Two things about the attempted car bombings and the airport attack in Great Britain.

First, a lot of attention is being paid to the fact that “All eight people arrested in the aftermath of two bungled car bombings here last week are from the medical profession.” The tendency for the past few years (both in the media and within academia) has been to assume that religious violence is an outgrowth of other social factors. The assumption is that it’s a function of feeling oppressed, or of having limited opportunities, or of being in a low socio-economic bracket. While these no doubt contribute to the motivation to perpetrate violence, they do not trump what I think is the fundamental aspect of the violence: its grounding in religious belief.

There is something particular about the terrorist acts committed by Islamic extremists and this particularity is the religious dimension of the violence. I tend to agree with scholars like Mark Juergensmeyer that view religious terrorism as a symbolic and performative act. It is not meant to accomplish a strategic goal but rather meant to announce that those committing the violent act will not tolerate the way things are in a particular country, or in the world.

Of course, despite the discussion of how surprising it is that the suspects are all in the medical profession, there is no speculation on religious motivation, only bewilderment. “Even if I were to come across my enemy, my duty is to heal the sick…How could I remotely plan to kill and maim innocent people? I have no words to describe this,” said the chairman of the British International Doctors Association in the Times article cited above. The Washington Post takes a similar angle:

Mohammed Shafiq, 28, spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation, a leading Muslim youth organization, said it was “absolutely baffling” that doctors — professionals with good jobs and income — would be involved in violent extremism. He said Muslim leaders have been most concerned about the radicalization of disaffected and unemployed youth, and they have been urging the government to help them find jobs.

Religious belief runs deeper than socio-economic factors, and while being poor may drive someone to religion, so might a whole host of other factors. Now the second point: what does this mean for terrorism in the United States?

Op-Ed columnist for the Washington Post Eugene Robinson, posits two possible reasons why we haven’t seen a U.S. attack in almost six years. First, al-Qaeda is planning something bigger, and not wasting its time with smaller operations. Second, the U.S. does a better job of integrating its Muslim citizens than Europe.

While the second point may be true, the suspects in the Great Britain plot/attack were foreign born. Furthermore, what does “well integrated” in the U.S. mean? Granted, the Pew Forum report specifically addresses American Muslims’ feelings about extremism, but still when we think of the difference between U.S. and European Muslim populations it comes down to socio-economic status. U.S. Muslims are middle class families. European Muslims are “disaffected and unemployed” young adults. But when we see doctors perpetrating the terrorism, where does this leave our analysis? We can’t pigeonhole suspects into a particular social class or as coming from a particular educational background. This seems to be a lesson we are having a difficult time learning.

Regarding the first point, that perhaps al-Qaeda is plotting something larger, I doubt that is the case. The Post also reports that:

The next terrorist assault on the United States is likely to come through relatively unsophisticated, near-simultaneous attacks — similar to those attempted in Britain over the weekend — designed more to provoke widespread fear and panic than to cause major losses of life, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials believe.

This would be the type of symbolic violence that Juergensmeyer talks about. From the same article:

Although British investigators have not claimed al-Qaeda involvement in the latest incidents, officials here said they may constitute a “hybrid” phenomenon, in which al-Qaeda inspires and guides local groups from afar but establishes no visible operational or logistical links.

My feeling is that this accurately characterizes what happened in Great Britain and, moreover, the future of Islamic terrorism. The 9/11/06 issue of The New Yorker ran a story by Lawrence Wright titled “The Master Plan: What will the next stage of jihad be?” The article described Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian theorist of jihad whose goal was to “codify the doctrines that animated Islamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of the future could discover the cause and begin their own, spontaneous religious war.” In other words, the more organized breed of terrorist organization is now defunct, and the future is terrorist attacks initiated by individuals or autonomous groups. Suri’s teachings were published on the internet in December of 2004, perhaps the theory is finally becoming practice.

The London terror plot and the Scotland car bomb attack of the past few days are clearly the “top stories” for the weekend, as the media plays on the fear of Americans and reminds us that terrorism is still a threat in the US. But that’s not all. Fox News and top Republican presidential candidates have reminded us what UK terror is “really” about: immigration.

The self-proclaimed “terrorism expert” Rudy Giuliani has already jumped on the UK incidents as an indication of the need for tighter national security in the US, including the obligatory pouring of even more resources into the patrol efforts on the US-Mexico border. One might recall the days when Giuliani enjoyed the contributions of undocumented immigrants in NYC, and prohibited police officers from questioning about immigration status.

