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Manchester and the Lies We Tell Ourselves About Terrorism
Again we see a horrific act of Islamic terrorism, this time at a music concert in Manchester, England. And again, the media tells us and to a large degree, we tell ourselves the same lies to avoid facing the truth about what we face.
1. The ideology isn’t responsible.
Inevitably we are told that the person who did this is insane and that it has nothing to do with religion or ideology. This is true to some degree since anyone who would blow themselves up in a crowd of innocent people is by any reasonable measure insane. There are, however, lots of insane, evil, violent and sociopathic people in the world. Most of them, however, do not blow themselves up in crowded concert halls. Ideology is what makes ordinary murderers and criminals into monsters. Lenin was a third-rate intellectual, Hitler a failed artist and crank war veteran, Stalin a common street thug and so forth. Ideology is what gives insane or evil people a rationalization and reason to become mass murdering monsters. So, no the ideology is responsible. Had it not been for radical Islam, the Manchester bomber would have been just another maladjusted and perhaps violent person. He likely wouldn’t have lived a good life and would have done harm, but he wouldn’t have done this.
2. Terrorism is not a threat to our way of life if we just ignore it.
One of the dumbest lies we tell ourselves after a terrorist attack is “what are your chances?” Well, your chances are pretty small. But to think that makes terrorism just something we can live with and the solution to it to “keep calm and carry on” is to both misunderstand human nature and the purpose of terrorism. Yes, your chances of dying in a terrorist attack if you live in the UK are vanishingly small. They do however increase if you are doing the wrong thing or in the wrong place. If you happened to be in Manchester last weekend, your chances were greater. If you happened to be in Manchester attending an Ariana Grande concert, your chances were pretty good. By targeting certain activities and things, terrorists create the incentive for people to stop doing those things. No one wants to risk their lives to attend a concert. So blow up a few concerts and people suddenly decide to avoid them. And after you have enforced your will on the public with one behavior, you move onto another like a snake constricting on its prey.
You can see this already. Twenty years ago, no one would have thought anything of drawing a picture of Muhammad. Today, no newspaper in America would print such a picture. In France, Judaism in many places is no longer practiced in public but is restricted to enclosed and armed compounds. Amsterdam is decidedly less gay and decadent than it was even five years ago. In America, no comedy show dare satirize Muslims or the Islamic religion. You can pretend that is because of political correctness but the political correctness is the result of fear. No comedian or sarcastic atheist wants to risk death for their act. But hey what are the odds it will happen to you?
3. Law enforcement can deal with Islamic terrorism.
Law enforcement is based on two principles that make it totally ineffective in responding to Islamic terrorism. First, law enforcement is reactive. Law enforcement doesn’t arrest people for crimes they might commit. It arrests people after they commit a crime or engage in an attempt or take concrete steps in a conspiracy. Second, law enforcement, since it can’t generally act to prevent a crime, depends upon being able to deter crime to be effective. Law enforcement rarely if ever stops a determined criminal from committing a crime. But that is a limited problem because its actions deter people from becoming criminals in the first place.
The assumptions that underlie any just law enforcement system, make a law enforcement approach to Islamic terrorism nothing more than showing up to count and clean up the bodies after the attack. We can tolerate law enforcement’s inability to stop a determined criminal because the stakes of ordinary crime are generally small. Even the worst mass murdering criminal will kill a handful of people. A single terrorist attack, however, can kill dozens or even hundreds or thousands. So the cost of not acting is much larger. More importantly, since Islamic terrorists want to die in the attack, there is no way to deter them. So law enforcement can’t prevent terrorism because its greatest weapon to prevent crime, deterrence, is ineffective.
Time and again Islamic terrorists are known to police and do everything but announce on Facebook and Twitter their intention to become terrorists. The public then understandably blames the attack on law enforcement because it failed to do anything. This, however, is not fair to law enforcement and fails to recognize the fundamental limitations of law enforcement described above. Law enforcement can’t do anything until the person actually does something and by then it’s usually too late to prevent the crime. Unless they get lucky and catch the person in that little window of time between when they take concrete steps to engage in an attack and when they attack occurs, law enforcement is powerless. There are hundreds of people running around America and the UK saying and doing the same things the Manchester bomber said. And only some of them will ever act on it. Short of rounding them all up, something law enforcement is not allowed to do, there is no way for law enforcement to stop them.
