Im-Politic: First Thoughts on Charlottesville

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ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, anti-semitism, Charlottesville, civil liberties, Civil War, Confederacy, Constitution, David Duke, Founding Fathers, free speech, Im-Politic, neo-Nazis, racism, Robert E. Lee, secession, slavery, treason, Trump, Virginia

It’s as tempting to offer timely thoughts about today’s Charlottesville, Virginia violence and the reactions it’s generated as it is difficult – for new developments keep taking place, and incontrovertible facts are hard to come by. That said, here are what strike me as as points worth making at present.

First, as I’ve previously written, the triggering complaint of the white nationalist/neo-Nazi/confederate revivalist/call-them-what-you-wish protest and the narrowest-gauge cause it represents should be unacceptable to all Americans who truly love their country. Confederate statues and other monuments to the rebellion (e.g., street and high school names) have no place in our national life. And removing them has nothing to do with erasing history. The history of the Civil War must of course be taught in the most intellectually honest way possible. But statues and street names etc are unmistakable efforts to honor and memorialize.

And whether you view the secession as motivated by intertwined racism and slavery issues (where in my view the bulk of the evidence points) or more legitimate federalist and states rights claims, the decision to revolt violently against the federal government was a simple act of treason, which should always be condemned in the harshest possible terms.

Moreover, please don’t respond with observations that the Founding Fathers’ ranks included slave-owners (like Washington and Jefferson) or that many subsequent American leaders were racists (like Woodrow Wilson). For slavery was, tragically, legal under the Constitution until emancipation. And as I’ve written (in the post linked above), most of the historical national figures with inadequate records on race were, first, to great extents products of their time and, second, known for playing many other roles and making many other contributions to the nation and its success.

As for the protesters’ broader supposed grievances about repressed and endangered white rights and even safety, I have no doubt that economic stresses and anxieties are at work in many cases. But feeling the need, or advisability, to fly the Confederate flag or wear the swastika simply signals a form of derangement that our society has rightly decided is beyond the pale politically and morally speaking. So public figures should decry this message and reject any association with those sending them.

Which brings us to the question of the Trump response. It was, as critics have charged, far too weak. What I can’t figure out is the “why”. Is the president a racist? He’s had too many African-American friends and supporters for that charge to stick. He and his advisers and aides also have too often argued for restricting immigration by pointing to the benefits U.S. blacks would reap.

Related anti-semitism make even less sense, given that Mr. Trump’s daughter married an orthodox Jew (who he has anointed as a top White House aide) and then converted herself to Judaism. I know that the “some of my best friends are….” argument can be and has been abused by anti-semites (as well as racists). But insisting that “some of my children and grandkids….” is much harder to dismiss.

The only explanation that makes even some sense to me (meaning of course that I’m not totally convinced) is that the president worries that a substantial part of his (largely white) base either covertly or (much likelier) subconsciously sees itself as racially repressed or marginalized, too, and would suddenly desert him if he went after the David Dukes and Richard Spencers of this country. In other words, Mr. Trump’s troubling words reflect a political calculation, not a shared bigotry.

If so, his position is not only timorous, but pathetically mistaken. Because for every hater he retains by his silence or anodyne words at times like this weekend, he risks losing many more moderates and independents who have no use for the identity-politics obsessed, and therefore intrinsically divisive, Democrats but who are disgusted by overt racists – much less neo-Nazis. In fact, Duke’s tweets today show that this arch-racist and anti-semite is infuriated by the president’s Charlottesville remarks.

More important, the president will earn much more durable support from independents and moderates – especially those who have actually lost economic ground or fear such losses – by keeping the campaign promises he made to restore living wage jobs than by even minimal pandering to prejudice.

Finally, the role of the Charlottesville police and any other law enforcement authorities tasked with handling the protests needs to be scrutinized thoroughly – along with our notions of protesters’ rights. I’m pretty certain that most Americans would agree with the right of Nazis and the like to stage a protest over the treatment of Confederate memorials (or any other reprehensible) cause, and to display symbols that should disgust all people of good will. And of course, these are Constitutionally protected rights.

