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The West’s Response to Mass Murder: Pretty Lights
On the BBC today I heard an interview with a Belgian member of the EU parliament. (She had the wavery, unearthly voice of the Talosians who imprisoned Captain Pike.) Her prescription for a unified response going forward to deal with the repercussions of the emanating penumbras of the unpleasantness at the airport: coordination. The police services are coordinated now, but they must be coordinated more. Barriers that prevent coordination must be addressed, and uncoordinated situations must be solved, and this can be done with a concerted effort to coordinate. The host was somewhat exasperated, and noted that Belgium had a large population of individuals who had gone to ISIS-land and come back. What about them?
The MP had a ready answer. Why, the EU Parliament had passed strong measures that permitted them to follow these individuals. It permitted the police to look at them.
That was her term. I’m sure she meant “investigate,” but even so, why would this take a special act? Because automatic scrutiny of bad actors might be seen as discriminatory, marginalizing, alienating? The idea of revoking citizenship of anyone who larks off to Syria to join the Bloody-Moon Army seems simple enough. As does incarceration and deportation for any non-citizen who’s even remotely connected to a terrorist attack. Well your honor I knew he was up to something with all the meetings and the wires and the mysterious men who kept dropping by, and after the attack he asked me to hide him and go to the man who had the passports, and yes I did that. But you have to understand —
GAVEL BANG Five years. Next case.
Never happen. I’ve no doubt there are serious hard-cases in European law-enforcement and counter-terrorism who would love to go weapons-free, so to speak, on the threat — and do so without caring whether it abrades the sensibilities of the technocratic stratum whose moral preening over the virtues of the post-national multi-cultural European identity got everyone in this fix. But that’s not enough.
See, here’s the odd thing. ISIS claimed responsibility, right?
Don’t we know where ISIS is? Don’t you think we have a reasonable idea where their C&C HQs are in those cities?
I’m not talking about a cruise missile response, but a MOAB over an ISIS stronghold. It won’t make them stop, but that’s not the point. It would make them pay, which you might consider an adequate short-term response. Next time? Two MOABs, two cities. The collateral damage would be horrific. No doubt it would renew their enthusiasm. So next time they get three.
It’s brutal, yes, but there are precedents set by much-beloved Democratic presidents.
Eventually the point has to sink in: you pay. Even if it doesn’t, there’s less ISIS, which would seem to be a good thing in the long run.
Such responses, however, seem unlikely these days. Outre; too . . . Russian. Would you approve? Would you consider it descending to their level? Or is it best to absorb and mourn, coordinate and look, and be prepared for the next attack. By which I mean: they’d better have the Eiffel Tower programmed for all the European countries’ colors. You’d hate to have 400 people killed in a Swedish airport and not be able to call up the flag-profile file that night. I mean, people would think you didn’t care.
Published in General
Nice straw man you got there.
RFBF,
You assume out of nowhere that the means of accepting surrender have something to do with a total cultural war. The idea that there is a moral judgement awaiting from the nations of the world — which is anything other than a tool to destroy us — is outdated. There is no omniscient source of fairness for us out there, and the consensus is against us. We ceased being exceptional during the Clinton regime, according to Lee Kuan Yew, who foresaw our decline and said that we had decided to become just another nation. He was right.
Now Obama rails against the notion itself, and has certainly disproven another of your assumptions; that America is capable of managing a sustained effort. It will never happen again until we are much weaker, which is where this is all going.
It would be nice to fight while we are strong, but all of our gains will be turned into losses by the next anti-American administration to come along, and come along it will, as we no longer maintain a pro-American culture. We are dying, and the world can smell it.
Your standards, which you claim are ours, are a thing of the past. This is no longer what America is like. You are preparing to defend a war effort in terms that made sense fifteen, twenty years ago. I know, I agreed.
Now I don’t. Things have changed.
Gee, I guess it really is 1914 all over again….