4. An armed populace will stop this.
An armed populace is a good thing for a lot of reasons. Stopping terrorism sadly is not one of them. Yes, an armed civilian can stop the occasional madman shooting people and turn a mass shooting into a single one. But armed civilians are not going to stop a dump truck running down a crowded sidewalk or stop someone from blowing themselves up.
Even an armed population runs into the same problem law enforcement runs into; the ineffectiveness of deterrence against Islamic terrorists. The point of being armed is to not to have to use the weapon. I don’t carry a gun into a rough neighborhood hoping to get into a gun fight. I carry one hoping the threat of using it keeps me from having to get into any fight at all. The gun is effective because it deters people from attacking me. Islamic terrorists, however, want to die and can’t be deterred. Moreover, the terrorist’s action will always beat my reaction. So unless I just shoot everyone I think might be a terrorist out of an abundance of caution, the chances are the terrorist determined to murder me will do so before I ever have a chance to defend myself.
5. Terrorism has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims.
This is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. Most Muslims are not terrorists, which is true, so the fact that some of them are has nothing to do with the ones who are not. The problem with this logic is that it ignores reality. Some number of Muslims in any nation will radicalize and become terrorists. It is impossible to tell which ones will do so but it is inevitable some will. So the more Muslims you have in your country, the more problems you will have with terrorism. Slovakia and Poland have very few Muslims and no Islamic terrorism. France, Sweden, Germany, and the UK all have significant Muslim populations and terrorism. With Muslims come terrorism. That doesn’t mean every Muslim is a terrorist or supports terrorism. But some do and there is no way to determine which will and which won’t. There is no magic “vetting” process that tells you which person will live a peaceful and productive life and which will become a terrorist. Indeed, many terrorists have been educated and came from good families. The leader of the 911 plot was an engineer. The terrorist in San Bernardino had a good job with the County.
6. We can fight terrorism and still stay true to our values.
Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the worst one. The people who tell it live in this fantasy world where good always triumphs if it just stays true to its values. Sadly, the real world isn’t like that. In the real world evil, by virtue of it being evil, isn’t defeated by playing by the rules. Playing by the rules and living by your values makes you a martyr. So your choices are, become a martyr to your values, bow to evil’s demands, or do whatever is necessary to win and ask God for forgiveness later.
History teaches us this lesson over and over again. Was it consistent with American values to carpet bomb Germany killing over a million civilians? Was it consistent with our values fire bomb Japan killing millions and drop two atomic bombs vaporizing two cities and leaving the survivors with generational effects of radiation? I don’t think so. If you went back to 1935 and told Americans that in ten years they will have bombed half the world, killed millions of civilians, men women and children and unleashed a new super weapon that threatens man’s very existence, they would have thought you mad. America would never do such things. Of course, it did do those things and more, because the evil it was fighting gave it no other choice. The same people who look back on World War II as some idealized “good war” think that we can now turn around and defeat an enemy willing to blow themselves up among a group of teenage girls by turning the lights off at the Eiffel Tower and making sure every Islamic terrorist gets his full day in court.
We have somehow convinced ourselves that we can survive in this world without getting our hands dirty. That we will never be required to resort to extreme measures to ensure our survival. This is most certainly a lie and really the worst lie we tell ourselves.
The choices we face
The choices Europe faces today are stark. They can either engage in acts of collective punishment, up to and including mass deportations and strict controls on the nature of Islam that is allowed to be practiced or they can face a dark future of terrorism and the slow erosion of their way of life. There are no easy solutions or solutions that don’t involve ugly actions and consequences.
America does not yet face these choices. Our Muslim population is too small and our country and population too large to force us to make the kinds of choices the nations of Europe are being forced to make. If, however, we continue to allow mass immigration and allow the America Muslim population to reach a critical mass, we will face the same choices Europe is facing now. That is not something people want to hear. It is much easier to tell ourselves lies about how we can keep calm and carry on and it will all go away if we just are understanding enough. Sadly, the longer we cling to these illusions the worse our choices will be when reality finally forces us to give up these illusions.