But I’ve long thought that the right to protest also entails the right of protesters to be protected from those seeking to disrupt their events. In other words, once counter-protesters started physically interfering with the Nazis, the police force present should have stepped in and started making arrests. Even better, they should have taken much more effective measures to keep the counter-protesters physically apart from the protesters, to reduce the odds of violence breaking out to begin with. To my knowledge, law enforcement authorities have never been sued for such failures (not even by the American Civil Liberties Union, which admirably supported the Nazis’ etc right to demonstrate in Charlottesville). I hope the organization will consider bringing such a case in the wake of Charlottesville, if the circumstances merit this action.

For failing to establish protesters’ right to security could easily turn into an open invitation for harassment that could crimp free speech rights yet further. And what would induce the Nazis – and violence-prone lefties – to start licking their chops more eagerly?

Im-Politic: Obama Keeps Ducking the Hard Terrorism Choices

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civil liberties, David Rieff, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, immigrants, ISIS, Islam, Jeffrey Goldberg, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, refugees, terrorism, The Atlantic, The New York Times

Give President Obama credit where it’s due. His continuing willingness to expose himself to reporters’ questions contrasts strikingly and favorably with the practice of his presumptive successor, Hillary Clinton – who has almost entirely shielded herself from freewheeling give and take with the media during this presidential campaign. Unfortunately, in the process the president also keeps showing that he’s learned absolutely nothing about protecting the United States adequately against the threat of Islamic terrorism. Just look at the transcript of his Pentagon press conference last week.

As Mr. Obama made clear, he keeps showing every sign of prioritizing the (impossible) task of achieving lasting victory versus terrorist forces on Middle East battlefields over the much more feasible strategy of keeping them out of the United States.

And the president is absolutely correct to claim that, after a string of alarming victories in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has lost considerable Middle East territory as well as some of its key leaders. He’s also correct to admit – as he has repeatedly – that the group’s “military defeat will not be enough. So long as their their twisted ideology persists and drives people to violence, then groups like ISIL will keep emerging.”

But as has also repeatedly been the case, he has failed to recognize genuinely the futility of, as he described it last week, “working to counter violent extremism more broadly, including the social, economic and political factors that help fuel groups like ISIL and Al-Qaeda in the first place.” And this after how many dollars, and how many American lives, have been lost in this region over the last two decades? In an oil-rich area that has not exactly been starved for resources in recent decades?

Even stranger, in a series of interviews with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg that culminated in a lengthy and comprehensive description of the president’s foreign policy views, Goldberg came away concluding that Mr. Obama believes there is “little an American president could do to make [the Middle East] a better place” and that “the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power.” The White House has never issued a denial. So it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the president’s views on American engagement in the region have been at best completely incoherent.

At the same time, the president’s views on keeping terrorists out of the United States, and dealing more effectively with the special problems posed by America’s Muslim community, remain much more coherent – but troublingly so. For even though U.S. borders and developments inside the nation are much more controllable than events in the Middle East, Mr. Obama’s perspective is dominated by a clear-cut fatalism. As the president once again explained in last week’s press conference, he believes he’s wrestling with a moral dilemma that puts a low-ish ceiling on his ability to protect his countrymen.

On the one hand, “[P]recisely because they are less concerned about big spectacular 9/11 style attacks, because they’ve seen the degree of attention they can get with smaller scale attacks using small arms or assault rifles or in the case of Nice, France, a truck; the possibility of either a lone actor or a small cell carrying out an attack that kills people is real and that’s why our intelligence and law enforcement and military officials are all working around the clock to try to anticipate potential attacks, to obtain the threads of people who might be vulnerable to brainwashing by ISIL.”

On the other hand, however, “We are constrained here in the United States to carry out this work in a way that is consistent with our laws, and presumptions of innocence.” Moreover, “if we start making bad decisions [like] instituting offensive religious tests on who can enter the country, you know, those kinds of strategies can end up backfiring.”

