On June 12, Omar Mateen killed 49 patrons at Orlando, Florida’s  Pulse nightclub. His weapon: A Sig Sauer MCX carbine.

On July 3, Abu Maha al-Iraqi killed more than 300 shoppers and diners in  Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood. His weapon: A van packed with explosives.

On July 14, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel killed at least 84 Bastille Day revelers  in Nice (as I write this, dozens of injured remain in critical condition). His weapons: A 19-ton truck and a pistol.

Don’t be surprised over the next week to hear calls from the usual suspects for “expanded background checks” for truck drivers, with an eye toward populating a “no drive list.”

Left unmentioned will be the heavy regulation of explosives by most of the world’s governments for decades, or that those regulations didn’t stop Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad and Ahmed Ajaj (the 1993 World Trade Center Bombers), or Timothy McVeigh (the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber) or  Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev (the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers), let alone Abu Maha al-Iraqi.

Also left unmentioned will be the heavy regulation of guns in both the US and France, or that those regulations didn’t stop Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (who killed 14 in San Bernardino in December 2015), or the Charlie Hebdo attackers (who killed 12 in Paris in January 2015), or the Bataclan theater attackers (who killed 130 in Paris in November 2015), or Omar Mateen, or Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

Laws and regulations won’t stop terrorists from using trucks, either.

“Our rifle is only a tool,” Private Joker notes in Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers (adapted to film as Full Metal Jacket).  “It is a hard heart that kills.”

Focusing on tools misses the point entirely: When they choose to attack, terrorists will buy, beg, borrow, steal or make the tools to do so (the Tsarnaevs used pressure cookers, nails, gunpowder from fireworks and remote detonators made from toy car controllers).

Terrorists don’t obey laws or conform to regulations. If they did, they wouldn’t be terrorists. Making those laws and regulations more restrictive fails as a counter to — in fact it actively incentivizes — terrorism. The goal of terrorists is to terrorize. Mass acceptance of repressive legal responses says they’re succeeding.

If oppressive police state tactics don’t work, what might?

Refusing to be terrorized would help, at least some. Just as being terrorized encourages more terrorism, not being terrorized discourages it. When one tactic doesn’t work, smart actors choose other tactics.

But opposing mass killings by “our guys” is even more important.

Western (including American and French)  troops have killed hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, in the Middle East and Central Asia just since 1991.  Many (maybe most) have been innocent civilians. Their families, friends, countrymen and co-religionists have, unsurprisingly, responded in kind. We should stop supporting military adventurism not just because it inevitably results in “blowback” and dead bodies back home, but because it’s as wrong when “we” do it as it is when “they” do it.

It is indeed a hard heart that kills. Tools are mere distraction. Hearts — and minds — are where change begins.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The Problem Isn’t Tools, It’s Terror,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 07/16/16
• “The Problem Isn’t Tools, It’s Terror,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 07/16/16
• “The problem isn’t tools, it’s terror,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Newberry, South Carolina Observer, 07/18/16
• “Issue is terror, not tools,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Corydon, Indiana Clarion News, 07/20/16
• “The Problem Isn’t Tools, It’s Terror,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 07/21/16

The last time a major American political party fell completely apart, it did so over the expansion of slavery. The split between the Whig Party’s northern and southern factions resulted in the party’s dissolution, the ascendance of the Republican Party (the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was a former Whig), and the Civil War. Between 1854 and 1856 the Whigs faded from the second largest party in Congress to non-existence.

The last time a major American party came anywhere close to falling completely apart, the divisive issue was racial segregation. Several southern state Democratic Parties split off to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party (the “Dixiecrats”), running Strom Thurmond instead of Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election, carrying four states and racking up 39 electoral votes. Truman won anyway.

The Dixiecrats were more or less an historical footnote by 1952, although a “National States’ Rights Party” persisted for awhile. Alabama governor George Wallace appealed to the same constituency in his independent presidential campaigns, and 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr tried to dog-whistle up a Dixiecrat resurgence.

Next week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland may be ground zero for America’s next great partisan implosion.  The issues involved are both more numerous and more nebulous — foreign policy, immigration policy, trade policy, gun policy, tax policy, what have you — than in similar previous episodes.