Published in General
I agree. And it is an enormously difficult problem. All of the dangers you point out are real. And that goes to the larger point that we cannot open our borders such that we are forced to choose between the dangers you describe or watching Islamic terrorism slowly transform our free society into an unfree and terrorized one.
I remember in the weeks after 9/11 thinking that the country was going to do one of those things that looks terrible to people fifty years hence. Something like the Japanese internment camps of World War II. I figured we were going to something like completely shutdown the borders, round up every person who overstays his visa, etc. Yes we’d get a bunch of innocents, but we’d justify it. Instead, we got the kabuki theater of the TSA, visas still aren’t seriously tracked, and seven years later elected a Muslim sympathizer to the presidency. Trump is trying to control the flow of some people entering the country and judges are freely admitting they wouldn’t block the same order if Hillary had written it.
That is because our political class lives in a fantasy world where feelings and principles matter more than reality. They don’t see anything beyond the morality play that goes on inside their head. The idea that there could be grave consequences to their actions or that the situation might not present any good much less ideal options is beyond their comprehension.
Wow, what a great post. I don’t think I disagree with anything in there. I’ve said this before, I’m getting tired of the Islamacist apologists, most of whom aren’t even Muslim and some of which are supposedly on the right.
And a breaking news addendum: “Egypt bus attack: Coptic Christians targeted, at least 28 killed”
Actually, armed civilians in Israel regularly do limit the damage from terrorists who try these things. The vehicle Jihadist has the element of surprise, but after initial actions, armed civilians shoot the drivers dead.
It is not this simple. They do not want to die in vain. If they think they won’t get anywhere, their intentions ARE deterred.
The knife attacks in Israel showed this to be untrue. Most knife-wielding attackers were stopped by people defending themselves and their friends.
It is not that they can be deterred so much as if it is clear we are not going to bow to their demands, people won’t become radical Muslims in the first place. You are right. No one wants to die for a loser ideology. But that is because no one wants to join a loser ideology. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that once they do, they view dying in an attack as a plus and thus can’t be deterred.
And yes armed civilians can in some cases limit the damage of an attack. That is nice but it doesn’t prevent the attack or its effect it has on people. It is great if the good guys win a gun fight against a terrorist at a concert. That fact, however, doesn’t make avoiding concerts in the future any less desirable under those circumstances.
If every terrorist just used a knife, we wouldn’t have much of a problem. Knife attacks are very ineffective and in a place as armed as most of the US, amount to bringing a knife to a gun fight. Sadly, knife attacks are not the problem; suicide bombs and trucks and planes are. And no group of friends, even if they have pistols stands much of a chance against a dump truck or against a bomb that has gone off.
Sort of depends on one’s values.
I believe in crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women.
Everything we did in WWII was true to the value of winning a war against evil. When we fight by half measures, that is when we are not true to the men fighting, and not true to our values.
The data from Israel is pretty consistent: the driver kills some people, and then he gets dead before he can extend the damage further. So, for example, the dump truck driver in Nice would have been killed pretty quickly if the citizenry had been armed – because when similar attacks have happened in Israel, the driver was killed.
I agree that a jidahist can do damage. But guns in the hands of citizens do limit that damage.
Well, I’d argue that those practitioners of the ROP (religion of peace) that are not citizens: student/worker visa holders, “refugees”, Green Card holders – do not, by their very status as non-citizens/guests, do not have the same legal rights in court as do citizens but the ‘Jurists’, the Left, the Libertarians and the Open Border Mush-heads of the ‘Tuesday Group Right’ don’t even concede this much. Just as non-signatories to the Geneva Convention Protocols deserve the same type of treatment as signatories.
I’m willing to deal with citizens as criminals and traitors.
I agree with you Bishop Walsh I thought we’d see the same type of actions taken, and as John Kluge reiterated in his post, if the chances of being killed are so infinitesimally low, why the hell are we all taking are shoes, belts, water bottles & shampoo bottles out at the airport. Let’s simply end this farce “and take our chances”.