Golly, but not as high as you would hope. Again, from my previous post ( I do hate to keep doing this), with the terrible title of, Trump Does Not Bother Me (I Understand the Language of Orthodoxy (Our Establishment’s):
On December 02, 2015 the attack by these two [the San Bernardino terrorists] took place which killed 14 and injured many more.
On December 03, 2015, Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the United States, says she will take aggressive action against anyone who uses “anti-muslim rhetoric” that “edges towards violence”.
L’Anschleuse?
Hmmmm. I wonder what Ms. Lynch, her boss, and all of the like-minded preening Euro-weenie government officials think of this anti-“Coexist”-ance rhetoric ….
Islamists Celebrate Brussels Terror Under Sick #Belgiumonfire Arabic Hashtag …
Liz, would you say this language “edges towards violence”, in the words of our Attorney General?
From an undercover documentary on a mosque in Denmark:
Fatma, during her visits to the mosque, learned from imam Abu Bilal that married women who commit infidelity should be stoned to death, and that Muslims who leave Islam may be killed. He makes no reservations about these teachings. She also learned that young children who refuse to pray should be beaten (a woman asks the imam specifically, how she should conduct those beatings). Fatma was also informed that a woman may not take a job without her husband’s permission.
Abu Bilal further says that her husband is entitled to take another wife. Fatma is not allowed to deny her husband his “sexual rights,” even when he is violent. When she asks the imam if she should involve the police, the answer is an emphatic “no.”
Officially, the spokesman of the Grimhøj mosque, along with spokesmen from three of the eight mosques, professes that the mosque respects Danish law. But behind closed doors — on hidden camera — he advocates polygamy and beating children. He also instructs Fatma to go back to her abusive spouse and to let him commit what amounts to rape.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7648/denmark-sharia
Doing what Trump said and threatening the lives of terrorists’ families would be much more effective than MOABs and kill far, far, fewer people. In fact, if the threat were credible, it might mean no one would have to die at all. We could start with the family of the guy they captured in Brussels last week, who helped to hide him during the months since the Paris attacks.
But that would “make us just like them” (somehow, mass bombings and drone strikes don’t “make us just like them”). And right now, not being “just like them” is the most important thing. And the responses to terror attacks (the cards, flowers and candles) will continue to be indistinguishable from responses to natural disasters.
Free speech is increasingly under attack in the U.S., and always by the Left. If Lynch follows through on her threat, I would expect a lawsuit.
The Left hates free speech, but conservatives still revere the concept. I hope.
What is needed is a moment of silence in order to honor the silence imposed by governments, such as that of Sweden, on people who speak out on the internal threat.
Sure, cheap. But when you have to fly 12 sorties to get a single Pd of .9999 as opposed to a single sortie for 4 different DMPIs at .9999 the J-series weapons end up a lot cheaper. (by a factor of nearly 5.)
Here’s a rather stretched hypothetical: There is an ISIS stronghold which we know has 1,000 ISIS fighters (there are 30,000 others here and there). A few miles away is the camp where all the wives and children of the ISIS fighters live. We have two MOABs. Lileks wants to drop one on the stronghold. Trump wants to drop one on the stronghold and one on the camp.
The 1st Amendment does not apply to Danish mosques, but my non-expert guess would be that, no, such speech does not meet “imminent danger” requirements. Merely advocating violent or illegal behavior at some point in the future would probably be protected. My understanding is that there must be incitement which is likely to cause violations of the law, and that such violations are imminent.
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/414/105.html
Lynch’s words show an unsurprisingly poor understanding of Constitutional law. “Edges toward violence” is meaningless, legally speaking.
(If Sal or Larry would correct me on this, I would appreciate it!)
You have conflated Kozak’s war goal with his strategy. His goal is to defeat the terrorists in order to protect us from terrorism. His strategy is to break their will to fight. That is his strategy because it is not possible to kill all of the terrorists — no army in history has ever killed every one of the enemy.
