctiveness, is culpably sentimental. Mateen was a U.S.-born American
citizen with Afghan immigrant parents, and the reality is that this is a
different proposition from being a U.S.-born citizen of Irish Catholic
background, inasmuch as even at its height IRA terrorism was a minor concern
for the United States, though it was a major concern for our closest ally.
There are Hindu radicals in the world and violent Buddhists, but the United
States is not immediately concerned with them as a question of national
self-interest.
The usual miscreants are making the usual dumb claims
about U.S. gun law and the need for gun control, with such Hollywood luminaries
as Kirstie Alley demanding that government “ban sales of fully automatic assault
rifles to the general public,” which is more or less what the federal
government did in 1934, and which is immaterial to the question at hand,
inasmuch as no fully automatic weapon was used in Florida. The question of
background checks inevitably has come up. But consider this: Not only did
Mateen twice pass the standard federal background check (he had no criminal
convictions or any other prohibitory factor) but he was twice interviewed by
the FBI as a potential Islamic terrorist. Whatever it is that Hillary Rodham
Clinton or Barack Obama imagines in the way of background checks for members of
the general public purchasing ordinary firearms such as the ones Mateen used,
it is sure to be something quite a bit less involved than an active FBI investigation
of a suspected terrorist.
Which brings us to another consideration: As with the
case of the perpetrators of the homicidal violence that plagues so many
American cities, many terrorists and other perpetrators of mass killings are
people who are hardly unknown to our law-enforcement authorities. Mateen was on
the federal radar. Adam Lanza’s mental-health problems were no secret in his
community. More than 90 percent of those who commit murders in New York City
have prior criminal histories. The Fort Hood shooter was in contact with Anwar
al-Awlaki, and that fact was known to the FBI. These killers do not come out of
nowhere.
The habitual Democratic response to these episodes is to
demand that we restrict the legal rights of people who have not been charged
with, much less convicted of, a crime, which is constitutionally, legally,
morally, and politically impossible. Beyond that, we get speeches that sound
like they come from party functionaries in some cartoon version of a 1930s
totalitarian state: Mrs. Clinton promises that we shall “redouble our efforts!”
against terrorism, while President Obama vows that we shall “spare no effort!”
in our investigation of this atrocity. One half expects them to promise that
the wheat harvest will double under the five-year plan unless the wreckers and
hoarders sabotage our program.
The fact is that we are not redoubling any efforts, not
where it could really count: screening people who enter the country legally and
preventing illegal entries. Nor is it the case that we are not sparing any
effort: We have a national-security apparatus perfectly comfortable monitoring
basically all electronic communication, but we can’t put a tail on a guy the
FBI twice had reason to suspect of being involved in terrorism?
The fact is, the federal government does not take this
sort of thing very seriously at all. Consider the case of “default proceed”
firearms sales. Sometimes, the FBI cannot immediately clear or rule out a
would-be buyer going through a standard background check, and if the FBI can’t
make a decision within three days, the sale can proceed by default. In many
cases — 45,000 of them in 2000 — the government decides that the sale should
have been prohibited, in which case the ATF is responsible for recovering the
gun. In practice, that almost never happens: In the study of the 2000 data (the
most recent available), the ATF pursued recovery of only one in nine improperly
sold firearms.
This is of a piece with the priorities exemplified by the
federal prosecutor’s office responsible for Chicago, which has the opportunity
to prosecute hundreds of straw-buyer cases every year but as a general rule —
and as a matter of policy — refuses
to do so. Why? Because that’s a lot of work, and no ambitious prosecutor is
going to make a name for himself locking up the kid brothers and girlfriends of
Chicago gang members, just as nobody at ATF is going to get a promotion for
doing rote work, even if it’s the agency’s job to do it.
We will endure endless sanctimonious speeches about what
happened in Orlando, and the Obama administration will swear to us that it is
doing everything it can. That is a lie. It isn’t doing everything it can — not
by a long shot — and neither are the law-enforcement agencies in our cities and
states.
The Islamists aren’t crazy. They understand and exploit
our weaknesses, which include the inevitable vulnerabilities of an open,
liberal, and democratic society. They know what they want, and they pursue
those ends with the tools they have at their disposal. We cannot say as much
about those we entrust with protecting us from them.
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