That is great. And I am all for people being armed. That, however, does not solve the problem of terrorism or make it less effective. The point of terrorism is to get people to change their behavior and bow to your demands out of fear. So the fact that the dump truck only kills a few people rather than dozens, does not really limit its effectiveness. If the risk of visiting a beach or a Christmas market is that some nut will show up with a dump truck and try to murder you and hopefully the people there will shoot him in time to keep him from doing too much damage, people will still avoid going there. The idea that you get a chance to fight for your life rather than just die isn’t really much comfort. The point is to live in peace and not have to fight at all.
The challenge as I see it is how should western governments respond when they detect sympathy for radical Islamic actions and goals, but the person expressing such sympathies hasn’t yet committed a crime. We in the west cherish freedom of thought. For that I am grateful, but this has also carried with it a vulnerability we have yet to address.
Because small chances, if they can be avoided by avoiding certain activities, are enough to be a threat to our way of life. The chances of any individual black person being lynched in the old South was very small. But that didn’t matter. What mattered is that the chances of being lynched went up a whole lot if you did something to piss off the white mob. So you don’t have to actually kill a large percentage of people. You just have to kill enough to get the rest to be terrorized into falling in line. So, all of the talk about “what are the odds” completely misses the point.
This would imply you never leave your house because each time there’s a fraction of a fraction of a chance you’ll be 100% dead. Maybe we should just ban all men from the country because men commit almost all the murders. How could you not send every man out of the country when there’s a 100% chance several people will be killed in cold blooded murder?
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day about “new security procedures” coming to the airport. My personal favorite part was this:
Two [COC] years! To roll out a system to automatically verify IDs.
In WWII, in the space of 3.5 years the US built almost 200,000 combat aircraft, almost 6000 warships, and more than 20,000 tanks.
But it’s going to take us two years to roll out a machine to validate Ids.
We deserve to lose.
This is true. That is why allowing in more Islamic immigrants only makes things more difficult. We can’t prosecute for thought crimes, but can we at least acknowledge that a lot of these problems would not exist internal to our country if we did not let them in?
There’s something I wanted to float. So, presumably, many of these Muslims like the idea of Sharia law enough to say so on a survey. Also, presumably for many, this is a deeply held religious belief (rather than a form of Muslim virtue signalling, which I wouldn’t discount in a survey) that they would feel was sacrilegious to lie about. So… I wonder if simply asking them (maybe a couple times in a couple different ways throughout an interview) would greatly weed out those who might not be ready for liberal society.
I mean, they could be told to lie, but I think that’s difficult for a lot of people, and many may simply refuse to lie about it if it really means that much to them.
Not sure what the actual numbers show, but at least where I live, Muslim immigration has exploded since (because of?) 9/11. Don’t know what is driving that but it is not what I would have expected on 9/12/01.
Ok, but who makes the determination that “he is a member of a foreign Jihadi group with which we are at war,” and what are his rights to contest that determination? The point of our criminal justice system, and all of our rights as citizens under the Constitution, is to protect the innocent, not to protect the guilty.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: the reason I’m such a stickler for these rights is not that I’m a bleeding heart who has great sympathy for members of foreign Jihadi groups. The reason is mainly selfish: I don’t want to lose the right to my day in court. I don’t want to give any future President the power to label me an “unlawful enemy combatant” and throw me in prison for life w/o any recourse to hire a lawyer and prove in court that I am no such thing.
Fair enough, but here’s another statistic for you: there are 16,238 murders per year in the United States, or an average of 44 cold-blooded murders per day.
Most of those don’t make the news, so we don’t get outraged over them, nor cower in fear because of them.
Unless you live in a crime-plagued inner city. Then you see a lot of people cowering in fear behind barred windows and doors.
To an Anglophile American, the self-deprecation of the British used to be charming, in an exasperating sort of way.
It seems to be mutating into a death wish. That has to stop.
Excellent post, @johnkluge. I agree with you, but suggest your example here is less than accurate. Carpet bombing millions of German civilians did not lead to victory in World War II. Nazi Germany was defeated by millions of Russian, American and British soldiers) invading, conquering and occupying Germany. Strategic bombing was inconclusive at best. The atomic bombs served to shock the Japanese Emperor into seeking peace, (and might be one of the only examples of actual “victory through air power”) but the reality is that Japan would have been ultimately invaded and conquered on the ground if they had not yielded.
