White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Loud Silence from Islam

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A dark shadow passed over Paris, the City of Light, on Wednesday, January 7.. Well-organized, well-trained killers murdered 13 people in the name of Allah. As Shakespeare said 500 years earlier, about the heinous murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”
Indeed, recent horrors in the name of Allah have been so gruesome it is impossible to conceive the mutilated reason, the perverted concept of God’s will, and the unvarnished rage that has subverted the once admired religion.
The killers are ruthless and depraved, but those who inspire them are evil and those who tolerate them are guilty.
In 2005, when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed and riots were stirred up against the publishers, a meeting was arranged at a community room in the basement of The Washington Times. It was not organized by the newspaper but, as I recall, by an interfaith group. There were several fringe “let’s be nice” speakers before the main event.
The main event was the Danish ambassador and, to a lesser extent, myself. The ambassador spoke about life in Denmark and what the Danish government would do to understand and listen to the concerns of the Muslim community. My role was to defend and explain the Western concept of freedom of speech and the place satire. The overflow audience, which by dress and appearance was dominated by emigrants from Pakistan, was implacable.
I have spoken to some hostile audiences in my time, but this one was special: No compromise, no quarter. Nor interest in cultures other than their own. Ugly and insatiable rage came out in their questions.
They did not want to know about the values of the country that had given their brethren sanctuary, education, healthcare and a decent life. My audience only wanted to know why the blasphemers in Denmark and Norway (the cartoons were reprinted there) were not being punished. For good measure, they wanted to know why the American media was so committed to heresy against Islam. No thought that they had moved voluntarily to the United States and were enjoying three of its great freedoms: freedom to assemble, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
They wanted absolute subjection of all Western values to the dictates of Islam. They had been fired up and they were angry, self-righteous and obdurate.
In 2009, I was invited to a conference of world religions in Astana, Kazakhstan. There were maybe 100 religions present, but at a featured session the conference degenerated into an Islamic diatribe against sexuality and the treatment of women (mostly in advertising) in the West. No dialogue. No discussion. Absolute certainty.
I mention this because of the reaction to the barbarity in Paris, and to a string of other barbarous murders across the world, from Muslims has been so muted.
“Je Suis Charlie” said millions of people in dozens of countries in sympathy with the murdered journalists and with their fight for press freedom. From Muslim leaders in the West, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the United States, there were statements of condemnation but no sense of outrage. From the bulk of the followers of Islam there was nothing. There never is. Not when innocent children are shot in their schools, or when aid workers are beheaded, or when or when satirical journalists are executed. The Muslim multitudes have acquiesced to evil.
When will those who believe deeply in Islam take to the streets to denounce the excesses of the few? After the horror in Paris, British Muslims took to the BBC to mildly criticize the murders, but more to vigorously demand a better deal for Muslims in Britain.
The medieval certainty of the leadership of Islam is endorsed by the silence of its congregants. The silence of the millions gives a kind of absolution to the extremists, intoxicated with fervor and hate. It will all go on until the good Muslims stand up and are heard. The guilt of silence hangs over Islam. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 

Beware the Armchair Terrorist

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Terrorism isn’t what it used to be. Disruptive technology is at work, and terrorism is much more threatening than it was.

The long-running, terrorist wars of the last century – like those of the Palestinians, the Basques in Spain, or the Kurds in Turkey – were relatively contained, both in the fields of operation and the political motivations.

The new face of terrorism is more awful, more random, and has little of the political purpose of terrorism of the past, however terrible its consequences were.

A new generation of robots is coming, which will make remotely controlled terrorism a real threat throughout the world. Add to that threat the profound difference in terrorism motivation.

Yesterday’s terrorism, though heinous, could claim high purpose: It was wholesale terrorism with political goals to be attained by murder and destruction of civilian targets. Today’s terrorism, by contrast, is increasingly retail, motivated by hatred and revenge. Often the motivation is more religious than nationalistic. The 9/11 attacks were the harbinger of this new terrorism.

Now take blind, irrational hatred, as in the Middle East, mix it with killer robots technology, and you have a huge global threat.

