Tag Archives: terrorism

On December 2, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik burst into a meeting at San Bernardino, California’s Inland Regional Center and opened fire, killing 14 and wounding many more. The two were later killed in a shootout with the police.

In the wake of this horrific attack, media reports are emerging that the couple’s neighbors observed “suspicious activities” at their Redlands, California townhouse and Farook’s mother’s home, but didn’t report those activities for fear that they would be accused of racial profiling.

What were these “suspicious activities?” One was an apparent domestic dispute. The others were general in nature: They were observed “doing a lot of work out in the garage” and received “quite a few packages in a short amount of time.”

I’ve lived in America for 49 years. During that time, I’ve observed numerous domestic disputes (and had a few myself). I’ve done plenty of tinkering around in my garage (when I’ve had a garage to tinker around in). And the local mail carrier and UPS and FedEx drivers know my home well — my family members and I do a LOT of online shopping.

Unless the media reports are omitting significant details, the only “suspicious” aspect of the activities in question were that Farook and Malik “looked middle eastern.” Reporting them on the basis of those activities would indeed have been an instance of racial profiling.

The neighbors are beating up on themselves. That’s understandable. But they shouldn’t be doing that. That their suspicions turned out to have been well-founded does not retrospectively make those suspicions rational. Normal activities aren’t — or at least SHOULDN’T be — “suspicious” just because the people engaging in them don’t look like one of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers circa 1940.

This is how the terrorists win, folks. The goal of terrorism is to terrorize us. What could possibly be a more effective means of that than getting us to live in fear not of some far-away foreign threat, but of our own neighbors?

It’s a numbers game, with hooks reaching down into one of the darkest and ugliest aspects of our history: Our racial and ethnic stereotypes and prejudices. For every active terror cell in the United States, there are almost certainly millions, maybe even tens of millions, of innocent Americans, native and immigrant alike, who look just like that cell’s members. “Suspicion” based on such appearances is a force multiplier for the bad guys.

It may well not be that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But when it comes to terrorism, unfounded and unbounded fear is our main weakness. If we can beat that weakness, we will inevitably beat the terrorists along with it.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

AUDIO VERSION

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“An American Guilt Trip: This is How the Terrorists Win,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 12/05/15
“An American Guilt Trip: This is How the Terrorists Win,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 12/05/15
“An American Guilt Trip: This is How the Terrorists Win,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 12/07/15
“An American guilt trip: This is how the terrorists win,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Libby, Montana Western News, 12/08/15
“An American guilt trip: This is how the terrorists win,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Muscatine, Iowa Journal, 12/09/15
“An American guilt trip: This is how the terrorists win,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Davenport, Iowa Quad-City Times, 12/09/15

Op-Eds

August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism

August 4, 2015 Thomas L. Knapp 4 Comments

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America became the first — and, to this day, the only — nation to use atomic or nuclear weapons in actual hostilities (as opposed to testing). The unconditional surrender of Japan quickly followed, bringing an end to World War II.

For 70 years now, the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have occasioned debate on whether or not those bombings were necessary, and whether or not they were justifiable.

Many World War II veterans — and others — stand on simple necessity to justify the bombings. A US invasion of Japan’s home islands, they argue, would have entailed a million or more US military casualties, and even more Japanese civilian casualties than are attributed to the atomic attacks.

The argument is facially persuasive. As of August 1945, my grandfather and my wife’s father were both serving in the US Navy in the Pacific. There certainly existed a non-trivial likelihood that either or both of them would have died in subsequent battles had the war not ended. For obvious reasons, we’re grateful they came home alive.

The persuasiveness of the argument fades when we consider the facts: Conditional surrender had been on offer since late 1944, the condition being that Emperor Hirohito remain on the throne. The US fought two of the war’s bloodiest battles — Iwo Jima and Okinawa, at a cost of tens of thousands of Americans killed — then unleashed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan’s civilian population, rather than accept that condition. But once the war was over, Hirohito was allowed to remain Emperor.