On the other hand, a willingness to commit to “total war” has been a feature of the American culture since our earliest days. Examples such as the Pequot War (1636) and King Philip’s War (1675) illustrate that we have always been ready to get out hands dirty if necessary.
I haven’t read the comments yet, but I have to jump in here to say, Thank You, John! You articulated my thoughts more clearly than I thought them!
I think the logic of the West’s situation wrt Islam leads inexorably to expulsion. We better get that up on our shoulders. There are at least a few things we can do first, barring all out war: 1) create safe zones for peaceful Muslims in their lands; 2) stop Muslim immigration — full stop; 3) offer sanctuary to Muslims who renounce their faith. But, if we are to avoid apocalyptic conflict, we’re going to have to vomit this toxic ideology out of our lands. I see that as the only way we outsiders can pressure Muslims to clean up their own house.
You (not “you” Percival, the vocative you), would think that, one’s political viewpoint notwithstanding, one would recognize the importance of the British Empire and Commonwealth in the history of the world.
You would be wrong. (Not sure that should be surprising, actually, considering recent and ongoing efforts to obliterate from the face of the earth the story of one side in the US Civil War . . ).
See here for the short, sad, and unlamented history of the “British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.”
My Dad had a rather large collection of important and irreplaceable papers relating to his time in Nigeria, and he left them to this museum. God only knows where they are now . . .
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
That worked out well, didn’t it?
That is dreadful.
Conservatism should never run from its principles or the facts. So let’s apply good old Western Civilization to this in the spirit of Burke, Smith and Aristotle: observe, measure, and verify. First, why would “no cartoons about Mohammed” be the best example of terrorism affecting everyday life? Were there so many of us doodling the founder of Islam before the Hebdo murder? The claim itself is weak: Boston Marathon attendance has gone up every year since the 2013 attack; the gay nightclub scene in Orlando is alive and well after the 2016 shooting; military enlistment hasn’t decreased since attacks like Ft. Hood; Google, Walmart, artificial intelligence and robots have done more to change the world economy than the 9/11 hijackers; and people still shop in public despite the Mall of the Americas attack (and when they do stop it will be because of Amazon, not Al Qaeda).
Other critical self-deceptions: (1), immigration screening/deportation/surveillance is more important than effective trade and aid strategies attacking the roots of transnational criminal organizations like ISIS/Daesh. We shouldn’t cede this subject to Neocons (occupy the host country and transform it) or the Left (massive UN-administered subsidizing of healthcare, food aid, public utilities, etc.) You hardly have to twist the arm of anyone on the Right about more regulated immigration and targeted surveillance, but why do we have to pull their teeth to get support for smarter intervention overseas (trade and investment to complement smarter military/espionage activity)? Disrupt the conflicts = disrupting refugee flows.
(2) The hybrid Malthus-Le Pen hypothesis of “critical mass” demographics. There’s neither historical nor scientific evidence that Muslim immigration and birthrates are exponentially increasing. Once accounting for refugees, rates of immigration from Muslim countries go *down* these past years. Countries with more open markets see a higher quality of life, lower birthrates , and more of the best immigration (skilled knowledge workers, entrepreneurs). Just like the predictions of Japan’s 1980’s world economic conquest, Malthus’ own overpopulation predictions, and the inevitability of Hillary’s election – the real numbers belie popular sentiment.
They are no doubt being studied by Top Men, a la the Lost Ark of Indiana Jones fame. You can be sure they weren’t burned, out of concern for the impact on climate change.
As for the previous debate about how to deal with radical Islamists who haven’t actually committed a crime (yet), last I looked, incitement to riot was on the books. Charge the lower sphincters with that and give them a good long stretch somewhere where they can reflect on their life choices.
Hi Manny, a larger pool to draw from will enlarge the risk I agree, but there are many who have grown up in the US or other western countries who have turned against western values and adopted jihad against us. Stopping the flow won’t stop the terrorism with so many disaffected already living in the west. It would be interesting to know how many people are on watch lists. I know the Manchester Bomber was on a watch list.
What did the US and Brittan do during WWII when someone expressed sympathy for the Third Reich? I wouldn’t want to see us treat Muslims like we did Japanese Americans.