This morning on Fox & Friends, a “fair and balanced” debate was held about the UK terror plot/attack. When a political analyst suggested that both Giuliani and Hillary Clinton could use these incidents to their political advantage, the other guest, a Newsday columnist, quickly responded that Hillary and her fellow proponents of “amnesty,” “multilingualism,” and “multiculturalism,” are essentially the reason why terror happens, a very misguided argument in my view.

At this point, the Republicans will do just about anything to conflate immigration with terrorism. Perhaps the most irrational of these arguments thus far has come from likely Republican candidate Fred Thompson, who has even found a way to bring a Latino group under the banner of “potential terrorists.”

Thompson spoke about undocumented immigration through the Mexican border at a campaign stop last week, strangely focusing on Cuban exiles as cause for alarm, despite the fact that Cubans who arrive in the United States, under the law, are not undocumented. He said,

“If they’re coming from Cuba, where else are they coming from? And I don’t imagine they’re coming here to bring greetings from Castro. We’re living in the era of the suitcase bomb. We can’t be talking seriously about national security while that’s going on.” (Watch here.)

Who is next? Under this view, Venezuelan immigrants would surely be viewed in the same way. What about Chinese immigrants? Or will migrants from any left-learning, Islamic or otherwise “enemy nation” be viewed as spies and terrorists before they are treated as refugees?

The assumption that Cuban exiles are coming to attack the United States, rather than to flee Castro’s rule is actually counterproductive to the Republican ideology regarding Cuba, which first generation Cuban Americans overwhelmingly support.

Hillary smartly condemned his comments. Let’s hope Miami does as well. Although Cuban Americans have a history of rejecting new arrivals from the island, let alone from elsewhere in Latin America, hopefully they will recognize the systematic efforts by Republicans to bring a “criminal” and now even “terrorist” association with being a Latino immigrant in the United States.

I’m usually a fan of the Becker-Posner Blog, and occasionally of the opinions of the titled author, 7th Circuit court judge Richard Posner. He’s a prolific author who writes volumes of popular jurisprudence, including today’s piece for The New Republic defending the NSA wiretap program. What if it works, he asks? Two problems.

When Posner says that “Law in the United States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy,” I wonder why a prominent jurist like himself would not see how some (many?) value upholding the law for it’s own sake. As Jon Margolick mentioned to me earlier today, it is the reason why drug dealers get off on procedural technicalities–isn’t the important part that the law maintain its integrity, not that we advance the social policy of ridding our society of drug abuse? Years from now we want procedural justice to still mean something, and that includes making sure that the executive branch is not de facto excused from their misdeeds. Because the President is not above the law, it is indefensible to set a precedent that he may flout laws he dislikes–just because he wants to.

A second problem, as Posner alludes to, is that we can’t know the success of the program due to secrecy limitations. The results of the NSA program, including whether it has or has not thwarted attacks, cannot therefore be used in evaluating the domestic wiretapping policy. But that’s not the point: the question of successful (or even of good) policy is distinct from the question of legality. It looks like the administration (and Posner?) is trying to make the policy logically antecedent to the question of law. But if it can be shown that eavesdropping on international-domestic telephone conversations has successfully thwarted terrorist attacks, then perhaps a case can be made for expanding the legal boundaries of wiretapping: amend FISA, or have Congress authorize Bush’s program. The repugnance of the program mostly centers on how the (largely) unchecked executive branch has thwarted the limits imposed by FISA, and in the process, has probably broken the law. The architects of the program, if they knew they were breaking the law, need to be held accountable, now. I await Specter’s judiciary hearings with bated breath.

(I’m comforted by Posner’s sensible suggestion for a new rule on FISA that evidence gleaned through the wiretapping programs only be available in national security-related cases, and not, as he says, cases involving people who are defrauding the IRS. Safeguards like this, which would prevent the Bush administration from overreaching and gobbling up more law enforcement powers, make the legal use of wiretapping programs seem, at least on their face, less onerous.)

On Monday, 14 law professors and former federal government officials, including Ronald Dworkin, Laurence Tribe, and Ronald Dworkin sent a letter to congressional leaders. In it is a critique of Justice’s argument on the constitutionality of the NSA program and it worth a read.

I think my opinion on this matter would be easy to figure out. I do not want to give any lengthy commentary since there are many other blogs who have handled the matter. However, from what I have read and what I understand of constitutional law, this illegal government spying on Americans is a clear violation of individual rights. Particularly, this run around civil liberties is unnecessarily. The intelligence agency has the capacity to read your mail, your email and your telephone conversation. It does have to obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof was even relaxed after 9/11! Either way the court very rarely rejects requests making this expansion unnecessary in addition to illegal in my mind.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/12/curious-word-honor.html

You should read this post at Balkinization–it’s brilliant. In particular, it brings to the forefront one of the largest unspoken dilemmas of modern politics and philosophy: pragmatism vs. aspiration. As John McCain is quoted in the above as saying, “It’s not about who they are; it’s about who we are.” Whether or not you think torture is permissible, how we approach the problem speaks volumes about our qualities as a nation and a culture. See my previous post for more on this.

Food for thought: “Intelligence sharing between Europe and the United States certainly won’t grind to a halt but European political elites are coming under increasing pressure from their angry publics to distance themselves from any U.S. practices that infringe on human rights and international law. That spells trouble for European intelligence officers who cannot say with certainty how the intelligence they share will be used by their U.S. counterparts.” –democracyarsenal.org [emphasis mine]

Intelligence cooperation has apparently been the unspoken backbone of political goodwill between Europe and the United States, even during moments of tense policy debate. That our stance on human rights could affect that backbone is troubling as well as unforeseen.

I mention this merely to provide more context for the human rights/terrorism defense debate, which rages unabated–and apparently unprogressed–in the news. What other practical considerations ought to be included when we weigh the hefty philosophical and moral burdens of sullying our souls through torture? Such actions are, I believe, like abortion: even on those occasions when they are both permissible and better than the alternative, they are NEVER to be wished for. No one is ever either pro-abortion or pro-torture; such choices are merely, as Winston Churchill might have said, the worst options except for all the others.

Yes, the video games are to blame for the radicalization of young Muslim boys all over the world, and not radicalized communities, extremist clerics, or violent propaganda masked as religious truths. Huh? That’s what you would believe if you were to take Tom Friedman’s column from late July at face value. When I read the article I remember being more than a bit skeptical, after all we go on and on that video games don’t affect American children, yet we are somehow to believe that Islamic teenagers are dumber then the rest of us. I always assumed the biology was the same.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the resources to challenge these claims or find out more about the games, because there’s not much info. That is until Slate’s Chris Sullentrop decided to take the games for a test drive. What he found wasn’t surprising to me at all.

In Ummah Defense I, the game cited by the Wall Street Journal and Friedman, you fly a spaceship and shoot down a fleet of attacking robots. The vertically scrolling game play resembles a less sophisticated 1941 crossed with Galaga. Ummah Defense II flashes forward to 2214 and places you in the role of a man who looks like Robocop. Your task: Destroy yet another robot army, this one made up of a legion of rolling, turtlelike machines.

Yeah, I’m really seeing the violence and calls to a jihadist overthrow of the West here. As Freidman wrote:

One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world ‘finally united under the Banner of Islam’ in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player’s goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers.”

Wow, it’ be nice if he even got the games right. I wish we knew where Friedman got his information, oh yes that’s right the WSJ story that said the men involved in the 7/7 bombing frequented a bookstore that was the sole distributor of IslamGames the company who made the games he points out. This kind of inference drawing is disgusting speculation and supports the misguided points of the PATRIOT Act. They went to a bookstore, they also probably frequented a coffee shop where they discussed how much they hate the West, surely it’s something in the coffee.

Now of course, we could reasonably infer that the enemies in these games are representations of the West, but as the article points out:

It is more likely a proxy for the secular world as a whole. Some Christian groups produce their own games to compete with what they see as debased mainstream products. Maze of Destiny, with its religious lessons, seems to fit in this tradition. It’s certainly a world apart from games that let you shoot Israeli soldiers.

Ideas and words do matter in this struggle against violent extremism, absolutely, but let’s once and a while step back from the situation and look at it critically. People jump to conclusions when you question the wisdom of Freidman’s article, but sometimes we need to remember that this thing isn’t as simple as video games and books, it comes from much deeper in society, from radical elements, from dangerous rhetoric from authoritative figures, not Ummah Defense I.

The Washington Post, interviewed an unnamed military official who speculates that we can’t pullout of Iraq on the timeframe previously suggested. This is not really news per se, just the expected response. America is caught in a very difficult circumstance. Politically its becoming nearly impossible to keep troops in Iraq. So many are saying the war was a mistake, and I agree, unfortunately leaving Iraq does not change the mistake, it just creates a world of new problems. Unlike most administration policies, polling cannot dictate our actions. In a sense though, what do Americas care if Iraqis kill each other? That itself is the problem, when we retract our troops and their are startling economic and political results in Iraq and the region, most Americans will be woefully ambivalent.