The president isn’t wrong about the need to balance domestic security with civil liberties and tolerance.  But with the significant exception of the Patriot Act and its authorization for U.S. intelligence agencies to expand their electronic data-gathering programs, he seems to view the Constitutional restraints on anti-terrorism goals as an all-but-paralyzing straitjacket.

For a compelling argument that his approach is not only overly timid, but veritably childish, take a look at this recent op-ed in The New York Times by David Rieff – a progressive. I fully agree with the author’s charge that the president refuses to admit that “In any war — including a just war — we lose a certain amount of our humanity,” and that “absent some miraculous end to terrorism, in fighting it we are going to compromise some of our values.”

This critique also applies specifically to Mr. Obama’s Muslim policies both at home and abroad. Indeed, they are greatly strengthened by the (a) president’s continued insistence – in the face of all the facts and common sense – that anyone calling for any types of curbs on Muslim immigration or refugee admissions into the country is a bigot, and (b) by his determination to respond to evidence of special security problems in the domestic Muslim community by suggesting that, if anything, its members are more patriotic and greater contributors to America’s safety proportionately than the population as a whole. As I’ve explained in a previous post, the lionization of Khizr Khan shows the extent to which this tactic has spread through the ranks of Democrats and mainstream journalists – notably by those who couldn’t even define “Gold Star Family” three weeks ago.

Presidents have no greater responsibility than national defense. If Mr. Obama took that duty to heart, he’d spend less time vilifying critics of his terrorism policies and propagating misleading anecdotes about fully assimilated American Muslims, and more time figuring out (as Rieff has so eloquently urged) how to fight the war that’s clearly underway while “controlling the worst excesses” and holding on “to enough of our humanity to have a chance of clawing back the rest when the war ends….” In particular, he’d emphatically denounce Clinton’s proposal to quintuple Middle East refugee admissions — which can only greatly worsen the domestic terrorism threat. Until he does, he’ll remain vulnerable to the accusation that his major concern isn’t protecting his fellow citizens, but ducking hard choices.

Im-Politic: Shootings Prompt More Islam Denialism from Obama

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civil liberties, Dallas shootings, Im-Politic, Immigration, Islam, Middle East, Muslim Americans, Muslims, Obama, Orlando attack, radical Islam, refugees, San Bernardino attack, terrorism

The violence that’s struck America this last week should make anyone hesitant to speak out confidently about the broader racial and other implications. It’s a time when we need more reflection and less pontificating. And that’s advice that President Obama should consider taking, too.

Of course it’s the president’s job to address the nation in the wake of tragedies and outrages, especially when at least some of the major causes can be at least ameliorated by policy. Many of his words, moreover, were commendably compassionate, constructive, and uplifting. But in at least one key respect, Mr. Obama’s remarks following the police shootings in New Orleans and Minnesota, and then the deadly attacks on Dallas police on Thursday night, revealed that he’s still wishing away the distinctive threat posed to America at home by radical Islam – and by a Muslim community that remains too ambivalent about its ideology and followers.

In the president’s words:

“The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans, or the shooter in Orlando, or San Bernardino, were representative of Muslim Americans,” Obama said. “They don’t speak for us. That’s not who we are.”

The trouble is, as even this statement indicates, compared with the size of America’s African American, white, and Muslim populations, the Orlando and San Bernardino shooters were significantly more representative. Mr. Obama mentioned twice as many acts of violence carried out by Muslim Americans as by the far more numerous members of either of the other groups he specified.

Nor, it seems, is the president familiar with recent data I’ve summarized from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the New America Foundation (no Islamo-phobe group) documenting how native- and foreign-born Muslims numerically dominate the lists of those responsible for terrorism acts or arrested on terrorism charges.