But it is possible to convince their hosts — the Muslim world — that supporting the terrorists is a bad idea. That is something we have done many times, from the shores of Tripoli to the invasion of Baghdad. As recently as 2004, leading Muslim scholars were arguing that it was necessary to rethink violent jihad as a strategy, because all it was getting them was invaded. That renaissance ended with the 2004 elections, when the Democrats decided to make opposition to the Iraq war the centerpoint of their campaign, and revived jihad as a strategy. In any event, if it were possible to just kill the terrorists, Kozak would be for it. But it is not, and terrorism will continue as long as the Muslim world chooses to support it.
Your understanding is correct, and the case from which this standard derives is Brandenberg v. Ohio. I discussed that case here recently in another context. It’s an unusually high threshold — I believe the highest ever, in history — and a great cultural and historic achievement. It’s also a much more recent one than most Americans realize.
European legal standards are generally nowhere near as protective of speech, for a number of historic and cultural reasons. I don’t put much stock in anything I read on Gatestone, but I have no doubt that Salafist preachers in Europe give sermons like that. I agree that those mosques should be shut down, although I don’t think they’re the key vehicle for radicalization these days. These days, it’s the Internet. (Or prisons.)
The correct legal test, under Brandenburg v. Ohio, is “incitement to imminent lawless action.” I’ve never seen the phrase “edges toward violence” in a judicial opinion.
Be a shame if somebody pushed the button and you lost it.
The law shows a shocking ignorance of the Justice Department.
Have you ever read any histories of WWII or the Civil War? We won those two wars by inflicting civilian casualties, massive in the case of WWII. Both Germany and Japan wound up being two of our closest allies, despite those massive civilian casualties.
That’s what James was referring to in this statement: “It’s brutal, yes, but there are precedents set by much-beloved Democratic presidents.”
So how about we spend a little time discussing our obligation to win?
Another hypothetical:
I’ll guess that almost all will approve of #1. Do you also approve of #2?
And I’ve never seen either phrase in the Constitution. Here is what I have seen:
Long before most lawyers still practicing started, and only in the dim memory of SCOTUS–dim not from low-wattage but from the natural human desire to turn away from that which is ugly or unpleasant– Raoul Berger wrote “Government by Judiciary”–which should have made further exposition of the covered subject unnecessary. But mental manipulation of facts and history is so much fun…….
Yup. This government no longer sees an obligation to win on behalf of the American people. We are the ones stuck in a pre-literate understanding of The Way Things Work, but after losing a couple of wars, after the UN regulates our yards, after mexico sues to create its people our citizens, then we may understand.
Until then, tough junk, wingnuts. Constitution, Schmonstitution.
Thanks, Claire and Larry. Didn’t Hess serve to clarify what is meant by “imminent danger?”
Well this is tendentious. How about you just lead with your point instead of too cleverly by half attempting to prove to people that they think the way you do after all? This poorly-formed Socratic nonsense is tiresome. Say what you mean. Is that too much to ask?
The answer to number 2 is no, and it’s different than whatever scenario you are about to say it mimics. Ask me why after you’ve said what you mean.
Let them deal with China.
Let them deal with Iran.
Let them deal with ISIS.
Let them… deal with Russia.
Tendentious. Too cleverly by half. Poorly formed nonsense. Tiresome.
Good arguments all.
You are much appreciated. :)
Thank you, Marci. It’s taken me years to perfect the Steynlink Maneuver.
You are. The point of hitting the enemy really, really hard is to kill him, to degrade his capability to wage war, to frighten his civilians, to cow his politicians. To show that we will not be defeated. To cause his surrender if he survives.
The death and destruction to be avoided is among our population. Death and destruction imposed upon those who are pledged to OUR death and destruction should continue relentlessly until surrender.
Given the pusillanimous nature of our leadership and the fact that our CinC and much of his party are on the side of the enemy, my sort of response is not likely to happen. But my Lord, does it ever need to. This war could be over in a month, if only we wanted to win it.