That aside, words mean things, and neither our happiness at our ancestors’ survival nor any military argument for insisting on unconditional surrender and dropping atomic bombs to get it changes the character of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Terrorism, per WordNet, is “the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature.” The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings meet that definition in spades.

US president Harry S. Truman ordered, consciously and with premeditation, the murder of somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 civilians in pursuit of his political goal of unconditional Japanese surrender.

Whether or not an act constitutes terrorism doesn’t depend on whether or not its goals are laudable. Every terrorist and supporter of terrorism in history, save a handful of thorough nihilists, has justified his or her atrocities on the basis of the desired outcomes, claiming that a few innocent lives sacrificed now means more innocent lives saved later.

But innocent lives are not ours to sacrifice. Murder is murder and terrorism is terrorism, no matter what nationalist or patriotic colors we wrap them up in and no matter what ribbon of “necessity” we stick atop them.

Even if we accept the “necessity” argument for the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they remain something to regret and to mourn, not something to justify or to celebrate.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

AUDIO VERSION

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/04/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/04/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Nagaland, India Eastern Mirror, 08/05/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sand Mountain, Alabama Reporter [paywall], 08/05/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 08/06/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Baltic Review, 08/06/15
“AUGUST 1945: Let’s talk about terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 08/06/15
“Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Dimapur, India Morung Express, p. 6, 08/06/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Goa [India] Herald, 08/07/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 08/07/15
“Anniversary of Hiroshima should be time for reflection, not celebration,” Libby, Montana Western News, by Thomas L. Knapp, 08/07/15
“August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Seoul, Republic of Korea Times, 08/10/15
“Harry Truman was a terrorist,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Providence, Rhode Island Journal, 08/10/15
“Atom bombs stopped unnecessary deaths,” by Ken McIntosh, Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal Gazette, 08/19/15 [editor’s note: There’s no corresponding entry for, or other evidence that I can find of, a printing of the original article in the Journal Gazette, but apparently there was one!]

Op-Eds

Security Theater: Fake Bullets Over Broadway

April 12, 2015 Thomas L. Knapp 1 Comment

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested two New York City women, Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, on April 2. The two were charged with conspiring to build and detonate a bomb in the style of the 2013 Boston Marathon attack. After more than a year of talking about it, they hadn’t actually done anything about it. Reasonable people might conclude they just relished terror trash talk.

On April 10, the FBI arrested Topeka, Kansas resident John T. Booker as he attempted to arm a 1,000 pound bomb outside the US Army base at Fort Riley. The bomb was fake, as was the entire plan for the attack, drummed up and pushed at Booker by undercover federal agents. The FBI knew that Booker was mentally ill. In fact, two of its agents had taken Booker to a local Muslim imam in 2014 to procure counseling for him, telling the imam that Booker suffered from bipolar disorder.

G-Men Thwart Islamist Bomb Plot! Like a TV series that keeps getting renewed despite dismal ratings, some variant of that headline pops up every few days. And like that imaginary TV series — “How I Foiled Your Jihadist?” — the whole thing consists largely of recycled plot lines and cheap special effects.

What we’re watching is not a war on terror. It’s not desperate police work versus very dire, and very real, threats. It’s theater, scripted entirely for public consumption and for the purpose of maintaining the post-9/11 “homeland security” funding bonanza.

As of 2001, the FBI’s annual budget came to $3.3 billion (that’s $4.4 billion in inflated 2015 dollars). Its 2014 budget weighed in at nearly twice the spending: $8.3 billion. Director James Comey’s 2016 budget request would increase that to $8.48 billion. In his March statement to the US Senate committee evaluating that request, his top sales point was that “the terrorist threat against the United States remains persistent and acute.”

But that “terrorist threat” is, to all appearances, largely manufactured by the FBI itself. And as for real terrorist threats, we know how to reduce them: By ending the foreign military adventurism that has, each and every time, preceded and been used as justification for terror attacks on US soil.

The solution to terrorism isn’t to give James Comey more money to spend creating fake terrorists. It’s to give US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter less money to spend creating real ones.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

AUDIO VERSION

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Fake Bullets Over Broadway,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Counterpunch, 04/15/15