In fact, it’s worth mentioning another indication of special problems in the Muslim-American community that came out in the aftermath of Orlando. In a June 20 Washington Post article, Mohammed A. Malik, a Muslim-American businessman and acquaintance of Orlando killer Omar Mateen challenged claims that his community isn’t helping American authorities fight terrorism. More strikingly, he revealed that he himself had reported Mateen to the FBI – upon learning that the latter had been watching video lectures by a radical Imam accused by the U.S. government of plotting violent attacks against the United States. and killed by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Malik says it wasn’t the first time he’d provided information to the FBI about suspicious Muslims, and all Americans should be grateful for this and similar examples of patriotism and courage. But as it turns out, this other instance concerned another young Muslim – and from the very same Florida mosque at which he and Mateen worshiped. This co-religionist, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, had become the first native American to launch a suicide attack in the Middle East.

In other words, a single U.S. congregation has produced two of the most notorious killers in recent American history. Just as important, Malik added, “We have a lot of immigrants in our community. They grew up in other countries, often with different sensibilities. A few don’t understand American culture, and they struggle to connect with their American-born or American-raised kids.”

Does President Obama, or anyone else, seriously believe that this mosque – whose imam, Malik contends, “never taught hate or radicalism” – is completely different from America’s mosques in general? In particular, do they believe that many other first generation immigrants from majority Muslim countries haven’t experienced great difficulty in assimilating into American culture and society, and that many of their children haven’t encountered these problems, too?

Actually, the president doesn’t appear to cling to these positions – at least not all the time. As I’ve documented, he’s admitted that “an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities,” and he’s scolded mainstream Muslims around the world for failing to push back hard enough against the faith’s violently and intolerantly retrograde fundamentalist strain.

But when it comes to turning this insight into policies that can make Americans safer from terrorism – like curbing immigration and refugee admissions from the troubled Muslim world – he not only backs away. He vilifies those who are demanding action.  This Islam won’t be easy to address, especially in ways that protect essential American liberties. But there’s no better way to invite more San Bernardinos and Orlandos than to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Following Up: Obama Still Deflecting Radical Islam Challenge – & Endangering America

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civil liberties, Following Up, Immigration, ISIS, Islam, Obama, Omar Mateen, Orlando, Orlando attacks, Paris attacks, profiling, radical Islam, refugees, terrorism

In yesterday’s post on the Orlando terror attack, I criticized President Obama for ignoring the Islamic extremism angle even after it was confirmed by a senior FBI official. Earlier today, he made some follow-up remarks addressing the issue. Unfortunately, although Mr. Obama took some modest steps toward linking yesterday’s shootings and similar outrages to a strand of intolerance in Islam that is anything but fringe, his gingerly treatment of the subject still indicates a strong reluctance to recognize the problem. Therefore, it’s hard to imagine him starting to support the full mix of measures likeliest to keep Americans safe.

Speaking to reporters today, the president acknowledged that “It does appear that at the last minute, [murderer Omar Mateen] announced allegiance to ISIL….” So he’s now on record as placing the atrocity in categories other than “hate crime” and “gun violence/mass shooting.” Mr. Obama also noted that ISIS and similar groups – which he has long accused of “perverting Islam” – have targeted “gays and lesbians because they believe that they do not abide by their attitudes towards sexuality.”

In addition, the president denounced – rightly in my view – those voices who seem determined to treat the policy choices facing the nation as “either/or” and who suggest that “either we think about something as terrorism and we ignore the problems with easy access to firearms or it’s all about firearms and we ignore the role, the very real role, that organizations like ISIL have in generating extremist views inside this country.”

The key question, however, is whether Mr. Obama’s analysis can justify the fundamentally new preventive measures toward which the Islamist connection unmistakably points – like more restrictive immigration policies that target (or “profile,” if you will) newcomers and visitors from heavily Muslim countries, a pause in admissions of refugees from the war-torn Middle East, and markedly greater surveillance of America’s domestic Muslim community.

The string of qualifiers that accompanied this statement signals that none of these changes is on his mind. Mr. Obama said that Mateen’s allegiance to ISIS “appeared” to have reflected a “last minute” decision. He also stated that “at this stage, we see no clear evidence that he was directed externally” and that “also, at this stage, there’s no direct evidence that he was part of a larger plot.” All these comments unavoidably – and no doubt deliberately – suggested that the link between Mateen and Islamism was the flimsiest, shallowest sort possible, and thus virtually irrelevant to his actions.

Moreover, despite the president’s realistic description of ISIS’ propaganda and recruiting capabilities inside the United States, he seems unwilling to take the next step and conclude that the terrorists’ main targets – and likeliest converts – aren’t just randomly sprinkled throughout the American population.

Mr. Obama characterized these targets as “troubled individuals or weak individuals” – which obviously is true. But ISIS and similar groups have a much more specific focus, and their successes are equally particular. They’re individuals who either are Muslim by background, who are engaged in or actively contemplating conversion, or who identify with the faith, or with certain of its precepts. Which means that America’s counter-terror approaches need to concentrate on this community. And the reality of limited resources makes some form of strategic prioritization all the more essential.

Revealingly, as I’ve previously pointed out, President Obama has admitted that extremist ideologies have resonated to a disturbing degree within mainstream Islam, and that the world’s mainstream Muslims – including presumably those in the United States – have not responded adequately. These views, expressed at a press conference in Turkey shortly after the November, 2015 Paris attacks, deserve to be presented at length:

“…I do think that Muslims around the world — religious leaders, political leaders, ordinary people — have to ask very serious questions about how did these extremist ideologies take root, even if it’s only affecting a very small fraction of the population. It is real and it is dangerous. And it has built up over time, and with social media it has now accelerated.

“And so I think, on the one hand, non-Muslims cannot stereotype, but I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we make sure that children are not being infected with this twisted notion that somehow they can kill innocent people and that that is justified by religion. And to some degree, that is something that has to come from within the Muslim community itself. And I think there have been times where there has not been enough pushback against extremism. There’s been pushback — there are some who say, well, we don’t believe in violence, but are not as willing to challenge some of the extremist thoughts or rationales for why Muslims feel oppressed. And I think those ideas have to be challenged.”

The president is correct in warning of stereotyping’s dangers. But the Orlando shooting reminds devastatingly that his record on balancing the protection of domestic Muslims’ essential liberties and the protection of all Americans’ security – by fostering such anti-extremist pushback from that community, stepping up monitoring, and strengthening immigration controls – has fallen way short.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Preliminary Thoughts About and Lessons of Paris

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2016 elections, Al Qaeda, border security, borders, Charlie Hebdo, civil liberties, Constitution, Donald Trump, France, Immigration, intelligence, ISIS, jihadism, Middle East, migrants, Mumbai attack, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris, Paris attacks, radical Islam, refugees, Robert Jackson, September 11, surveillance, terrorism

Because barely a day has passed since the news first broke of the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, caution is in order about commenting, especially about the identity of the attackers, and other crucial details of the strikes. Nonetheless, some observations can reasonably and usefully be drawn, and some important implications, including for a range of security and economic policies, can be identified.

> Except for the innocent victims and their families and friends, the Paris attacks weren’t a “tragedy,” as so many good-hearted folks have mistakenly supposed. Whether the aim is intentional or not, that term drains the event of moral content and inhibits clear thinking. In particular, it weakens the public’s determination to establish and enforce accountability – notably over the longer run, as the temptation grows to return psychologically to normality, along with shoulder-shrugging defeatist impulses. Instead, the attacks were an outrage and an atrocity. Making all efforts to prevent repeats are imperative both for self-defense and to create a better, safer world for future generations.

> Another term we need to excise from news coverage and discussion is “senseless.” The Paris attacks clearly were intended to further a political and policy agenda: sowing chaos among ISIS’ enemies the worldwide, including in the United States, and dissuading governments from joining military efforts against the group in the Middle East, or from continuing or strengthening existing efforts. Indeed, these agendas – which are sadly likely to achieve at least some degree of success – are what justify labeling the Paris attacks as acts of terror. As such, they are utterly incomparable to the kinds of mass shootings in America and elsewhere that are carried out by obviously deranged individuals whose heads are filled with heaven knows what delusional “ideas” with no chance of attracting significant support or even sympathy.

> ISIS has now credibly claimed responsibility, and both the French and U.S. (albeit with some apparent reluctance) governments agree. So there can’t be much doubt that the attacks represent the latest instance of Islamic terrorism.

> As widely noted, the Paris attacks could well mean that this Islamic terrorist challenge is entering a new phase even more dangerous than experienced so far. Its scale and intensity more closely resembled the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, India, than the more targeted strikes on the Charlie Hebdo staff and on a kosher grocery store in suburban Paris, both in January. Indeed, the City of Light was literally a war zone for several hours, as both the French military and police were called into battle.

> There’s no reason to think that ISIS – and similar groups – will stop, even for the time being, with Paris. No one should rule out equally deadly follow-on strikes elsewhere in Europe, and – though less likely due to geography – the United States.

> Mumbai, of course, was all too easy for Westerners to ignore, even though many of the victims were Westerners. But because so many were not, and because it took place in a very far away developing country that’s typically dismissed as violence-prone, it hardly amounts to wallowing in liberal guilt to acknowledge that Mumbai’s impact in Europe and North America was orders of magnitude weaker than mass killings in one of the former’s crown jewels.

> Meaning no disrespect to all the dedicated individuals in intelligence and security agencies in France, and all over Europe, but if only because attacks like those in Paris require so many accomplices and so much on-the-scene planning and related activity, it’s clear that anti-terror strategies need to be dramatically improved. For example, it’s already been confirmed that one of the attackers was a French national who had been on a French government terrorism watch list since 2010. No doubt other lapses will be revealed going forward.

> Similarly, there can’t be any reasonable doubt that border security policies in Europe and the United States will need to be strengthened. Near the body of one dead attacker at the Stade de France was found a Syrian passport showing that holder had been admitted as a refugee into Greece in early October. It’s not certain that the passport actually belonged to the attacker – as opposed to a victim – although at least one report says the document was found on the attacker’s person. Further, another report has appeared of a second such passport. And another passport found in the vicinity reportedly comes from Egypt.

Although some analysts believe these documents to be counterfeit, and carried by the attackers to boost European opposition to admitting large numbers of Middle East refugees, properly screening these migrants is clearly a major challenge because terrorist infiltrators could easily exploit the chaos surrounding many entry points. And once in a country belonging to Europe’s visa-free zone (and Greece is one of these), visitors are free to travel passport-free among 25 others (including France).

It’s also important to note that America’s own borders, especially with Mexico, aren’t exactly hermetically sealed, and that serious mistakes by its own immigration authorities made the September 11, 2001 attacks that much easier to carry out. Indeed, six of the 19 September 11 hijackers had violated various American immigration laws, but were still in the country, including two who had overstayed their visas. As a result, supporters of lenient U.S. and European immigration and refugee policies clearly don’t want to hear this, but tighter restrictions are nothing less than essential.

> In this vein, these policies are bound to become far more controversial throughout the West, and it’s hard to imagine that supporters of stronger immigration controls – especially Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump – won’t benefit politically.

> Further, since many Islamic terrorists are nationals of victim countries, more aggressive surveillance and related counter-measures are simply unavoidable. For all the vital importance of preserving civil liberties, their preservation, as always, needs to be balanced against national security considerations that clearly have again grown in importance. No freedoms are ever absolute, and in times of emergency like this, it’s crucial to remember Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s warning in a 1949 dissent that “if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

> Calls for escalating the West’s military operations against ISIS have naturally proliferated over the last 24 hours, but the goal of decisively defeating this terrorist group is no more realistic than it was before the Paris attacks. As made clear by the decisive defeat of Al Qaeda following 9/11, the Middle East remains so terminally ill on so many fronts that it will remain a breeding ground for terrorism for the foreseeable future. And since, as I have written repeatedly, America’s allies in the region are too internally weak to “step up” and provide meaningful assistance to a coalition dominated by non-Muslim outsiders, the nation’s best hope for greater security is focusing on what it can plausibly hope to control – access to its own territory.