I’m really not kidding, I’m not making this up — watch the video yourselves
Senator Marco Rubio openly compares Muslims to Nazis. Here are his words (0:15-0:23, emphasis mine):
That would be like saying we weren’t at war with Nazis, because we were afraid to offend some Germans who may have been members of the Nazi Party but weren’t violent themselves.
The more accurate analogy, if Mr. Rubio wants to go there, is between Muslims and Christians, and between radical jihadists and Nazis. We were NOT at war with Christians in WWII, and no public figure would DARE to paint Christianity and Christians with the “Nazi” brush.
Why do we allow national public figures to make outrageously discriminatory comments like this without characterizing such hate-speech for what it is? Mr. Rubio is not just a candidate for President, he is a sitting United States Senator.
Are we entering yet another decade of American hate-speech broadcast throughout the world as our national public figures stumble over each other in their pandering to our most vile and base instincts?
In this crucial time after a high-profile attack, our national public figures shape the world that we all must share for decades to come. It is a shameful embarrassment to EVERY American that this hateful bigot is a contender for the Presidency.
Ms. Clinton, together with the Obama administration, is doing absolutely the right thing to avoid characterizing the perpetrators of these attacks as “Muslim” anything. The perpetrators are religious terrorists. They are extremists whose religious fervor compels them to become murderous sociopaths because their “god” tells to. They are exploited by political agents who seek power, profit, and influence from the resulting chaos and mayhem.
I applaud the courage of Ms. Clinton to stand by doing the right thing. I categorically condemn the GOP for its bigoted hate-speech, and I condemn the mainstream media for its reluctance to characterize hate-speech like this for what it is.
The GOP has been pandering to those most base and most vile elements of our culture for decades. It is therefore not surprising that the party’s candidates exemplify the very worst aspects of today’s American culture. America has always had racists, bigots, and xenophobes. We have not always elevated them to high public office.
The GOP is shaming America today, and it causes me great pain as an American who loves my country.
We could say we were at war with Germany even if some Germans weren’t big fans of the Nazis because it was country vs. country. Unfortunately in the other theater we did make the mistake of expanding war with Japan to mean war with the Japanese, and therefore detained them in camps. I certainly agree with the general thrust of your diary so I hope you take this as elaboration rather than argument.
Particularly when commentators like Coulter and Malkin are still welcomed into the mainstream conservative fold even though they endorsed similar internment camps for Muslim Americans in our time. I would add their patron saint President Reagan apologized for the Japanese internment and signed reparations for it, part of that apology is ensuring such sentiments never happen again in this country. The last thing we want to say is that we are at war with Islam. That just plays into the hands of these extremists, butchering innocents in their perversion of Islam.
… Churchill, in particular, made it a deliberate point of English v German and Roosevelt, et al, did nothing whatsoever to dissuade anyone of this view. This is widely documented. In fact, we call June 6 1944 ‘D-Day’ to avoid calling it what it really was: an allied invasion of France. Yeah, it was occupied France, but it was France nonetheless. We call it ‘D-Day’ because we can’t call it an invasion of Germany, much as we’d like to… Even today, historians –who should know better– call the 1941 incursion into eastern Poland a German “invasion of the Soviet Union”… why, because, at the time, people wanted to gin up sympathy for the Soviets against the Germans.
I don’t think it’s all that elaborate. A great deal of ‘Germans are bad’ went on, here and abroad and I don’t know that an abstract and detached view of the various ‘states actors’ made it all that easier, or clearer.
…and everyone knew what it meant. Yes, we invaded Nazi-occupied France. I’m not aware of anyone on our side being ashamed of or apologizing for it. Yes, there was anti-German sentiment here, but it did not reach nearly the levels of anti-Japanese sentiment which is the point I was trying to make. Eastern Poland was in fact Soviet-occupied at the time thanks to Molotov-Ribbontrop and the Nazi invasion did make it almost to Moscow.
“D-Day”, and H-Hour (and M-minute, for that matter) are military jargon for the timing of an operation, not euphemisms for “invasion”.
Last I heard, it is (and was) also called the Normandy Invasion, or, as in the case of this official 1944 newsreel, the Invasion of Europe.
The 1941 “incursion” didn’t stop at the Soviet border. Had it done so, you might have a point.
Finally, the “Germans are bad” trope did happen a lot during the First World War, but American WWII homefront propaganda focused more on opposing Nazi and fascist ideology than Germans per se.
Now, the case of the Japanese (and Japanese-Americans) was something else entirely…,
… and that’s what we call it. We use ‘military jargon’ because we don’t, or can’t, use other jargon. We don’t name the attack on Pearl Harbor using military jargon. What other military action, in the imagination of the general public, makes use of the ‘military jargon??” We don’t call most any military action by it’s ‘military jargon.’ It’s not the case we call it ‘D-Day’ because that’s what it is… we call it ‘D-Day’ because we aren’t able, or willing, to call it something else entirely. That’s a clue.
I repeat: there was no reluctance to call the events of June 6, 1944 an invasion, although, for what it’s worth, Eisenhower also called it a crusade.
Apropos military jargon: Some (think “collateral damage”) are euphemisms; most are in-house terms, such as one will find in any profession; some, such as “D-Day”, “H-Hour”, etc. have precise meanings. More to the point – and take another look at the newsreel, in particular the reference to bombing French factories – neither civilian or military authorities in 1944 were squeamish about inflicting death.
Nor was Barack Obama, who said the following during the October 8 Presidential debate:
There is less rhetorical disinclination to avoid inflicting death than you might think.
The administration is carefully and correctly avoiding language that will create the impression that we are targeting Muslims. I don’t think anybody is squeamish about inflicting death.
The many civilized Muslim nations are our most valuable allies in minimizing or reducing the threat presented by these terrorists. It is therefore crucially important that they understand that we do not seek to wage war on the religion practiced by virtually their entire populace.
This same crucial reality is why the GOP statements are so offensive.
…my points upthread were limited to the political semantics of the Normandy invasion. I cited the 2008 Obama quote to reinforce my position that wartime rhetoric is not as squeamish, nor euphemism-prone, as some might think.
As an aside, even George W. Bush avoided demonizing Islam and its adherents. This Republican rhetorical race to the bottom since Trump’s entry into the race is what makes these statements not just offensive, but dangerous.
These chuckleheads are basically reinforcing Salafist propaganda, and the hell with national security.
I’ve seen academic treatises that address this point.
Our term for the European enemy in WWII was “Nazi”, a political word. Our term for the Asian enemy in WWII was “Jap”, a racist word. Later, our enemies in Vietnam were “Gooks”, another racist word.
In WWII, our European enemy was so much like ourselves that we resisted our temptation to use racist language to describe them. We had no similar reluctance towards our Japanese enemy.
It is true that German-Americans were suspect, especially at the start of the war. We did not, however, round them up and move them to concentration camps like we did to our Japanese-American citizens.
The major point, though, is that WWII was NOT a religious war. We did not enter WWII because of flagrant Nazi anti-Semitism.
…why calling people from Japan Japs is inherently racist while calling people from Poland Poles, people from Finland Fins, and people from Sweden Swedes are OK. In all cases it is simply the first syllable of the country’s name. I guess given that in English it means something else we probably don’t want to call people from Germany Germs, however:)
The point is that our colloquial term for our European enemy was a POLITICAL designation, while our colloquial term for our Asian enemy referred to their racial/ethnic identity (“Jap”).
We fought a “Nazi” enemy in Europe, we fought a “Japanese” enemy in the Pacific.
I’m not aware of what if any particular faction was in charge of Japan at the time. It is a bit of a tangent, but something I have been curious about. Add Scotland (Scots) and Turkey (Turks) to the list while we’re at it.
Emperor Hirohito, whose reign began in 1926, was in power. After the devastating 1926 Tokyo earthquake, the Japanese military began a period of ascendancy and was a strong influence on Japanese policy.
I invite you to spend more time with academic sources like this to better understand the role that racism played in US propaganda during WWII.
In any case, as you observe, this is a tangent from the ugly reality of the bigoted hate speech our GOP now directs towards the entire Muslim faith tradition.
Rubio is trying to collect political points, he had been the one punching the hawkish ticket on the R stage the other night.
But I beg to differ regarding this quote: “we were NOT at war with Christians in WWII”. That’s our image of it now. Back then, WW2 was coached in highly religious terms, as a Christian crusade.
Since we are actually at war with Islamic extremists. Other religious extremists exist in other faiths, but they aren’t causing mass casualties worldwide, nor do they have the organization and sophistication, not to mention easy access to financing as some of these groups. In many ways, this is a war within Islam that effects those of us outside of it. But it’s not a war with Islam itself, and saying as lefties like Maher and Dawkins and righties like Rubio and Malkin-that Islam itself is the enemy-is quite problematic.
Now it’s easy to see how Nazism was obviously a rejection of Christianity, but it played on historically Lutheran sentiments of anti semitism always at the surface of German Christianity. It was a war within the German church between the free church of Bonhoeffer and Barth and the tightly controlled Reichkirk. People forget Hitler youths were organized in church basements and Hitler himself was often depicted as a praying Christian, despite the fact that he was nothing close to that.
Cutting off the Gulf state financiers, stopping the spread of extreme Sunnism from the GCC, and getting Iran to preach it’s Shia faith within its borders, are all hard, largely diplomatic or relying on intelligence oriented law enforcement actions directed to the money trail. I’m more open than I was Thursday to a multinational ground campaign against ISIL positions, but I think relying on the military alone is throwing money and lives down a pit, especially if we go in without the massive multinational force and sustained commitment lacking in all our other 21st century endeavors.
… I don’t know that Bonhoeffer would have started the Confessing Church had not the Nazis wholly usurped the inner workings of the state Lutheran Church. I would not, therefore, characterize is it as a war between two, more or less, equally opposed theological facets (a notion that relies upon an understanding of church and state the you are well versed but one which Germans never possessed…). It is, rather, a creation of one (Confessing Church) in reaction to the usurpation and capitulation of the other (Lutheran Church).
The Lutheran Church of Nazi Germany was not, you see, strong enough to withstand the political onslaught of the Nazis. Bonhoeffer was, but many were not.
We are not, nor is France — nor is anybody, for that matter — at “war with Islamic extremists”. We are at war with POLITICAL extremists. The use vaguely Islamic rhetoric, but they are wholly political both in their aims and in their tactics. The best way to help Islam is not to try, in a political fight, to help Islam.
And there is a distinction between extremist politicized Islam and Marxist extremists or politicized Catholicism in Northern Ireland. The former example has a global recruiting network, overt and covert access to oil capital, and a need to control territory. All three of these characteristics make them different from other terrorist groups, even other more localized Islamic groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, or MILF.
Those groups are waging local campaigns that have a more traditional political dimension in seeking control over a specific state and fighting a particular state actor such as Israel or the Philippines government. In that sense, these Muslkm groups are closer to the Kurds, the Tamils, or the IRA than they are to ISIL.
ISIL is a different beast, combining the anti-globalist ambitions of Al Qaeda with a need to control, expand, and maintain territorial governance. I think it is a mistake to argue, as Sen. Rubio has, that ISIL represents all of Islam and we are engaged in some kind of holy war between secular Judeo Christian inspired West and a barbarian horde in the Islamic world. A tragic and deadly mistake. It is also mistake to downplay or pretend the Islamic component is irrelevant. Bagdhadi would have no political power if people didn’t sincerely believe he was descended from the Prophet and the rightful caliph, his state appeals to the messianic vision of a particular strain of a particular religion.
This would be like downplaying the Christian eschatological components to David Koresh or how Mormon texts are used to justify the pedophile cultist Warren Jeffs. The vast majority of adherents to either faith reject these politicized prophets, but the reason they have political power is entangled with the religious beliefs and devotions unique to that faith.
…is a perfect example of why I try to avoid religious labels in many of these conflicts. It’s not Catholics vs. Protestants. It’s not a theological dispute. They weren’t at each other’s throats over the Real Presence in the Eucharist or the propriety of honoring the Virgin Mary, at least in modern times. It was pro-Irish vs. pro-British which happened to strongly correlate to Catholic and Protestant respectively. That is why there was the running joke about whether a declared atheist were a “Catholic atheist” or a “Protestant atheist” and why foreigners of either persuasion were generally not targeted for religious belief.
Even in the Middle East it is not Jews vs. Muslims in the sense of who has the better divine revelation, but rather Israelis vs. Arabs over the control of territory.
That’s what’s scary. It’s a religious conviction that they have a right to govern their territory in a religious way, and the only way to maintain the territory is to increase it. And they’ve been committing genocidal attacks against the religious minorities there.
It’s hard. The whole thing is a mess, which shows the folly of the initial invasion and why it’s proponents should not be placed back in power. I really feel for the President-he is trying to hold the war hawks at bay while also doing what he can within reason to protect us, and it’s not an easy line to straddle.
We’ve had a lot of debates about liberalism v. realism, but in my view, what happens in France is in our direct national interest. Those ties are the longest and most closely held in our history, they were there for us on 9/11 and we should be there with them today. This isn’t a war of choice, but a response to a severe attack. Adjusted for population, it was as devastating as 9/11. My view has always been, we go to war to protect ourselves and our allies if they are attacked. It’s why I would’ve backed the first Gulf War and why I am a bit more hawkish on China and Russia than others here. But Iran and Assad, as bad as they are, have to be brought to the table. We can’t beat them and beat ISIL. We worked with Stalin to beat Hitler, and none of these guys are as evil as Stalin.
For you, does this just include the military organizers of this under the Bush administration or does it also extend to those who voted for the invasion – such as Secretary Clinton?
In light of the recent developments, it’s increasingly hard to swallow the “it was a mistake” response regarding her earlier support. Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but when you make catastrophic, world-changing mistakes, should we accept that as an answer and move on?
…I place this squarely at the feet of those who pushed for it and led it, and mostly absolve those who simply voted to authorize it. We cannot hold the latter responsible for how it was actually carried out, which I believe Clinton was quite critical of, and certainly not try to make it forever disqualifying. I didn’t like the war at the time either, but I do remember the political context and I’m not complaining too loudly that Saddam is gone.
For other votes, I can accept the apologies, but not this one. The Iraq War was so obviously a mistake that it’s not enough to later criticize its handling.
So many in Congress saw how bad the idea was (except for those planning runs for higher office it seems) that their votes can and should always lead to questions in their judgment. It’s the most serious vote a legislator can ever take.
The vote came before BMG existed, but I wonder how many regular readers and contributors here supported the war. Not many, I suspect.
On the other hand, how many agreed with Ted Kennedy who called his vote against the use of force the best vote he ever took in the Senate?
That quote perfectly lays out the issues before those in Congress. The imminent threat concern was manufactured and overstated, but what about everything else in the second half of his quote in terms of the cost of the war? Congresspeople who voted for the invasion without better answers to those questions weren’t even doing the basics of their job, or they were much too eager to engage the United States in war – both of which, for me, are disqualifying. And I don’t accept “evolutions” on war votes.
I think I’d have voted for Humphrey over Nixon in 68′, which may be similar to the choice we get in November. Somebody who went from war cheerleader to critic come lately, solid on domestic and social issues. But if that’s a deal breaker for you, I can respect and admire such a position, even if it’s one I no longer share.
ISIL is the direct result of our failure to stabilize and maintain Iraq after we invaded, and the Bush administrations abject disinterest in any post-war planning or preparation. The buck stops there. Hillary said her vote was a mistake, but this is real life, and history doesn’t have a replay function.
So having made this mistake, how do we best fix it? Do we withdraw all our troops and let the Sunni and Shia duke it out in a genocidal conflict for the Middle East? Do we continue managing it with an air campaign and arms to rebels campaign that has been an abject failure at preventing attacks against Western homelands or changing the situation in Syria?
I don’t know. I honestly do not have the answer for this. I respect the fact that the President chastised those who claim to have easy answers that are really advancing fantasy solutions unworkable in the real world, since it is real Americans who will die if we go to war. Prior interventions have made us less safe. Yet continuing the status quo will fail to prevent the next Paris. We have to concede that this is also true. Something has changed. So what should our response be? I think that is something neither the current President or any of the folks trying to be the next one have an answer to.
I’m having trouble deciding whether that might have averted war or if it’s one of history’s scariest counterfactuals.
I would think that the followers of the “Rightly Guided Caliphs”, the Sunnis would be chomping at the bit to purge their ranks of these misguided criminals ISIL who are bringing such shame to their religion. There are a Billion good guys right, they should be able to quickly dispatch and bring to justice the 32,000 who are currently causing so much pain.
Whether the warriors are “rightly-guided Caliphs” or American GIs, an invading horde of warriors accompanied by days or weeks of aerial “shock and awe” is going to make the problem worse, not better. An attempt to do so will create 10, 100, or 1,000 Jihadists for each of those “32,000” that we blame for causing so much pain.
Each of the three Abrahamic faith traditions has grown and multiplied during periods of religious war. Religious war and martyrdom HELPS, not hurts, these traditions. The earliest Christian Celts created “white martyrdom” because there were no Roman persecutors to create “red martyrs”. Understanding that reality is key to understanding the motivation for this Jihad.
This is why an “auto-immune disorder” is a better metaphor than war.
America has suffered about THIRTY THOUSAND deaths per year from gun violence since 2001, for a total of more then FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND deaths from 2001 through 2013. We suffered 3,380 deaths from terrorism during that same time — a period that includes the WTC bombings (surely an anomaly). We suffered more than ONE HUNDRED innocent lives lost from gun violence for every victim of terrorism since the turn of the century.
Our focus on “terrorism” is a pathology that blinds us to the real threats to our security that surround us.
Ridding our cities of guns and shutting down the factories of our gun manufacturers will do FAR MORE to increase our ACTUAL national security than ANY action we take against ISIS or terrorism.
The biggest argument in favor of gun control is that our loose gun laws make it insanely easy for terrorists of any stripe to commit mass murder attacks. And we’ve lost more than Paris did during this presidency to lone wolf attackers. All male, all but three white. None Arab or Muslim as far as I know.
That said, I think ISIL is a threat. It’s proven me and the President wrong and is entering a new phase where it exports its fighters and tactics abroad, completely undermining the containment strategy. So I would argue we will have to rethink it, but I also agree committing to a massive ground invasion would likely make the issue first. Something we can all agree on should be immediately cutting their funding and cracking down on the Turks buying ISIL oil and the Gulf states looking the other way while prominent citizens and clergy in their country fund them. Finding a diplomatic solution to the Iran-Saudi proxy war would also make a world of difference.
We could pursue those options with an expanded military campaign, but I worry the military option is the only one policy makers will consider. Cutting their funding would be my top priority. No way they get these kinds of passports or access to the West without heavy financing from wealthy people whose assets we should immediately seize.
I agree that these issues are linked.
I also agree that ISIS is a threat, but not nearly so great a threat as the current media and political hysteria would have us believe. That’s why I offer gun violence for comparison.
We have, for decades, accepted a 100-fold worse death rate for guns as a tolerable price to pay to preserve our “right” to own weapons. We accept a similar annual death toll on our highways as a tolerable price to pay for our much-cherished right to own and drive our automobiles.
I view the death toll from terrorist attacks, including ISIS, in a similar vein. In my view, it is a tolerable price to pay to preserve our rights of free exercise of religion, free speech, freedom of assembly, and most importantly freedom from government surveillance.
If saving American lives is our goal in “fighting terrorism”, I strongly believe that we should cut our annual toll from gun violence one hundred fold. When — and only when — the death toll from terrorism is comparable to the death toll from gun violence, I will be more inclined to focus on terrorism.
I believe we should take whatever steps are necessary and appropriate within a legal PEACETIME framework of national and international law. I believe we should pursue and capture terrorist organizers as we do any other criminal organization.
In that context, I believe we should acknowledge that the constitutional rights and freedoms that we hold dear as Americans have ALWAYS come at a price — because we value those rights and freedoms, I believe we should be willing pay that price rather than shred our rights and freedoms as we have been all too eager to do since 9/11.
The price of attempting to cure the disease of terrorism is not nearly worth the cost in our rights and freedoms that an effective intervention requires.
I fear our American police state FAR MORE than I fear even the most virulent ISIS terrorist.
I strongly feel that the number of lives lost to gun violence is intolerable and the government has a core responsibility to mitigate against it. The Times piece on gun trafficking should at least be food for thought for law and order conservatives. They would favor a streamlined chain of command, intelligence gathering, sharing of information, and preventing one state’s loopholes from enabling a mass murder in another state if you called it terrorism or linked it to Islamic extremism.
Yet, not a peep from the Chertoffs, Rudy Guiliani’s, or Tom Ridges about that. They can and should be enlisted in the gun control argument, and I give credit to Bill Kristol and Bill Bratton for making that connection. On this issue, we are the pro law enforcement party, and it’s fair to say the GOP and NRA want terrorists to have easy access to arms. I think that’s a talking point we shouldn’t abandon, and one I am confident Hillary Clinton has the experience to make.
On the second point, while I agree with the civil liberties concerns and enemy recruitment concerns about the overreach of government agencies post 9/11, I also think they have been proven to be widely ineffective at preventing incidents like this. You can’t replace smart and small intel efforts on the ground level with big, bloated, centralize electronics eavesdropping.
We should be sending in double agents and local allies to gather information at the source or online to ferret out the real recruiters operating on social media. Unfortunately, the CIA post 9/11 has become obsessed with the targeted assassination program of the drone campaign, and is no longer devoting assets to classic intelligence gathering techniques. This was evident with the bin Laden hunt, where even the movie they approved demonstrated how few resources and individuals they devoted to capturing public enemy #1. Raids like that where we get our man with pin point accuracy and kill no civilians should be the rule rather than the exception.
We should want Russian experts, and we have a shortage. We should want more Farsi, Pashtun, Arabic, and Turkish speakers and we have a shortage. So I would actually invest the massive amount of money we are wasting on ineffective window dressing like the TSA and NSA and direct it instead to recruiting effective individuals who have the intelligence and the skills to make key connections. And that’s where progressives should take the conversation-sadly, we lose on the liberty arguments when it comes to this issue. We can wage a smarter war that actually allows us to enjoy more freedom, and that is what I would argue.
I agree about human intelligence.
I still oppose the premise that “we can wage a smarter war”. Call it an “intervention”. Call it a “police action”.
I feel strongly that we need to STOP calling it a “war”, because of the enormous amount of domestic and international baggage that comes along with that choice.
I think War on Terror, or whatever the Obama administration renamed it, is a terribly useless phrase. As someone at the time said, you can’t declare war on a noun, or in this case, on a tactic. And I think the rabbit hole of a never ending, always evolving and expanding war has done a lot to hurt us, our civil liberties, and our foreign policy. Incalculable and possibly irrevocable damage.
That said, ISIL is the odd terrorist group that also seeks statehood. It’s a non state actor controlling territory and deriving it’s legitimacy from control of that territory. I’ve long felt it’s time we scrapped the original AUMF and Patriot Act, close Gitmo, and move forward to a new phase of post-9/11 American life. That said, I think ISIL, while the result of our mistakes in Iraq, is a cancer that has to be eradicated from the world stage. And I think it is fair for the French government to say, after Friday, that it is at war with this specific organization and will use the powers of the state to defeat it.
Now a full scale ground invasion is probably not the most effective means of eradicating ISIL, but it is clear that the containment strategy I lauded and Obama continues to insist is working, has failed, and unlike car accidents or even school shootings, these kinds of events are an example of an external threat projecting it’s power on friendly soil. I have faith that this event may have galvanized all the actors responsible for ISIS to finally do something to clean up after it. Kerry may have a breakthrough on Syria. If we can end their civil war, we largely end ISIL’s rationale for existing and isolate it.
A thug who terrorizes, beats, or kills an innocent is an immediate threat to my security. I don’t care whether that thug is a “terrorist” imported from some other country or a locally-born veteran with thirty years on the Medford, MA police force. I really don’t care.
I am, frankly, MORE disturbed by home-grown maniacs shooting up schools with weapons provided by their parents than I am by any Jihadist. I have two children in college. I have a right to expect that they will not be gunned down while they’re on campus. I categorically reject the premise that the Paris attacks are in any way more important, more grave, or more threatening. They are not. They just aren’t. We can’t stop religious crazies from deciding that their “god” wants them to kill people. We most certainly CAN stop school shooters from acquiring automatic weapons from their parents (or children taking shotguns from un-locked cabinets in their home in order to murder other children).
Yes, ISIS is a cancer that must be eradicated. I think the decision of France to declare itself at war only makes an already bad situation worse. I think our job is to lead the western world by being calm, low-key, and methodical. Our job is to NOT declare war, NOT stoke the fires of bigotry by blaming every Muslim, NOT stoke our own hysteria by turning our backs on people who have already been terrorized by ISIS, and NOT further dismantle the very freedoms that make us a target in the first place.
War is NOT the answer.
I disagree with that standard. To wit, it is more logical than the opposite idea. That we can do nothing to stop gun crazed maniacs but have to suspend the Constitution if that gun crazed maniac happens to be a brown Muslim man intent on killing people rather than a racist, misogynist, or crazy white kite. I totally agree with you that this double standard is ill considered. But your inversion of this trope still posits that we can’t do anything to stop a subset of gun toting maniacs from killing Americans. And I believe we can. and do so in a way that doesn’t threaten our Constitution.
It requires diplomatically solving problems that we created. The first step has already begun-get all the parties involved in the Syrian civil war to agree to peacefully resolve their differences via the political process and equally agree to confront our common enemy. The Russians lost 200 people to ISIL as well, they have just as much at stake, if not more so considering the Sunni insurgency in Chechnya, to beat these guys.
The second step is to get Turkey and our Gulf allies to stop funding ISIL, stop attacking ISIL enemies like the Kurds or the Shia, and focus on beating the greatest common enemy we all have. We can use a combo of carrots and sticks to effect this change. I favor sticks at this point, we bestowed the third largest military on the Saudi’s, along with a great Jordanian and Egyptian military. These Arab states should work to cleanse their region of ISIL and work with the US and NATO to do it-with them in the lead. If they refuse, cut their military aid off completely. It has largely been used to oppress their own people or threaten Israel*, time to actually use it to help the taxpayers who subsidized it!
And the third step is using this same approach with Bibi. Recommit Israel to a democratic Palestinian state in Gaza or the West Bank or lose your military aid. HW Bush and James Baker did it before, it’s hardly a radical idea and certainly not an anti-semitic one. If anything, it’s the tough love the preservation of a democratic Jewish state will require.
None of these three things involve American boots on the ground or a third (or is it fourth? fifth?) American led war in the Middle East. But it will require substantial diplomatic, political, and some military involvement and it will take a long time. I appreciate that our current President is being far more honest than any of the candidates hoping to replace him with how hard and difficult this issue really is.
We can get these guns off our streets without shredding the constitution.
I don’t think we can stop people from becoming Jihadists while preserving our constitutional liberties.
We’re not far apart here, I think we’re just seeking common ground on language.
The caveat:
To which I will only say, we haven’t tried! I think America can walk and chew gum at the same time, despite how often our politicians continually underestimate our people. I think we can actively protect the rights of law abiding gun owners while ensuring that gun trafficking and ease of access is curtailed by common sense federal legislation. My whole point above is that the most invasive tactics against terrorism are also the least effective. Torture, wide spread wiretapping and survelliance, indefinite detention-all have made us less safe and led us to damning consequences by relying on misinformation or casting too wide a net.
A pinpoint approach to intelligence and surveillance that relies on peer to peer intel to infiltrate and undermine these networks has not really been invested in or attempted. Rare occasions when it has have yielded fantastic results, like the bin Laden raid.
The other irony is, early Red Scare aside, the Cold War was largely fought by intelligence analysts who were highly trained to target specific individuals for defection to become double agents. It yielded far better intel than our spy satellites, which erroneously reported a tank build up in the early 80s that was a deliberate Russian ruse, among other failures. But defectors played key roles in giving us critical information, particularly during times of high tension and crises, that ultimately helped us in the end. I hope the same smart power approach can be applied to this situation.
n/m
War on poverty, crime, terrorism, etc has blunted our reaction to the word. I do feel this is a long running war inside Islam which has now spilled over into the west. The “Rightly Guided Caliphs” refers to the Sunni/Shia schism which they have been fighting since 700. It will be an increasing threat however.
We could lower the speed limits on the highways here and save lives or we could pressure the Turks to take over the role as Islam’s police force. For our national security I say get the Turks to do it. If going after the 32,000 will encourage so many new recruits I think then the sentiments of the whole Billion good guys is called into question.
…where I was OK with your historical references, but then you insisted on concluding by offering stereotypes about Muslims:(
I feel that we have historically underestimated the hatred many Muslims have for the west. I’m not just xenophobic, for a few years I subscribed to a Palestinian periodical (my mail was opened then sent on by the Israelis), I had a French/Muslim pen pal. If there were not a great many sympathizers how could this rag tag band be taking on the US, Russia, France etc. Where is their funding coming from? From the Chechan revolutionaries (remember the slaughter in the Russian schoolhouse) to Boko Harem we have been unable to stop them. It is only the start, we need to encourage the Muslim world to rid themselves of their own cancer.
You know that defense is asking for trouble, right? The vast majority of Muslims are already with you on wanting to get rid of the cancer. Something like far less than 1% subscribe to ISIS as pointed out on another current thread. Then again, the same tiny fraction of “Christians” are members of such upstanding faith-based organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and Westboro Baptist Church, which I’m sure you would never dream of accusing the rest of us Christians of not doing enough to excise that cancer from OUR religion.
I have no Muslim friends. I distrust anyone who says they are a devout anything, they’ve given up thinking for themselves. I feel that the 1% figure (where is that written in stone) greatly understates the problem. If you and our leaders are using that figure we’re going to be caught as flat footed as we were on 9/11. I love it when motorcycle groups band together to drown out the Westboro church. You Christians should lead the fight if groups are using your faith as a cover for evil.
Unfortunately we can continue this thread in a couple of months.
Wa alaikum salamn.
This line: “I feel that the 1% figure (where is that written in stone) greatly understates the problem” is pure bigoted nonsense, as is your entire comment.
In fact, ALL the data indicates the “1%” is far too high. The US government says that the Muslim population in the US in 2015 is “2 million to 7 million”. If the likelihood was 1%, that would be 20,000-70,000 terrorists in that population. There is ZERO evidence to support this.
Your comment is pure bigotry, reflecting your prejudice against people of a specific religion. The fight that I participate in is a fight against precisely the kind of bigotry that your comment exemplifies.
I assume you would agree there is a percent at which the problem is real. If I had stayed at a safe 0.2 – 0.3 worldwide sympathizers would I still be OK? Is creeping up to a 0.7 – 0.8 too much?
Over 1% sends it over the top to a bigoted level. I am not talking about actual trigger pullers, but sympathizers. Where would you put the level, or do you say 100% are good guys?
I am reminded of Abraham’s plea to God not to destroy Sodom if there were left only five innocent men. You would have to get at least a majority before you make valid generalizations, but whatever the number is we should address whomever constitutes that number without playing guilt by association with everyone else.
trying to score some political points–particularly with the evangelical crowd that thinks Christianity is superior to Islam–there is a branch of conservatism that would like to bring back the Soviet Union. For a long time, it was Mother Russia that held together the Republican’s weird coalition. The Islamo-Fascist Crowd would like to bring back that common enemy.
Rubio is also an incredible asshat. That goes without saying, but I felt like saying it anyway.