In May, the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons convened a first-ever meeting of experts in Geneva to discuss Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which could be the start of a wave of anonymous killing across continents and oceans.

These new robotic weapons can do everything that a human with a bomb or improvised explosive can do. The old brake on terrorism — that the terrorist would be caught or, more likely, be killed in the attack — could be over. The age of the armchair terrorist is at hand.

We have all seen the carnage from a simple bomb made from fuel oil and fertilizer. Now add to that the possibility that bombs and other weapons could be made and stored for future detonation using mobile phone technology; or that remotely operated vehicles could drive down a street with machine guns blazing.

Then there are drones. The United States has pioneered the highly sophisticated Predator — remotely-piloted vehicles that can destroy a target across continents and oceans with precision. But non-lethal drones are doing all sorts of work, from examining pipelines to determining the views from potential skyscrapers in New York.

Not only will tomorrow’s terrorists have farther reach, but they will also have the Internet to create chaos. Imagine a Web whisper about a drone armed with biological or chemical agents flying over a big city, its effects magnified by public panic. Likewise, a drone armed with a dirty nuclear weapon – its impact is likely to be quite limited, but the public panic over radiation could cause severe incident.

Israel may have been more panicked over the appearance of a drone from Gaza than the rockets that the Iron Dome missile system took out. A slow-moving drone at rooftop level might one day be a greater threat than a fusillade of high-flying rockets.

The late James Schlesinger, a former Defense secretary and CIA director, liked to discuss the British Empire with me and how it had held together. Because I had grown up in a British colony, he thought I could tell him.

The answer is a combination of economics, psychology and formation before the worldwide proliferation of small arms and explosives. It was fundamental after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 that weapons be kept strictly in the hands of the British. African regiments and police, for example, were seldom armed, and then only for special purposes.

Schlesinger emphasized that all arms developments demanded further developments, because your enemy would soon catch up with you. This has happened throughout history: The British invented the tank in World War I, the Germans perfected it in World War II and overran Europe with its Panzer divisions.

Those who hate the West may use its own technologies to attack it at random with remote-controlled weapons, mobile phones, Google maps, and vehicles invented in America. Disruptive technologies are coming to terrorism — and that’s a horror. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Anti-terrorism Industry Eyes Private Aviation

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A disturbed man, Joseph Andrew Stack, flies a single-engine Piper airplane into a Texas federal office building. He kills himself and an IRS worker. It is tragic and awful – and it points up vulnerability in our society that could be exploited by terrorists. But it is not a reason to impose new restrictions on private flying.

General aviation–the blanket term given to everything that is not a scheduled airline or cargo flight–has not to this point in time been subject to onerous security. Yet there are those calling for a security regime to be introduced after the Texas incident.

To apply even modest security on general aviation would be a daunting task because airplanes fly from small airports to big ones; and they fly 24 hours a day. Some are light aircraft like Stack’s and others are corporate jets and charter aircraft, all the way up to airline size.

Charter companies and corporations could take the hit from expensive security. But it would mortally wound private flying and not increase security at all. Elaborate evasions–such as flying from deserted roads, farms and abandoned airfields–might increase. What now happens in the light would happen in the dark.

Here I should declare that I have held a private pilot’s license for nearly 40 years, although I no longer take to the air as I once did (whenever possible).

The aviation community has always known that airplanes are easily used as weapons in the hands of suicidal pilots or if rigged with off-the-shelf technology. To turn a light aircraft into a crude missile you need purpose, know-how and access to a hobby shop or an electronics retailer in the local mall.

Over the years, I have heard many discussions on what you can cause an unmanned aircraft to do. No one was planning to do so, but it is a subject that used to come up from time to time in pilots’ lounges: airport facilities where pilots hang out, get weather briefings or just to tell stories of derring-do.

Pilots belong to a freemasonry that binds people of disparate backgrounds together in a common love of aviation and common bad experiences. Horseman and boaters enjoy something similar but not with the depth and passion that unites pilots, whether they are weekend stick jocks (their term for themselves) or former military pilots, who have done extraordinary things and now fly for the airlines or just fly privately.

