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See this earlier post for thoughts on today’s terrorist attacks on London.
THERE’S A GOOD POSSIBILITY THAT THE LONDON TERRORISTS ARE ON TAPE:
London is crammed with closed-circuit television cameras _ 1,800 in its train stations, 6,000 in the Underground network and some on buses.
[Security analyst] Shoebridge said detectives will have to watch thousands of hours of tape _ slowly and carefully.
MAX BOOT HAS GREAT INSIGHTS ON ENDING POVERTY IN AFRICA. It’s not a matter of giving African nations more billions—we’re already doing that:
The solution being promoted by Live 8 is simple: Send beaucoup bucks. The anti-poverty campaigners are grouchy because the wealthy world spends only 0.25% of its gross national income on aid — a mere $76.8 billion last year. They want to nearly triple that, to 0.7% of GNI.
The United States, in particular, is castigated for its stingy development budget — only 0.16% of GNI. This obscures the fact that, in absolute terms, the U.S. government spends far more on foreign aid ($19 billion last year) than any other nation. And that’s only a small part of our total contribution. Thanks in part to our lower tax rates, Americans give far more to charity than do Europeans. If you include private-sector donations, the Hudson Institute finds, U.S. foreign aid totals $81 billion, or 0.68% of GNI — close to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. And that’s not counting the billions the U.S. spends to subsidize global security or the billions more it sends abroad as investment capital.
By any measure, the U.S. is extraordinarily generous, and President Bush is making us more generous still. He has already tripled development aid to Africa and plans to double it again.
it’s a matter of the economic policies of the impoverished nations:
In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans’ income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.
Misgovernment is oppressing these nations by robbing them rather than implementing the kinds of economic policies that have worked elsewhere:
Africans continue to be tormented not by the G-8, as anti-poverty campaigners imply, but by their own politicos, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is abetting genocide in Darfur, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is turning his once-prosperous country into a famine-plagued basket case. Unless it’s linked to specific “good governance” benchmarks (as with the new U.S. Millennium Challenge Account), more aid risks subsidizing dysfunctional regimes.
Read the whole thing—the last paragraph’s the kicker.
What I don’t yet see being widely commented on, is that this coordinated series of bombings, echoes a pattern that has recently developed in Iraq, in which multiple bombs are set off simultaneously. Those who made these attacks on London either learned from watching, or from carrying out, similar attacks in Iraq.
This is is an example of how our current approach to terrorism isn’t sufficiently effective.
By “our current approach,” I refer to our very odd experiment—previously unthinkable in human history—of considering “innocent” the civilian society that gave birth to those who kill our civilians, and refraining from attacking them directly. In all previous wars in human history, if a nation’s civilians were killed in large numbers by those of another nation, that was considered an act of war, and the attacked nation surrendered, paid ransom, or made war back on the attacking nation, including everybody in it, military or civilian. For example, in World War II, the Nazis and their allies bombed civilian cities, and the Allies responded by bombing Axis cities.
Many nations therefore refrained from killing civilians, instead attacking military personnel and targets, and in return the war was confined to soldiers. The French novelist Guy de Maupassant wrote many stories describing this, such as “Boule de Suif” and “Mother Sauvage” (see this excellent translation by Sian Miles. )
Never before in human history have nations said that they will do anything to spare the civilians that gave birth to the killers of their own women and children, even risking continued terrorist actions targeting the attacked nation’s own civilians. Since the terrorist actions do continue under such circumstances, as we are currently seeing in Israel, in Iraq, and today in London, this strategy isn’t sufficiently successful. It’s noble, but it lets things drag on too long.
In cultures that give rise to terrorists, the civilian society is calling out for terrorists to arise from among them and to go and murder the civilians of the targeted nation. There are many accounts of the Palestinians, for example, who are known for their terrorist attacks on Israel, celebrating terrorist attacks on Israel. Clearly this is a civilian society that celebrates the killing of civilians.
Therefore such civilian societies are in no way innocents, but are directly responsible for the existence of the terrorists, who are literally only doing what their friends and families want them to do. The terrorists are people, after all. And that’s what people do—they try to do something that their friends and families, and the civilian society in which they live, want. You can raise kids to be good, as usually happens in nations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or to be evil, as often happens in nations which give birth to terrorist killers of women and children.
While this seems self-evident to me, perhaps it does not seem so to others. If so, surely it could be easily studied via interviews with those who know terrorists. What were the ways in which a given terrorist was first exposed to Islamofascism?
Here’s an example, cited last Monday by Little Green Footballs. The wife of Al Qaeda member Al Majati, killed by the Saudis last April, states that he wasn’t an extremist until he met her. She wanted him to be an Islamofascist:
It wasn’t until my confrontation with the Institute after I decided to wear the veil, that Al Majati was introduced to religion. He asked me once, “Why did you put yourself through so much trouble?” I answered that it wasn’t me who created the problem adding, “This is a divine command which as a Muslim, should not disobey it”.
Al Majati didn’t speak Arabic very well. When I quoted verses about the veil from the verses of Al Nur and Al Ahzab, he couldn’t understand them. I then bought him a book as a gift, entitled “The Translation of Quranic Meanings” and he became convinced after reading the verses and their translations. Two days later, I saw him again and was surprised to see that his thinking had radically changed. He read the book and was touched by the word of God. I believe this was instinctive love, as God himself had planted it in his heart.
[...]
Q: When did your husband discover jihad?
A: Towards the end of 1991, we traveled to Paris for a month to attend an Islamic conference where representatives from various organizations had gathered, including Hamas and the Mujahedeen from Afghanistan . There were also members of the Al-Yarmouk team for Palestinian songs. We found the atmosphere amazing. It also became evident to us that Islam was not just a religion for Arabs.
Surely Al Majati was predisposed toward Islamofascism by those with whom he grew up as well.
Since in my view the civilian society is directly responsible for the very existence of the terrorists, taking the heart out of that society’s wish to kill us appears to me to be key to ending the conflict. The alternative is nothing less than the sacrifice of one’s own civilians, since, as we have seen today in London, targeting only terrorists permits the conflict to drag out interminably, for years and perhaps for decades, and during that time the terrorists go on killing one’s civilians.
Rather than suggesting mass destruction of civilians, I’m suggesting targeting some number of blocks of civilian residences surrounding terrorists who have recently murdered civilians. Societies supporting terrorist killings of civilians can easily be shown that so doing results in the loss of their own civilians, as has been the case in war throughout human history, until our current odd experiment, in risking the lives of our own civilians in order to avoid casualties to those civilians of other countries who are seeking our deaths. Once it has been shown that terrorism doesn’t work, it will be abandoned as a failed strategy.
As often—but not always—happens in the first hours after a terrorist attack, we do not yet have details on who did it, or the geographic location in which they live. But frequently that changes after a period of time has passed. P.S. War is hell, and the sooner we win this one, the better it will be for the survivors on both sides.
The counter-argument is, yes, but it’s better to take civilian casualties for 5 or 10 or 20 years, rather than having a larger conflict. To which I respond, what larger conflict? The civilian societies that spawn terrorists have no military capabilities with which to oppose us.
The next counter-argument is, yes, but it’s better to take civilian casualties for 5 or 10 or 20 years, rather than having to kill civilians who want to kill us and who are giving birth to those who kill us. And that, I suppose, is a matter for further discussion. I personally would rather take no further losses of women and children on our side, and demonstrate to the world, for all future generations, that terrorism is a strategy that just doesn’t work.
All are in this interview with John R. Bradley, author of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis.
Money talks in Washington, and the Al-Saud have a lot of it to throw around. They have ingratiated themselves – to put it mildly – with successive presidents, be they Democrat or Republican. They put former American ambassadors to Riyadh on the payroll, and you find them popping up at conferences all the time saying that the Al-Saud are the only answer, that we must continue to stick with the Saudi regime. They fund think tanks, which are then compromised in what they can say about Saudi Arabia when it comes to drawing up foreign policy initiatives. They fund Middle East departments at major universities, which are basically in the hands of a pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab regimes mafia.
They also buy off so-called “experts”, academics and journalists – if not directly with cash (and that does happen; your magazine has given lists in the past) then with the implicit threat of withholding visas for subsequent trips to the kingdom, which such individuals need to make in order to say “when I was in the kingdom recently” to give their comments an air of credibility…
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