In the past a few of those internal policy disputes could be kicked down the road every four years for the sake of party unity and political victory. This year something’s changed. The rise of Donald Trump has brought all of them to a single head in one moment. In addition, the man himself scares the bejabbers out of the party establishment with his garish, faux-populist, medicine show style.

For that establishment, the closest thing possible to victory is for Trump to lose, either to revolting delegates in Cleveland or to Hillary Clinton in November. The party can’t win the White House with Trump, then go back to being the party of George W. Bush, let alone Ronald Reagan. If Trump wins, the establishment loses and the GOP becomes, more overtly than ever and probably irreversibly, the party of banana republic nationalism.

For Trump’s supporters, victory looks like … well, like winning with Trump and making the GOP, more overtly than ever and probably irreversibly, the party of banana republic nationalism.

That signpost reads “all downhill from here.”

In this election, the functional equivalent of the 1948 Dixiecrat ticket are the Libertarian Party’s nominees, two “moderate Republicans” who will be on the ballot in at least 40-odd states rather than four. But where the Dixiecrats were a menace to the Democratic establishment, Gary Johnson and William Weld may be the Republican establishment’s only hope.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Is the Party Over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 07/14/16
• “Is the Party Over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 07/14/16
• “Is the Party Over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Bell Gardens, California Sun, 07/14/16
• “Is the Party Over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 07/15/16
• “Is the party over for nation’s Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fayette, West Virginia Tribune, 07/18/16
• “Is the Party Over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pahrump Valley, Nevada Times, 07/20/16
• “Is the party over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Bucks County, Pennsylvania Courier Times, 07/21/16
• “Is the party over for Republicans?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Doylestown, Pennsylvania Intelligencer, 07/21/16

Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center, characterizes itself as a non-governmental organization “at the forefront of fighting terrorism and safeguarding Jewish rights worldwide.”

On July 10, the organization filed a federal lawsuit on alleged behalf of the families of five Americans (one American tourist and four Israeli-American dual citizens) killed in attacks which the suit blames on Hamas, the Islamist organization governing Palestine’s Gaza Strip area. Facebook, the suit alleges, assists Hamas (in violation of the US Anti-Terrorism Act) in “recruiting, radicalizing, and instructing terrorists, raising funds, creating fear and carrying out attacks.”

The suit seeks to punish Facebook to the tune of $1 billion for failure to censor public communications of which the Israeli government disapproves. This should be troubling for two reasons.

First, the obvious: Federal law (47 USC § 230) protects sites like Facebook vis a vis content created by  their users: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” There’s a reason for that legal provision, and this lawsuit highlights that reason: Suing Facebook because Hamas operatives use social media is like suing AT&T because Hamas operatives talk on the telephone.

Second, the less obvious: As I previously mentioned, Shurat Hadin characterizes itself as a non-governmental organization. In reality, it seems to at the very least serve as a front for, and quite possibly to function as a de facto litigation arm of, the Israeli state.

A 2007 US embassy cable — revealed by whistleblower site Wikileaks — cites Shurat Hadin founder Nitsana Darshan Leitner as admitting that, at least at one time, the organization received evidence and took direction from the Israeli government, claiming that “[t]he National Security Council (NSC) legal office  saw the use of civil courts as a way to do things that they are not authorized to do.”

Shurat HaDin’s lawsuits against Facebook (this one and another, filed in 2015, which complains that Facebook’s tools for connecting people with similar interests as “[allow] Palestinian terrorists to incite violent attacks against Israeli citizens and Jews on its internet platform”) are, in a word, “lawfare”: Asymmetric warfare carried out through abuse of legal and judicial systems to accomplish military aims.

The US government has no business involving itself in the conflict between Israel and Hamas — nor should the  US courts allow Shurat HaDin to turn Facebook and other US firms into collateral damage in that conflict.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Shurat HaDin versus Facebook: Vexatious Litigation as Warfare,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 07/11/16
• “Shurat HaDin versus Facebook: Vexatious Litigation as Warfare,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 07/12/16