Pilots tend to revere anything that leaves the ground and to know that part of the thrill is the high price that will be paid if things go wrong. As Walter Hinton wrote in 1926: “Recently, a man asked whether the business of flying ever could be regulated by rules and statutes. I doubt it. Not that flying men are lawless. No one realizes better than they the need for discipline. But they have learned discipline through constant contact with two of the oldest statutes in the universe–the law of gravity and the law of self-preservation. Ten feet off the ground these two laws supersede all others and there is little hope of their repeal.”

At Barron Hilton’s ranch in Yerington, Nev., I saw astronauts riding in gliders, hot air balloons, as happy as they were going into space. Every form of flight deserves the same respect as another. The price of failure is the same: death.

One of the great freedoms in America is that anyone can learn to fly and can fly from the smallest airport; really just a field that has been surveyed and leveled to JFK or LAX. You will need a reservation to land, but you can do it.

Aviation is truly one of the last egalitarian pursuits. You can put passengers through a metal detector at the general aviation terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport, but what about a farm in Kansas?

One of the many firms that is part of the anti-terrorism industry, STRATFOR, has been proselytizing about the dangers of private aviation. Sure there is a remote danger there, as there is with the availability guns or the vulnerability of city water supplies.

Flying is one of the great freedoms. And to those who are lucky enough to fly, it is the supreme achievement in the ascent of man. To curtail it is to make a terrorist somewhere chortle. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Danger Posed by ‘The Enemy Within’

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In a time of terrorism, the enemy within is the most pernicious.

He is the terrorist who can strike at any time. He is the good neighbor who harbors hate. He is he loner who craves to be part of something larger than his own life promises.

Most disturbingly, he is probably a third or fourth generation immigrant.

He is the lethal misfit.

He is also the unique product of the modern world: The immigrant who doesn’t assimilate into the society in which he lives, but connects with the world of his ancestors through technology. He may be a Nigerian youth living in London, Madrid, or Houston, but in his mind he lives in Nigeria because technology makes it possible to do so.

Britain is filled with pockets of immigrants who choose not to assimilate, enjoy the privileges of British society, and deny their nationality.

A few years ago I met a young woman in Doha, Qatar, who covered her head with a scarf and spoke with an English accent.

“Oh, you’re English,” I said, thinking we might talk about the old country.

Stiffly, she said, “I was born there, but I am an Arab.”

Before taking a job with Al Jazeera’s Web site in Doha, she had never been out of England. But psychologically, she had grown up in the Middle East and was indifferent to the culture and the people who had taken in her family and educated her with tax money. She closed her ears in school and opened them in her local mosque. She is typical of immigrant children from Houston to Rome and from Toronto to Sydney, alienated by their own intent, angry and vulnerable.

When America’s immigrants were pouring in through Ellis Island, N.Y., they were coming to a new life; and however hard, it was going to be an American life. Sentimentally, they might sing rebel Irish songs in Boston, dance the polka in St. Paul, Minn., and mix the marinara sauce in Hoboken, N.J., but the tickets that brought them here were one-way tickets. The only contact with the world they had left was by slow, sea-borne letters.

Now, with technology, all immigrants’ tickets to America are essentially roundtrip tickets. Immigrants no longer have to consider assimilation as a worthy or a necessary goal.

There are reasons of national unity to work against the Balkanization of America. However, the clear and present danger is from those likely to fall prey to the malicious excesses of politics or religion.

It is frightening that a wealthy young man from Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, tried to blow up an inbound airliner on Christmas Day. But the home-grown rebel–like the five, middle-class young men who are now being held in Pakistan–is more concerning.

Gradually, screening of passengers will improve and the intelligence community will handle information better. In the meantime what are we, and other nations like Britain, to do about our citizens who hate the lands that have given them so much? Spy on our neighbors? Inform on our friends?

If we do those things, the enemy within will have won; and if we don’t, the enemy within may win with an act of terrorism. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate