Defense One has a
must-read piece on our over-sized reaction to the Islamic terrorist threat:
In fact, Muslims account for only a small percentage
of the terrorism in Europe over the last several years. Most
politically-motivated violence there is carried out by nationalist and
sectarian groups, yet the government and the media don’t treat these
threats the same. Anders Breivik killed 77 people in separate gun and
bomb attacks in 2011, including many children. Many people in Europe
share Breivik’s xenophobic, ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim ideology, but
we don’t hold them collectively responsible for his decision to employ
violence to further those views. We don’t call for a war on his beliefs;
we demand his criminal prosecution.
A similar phenomenon occurs here in the United States, where most
media outlets covered the distant Paris attacks far more closely than
domestic shooting sprees by white supremacist Fraizer Glenn Miller, or anti-government extremists like Curtis Wade Holley, Eric Frein, and Jerad Miller, who assassinated four police officers in separate instances last year.
The Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point documented
3,053 injuries and 670 fatalities in the United States from far right
violence from 1990 to 2012. A 2014 University of Maryland survey indicates U.S. law enforcement now view Sovereign Citizens as the greatest terror threat they face. Yet the federal government effectively treats
these acts of politically-motivated violence as hate crimes or lone
attacks rather than terrorism. This may explain why an attempted
firebombing at a Colorado NAACP office building the day before the Paris attacks received little media attention.....
Deaths attributable to terrorism here in the U.S. are a tiny fraction of the roughly 14,000 homicides committed each year, one-third of which go unsolved.
Yet we devote far more resources to uncovering potential terrorists
than to finding actual killers. The purpose of putting terrorist acts in
context is to better understand how we might respond in a more
effective manner.
The second prevalent theme in the early coverage of the Paris attacks
was the tendency to exaggerate the capabilities of Muslim extremists.
With very little information available — save a brief video showing the
execution of a wounded police officer — many counterterrorism officials
and policy makers didn’t hesitate to call it a “sophisticated” attack that represented a new and “more complex” threat. The FBI and DHS backed this description in a law enforcement bulletin, claiming
the Paris attacks “demonstrated a greater degree of sophistication and
advanced weapons handling than seen in previous coordinated small-arms
attacks, such as the 2013 Westgate Mall attack” in Nairobi, Kenya. The
Somali militant group al-Shabaab claimed credit for the armed assault on
Westgate Mall, which killed sixty-seven people. Details regarding the
attack and whether some perpetrators escaped are still mired in controversy.
The facts don’t support the hasty conclusion that the Paris attack was as sophisticated as originally claimed.
While one or both of the Kouachi brothers may have travelled to Yemen
and received some training from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, their
attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices was almost derailed because they
went to the wrong address. They had to ask a maintenance man for
directions. They caught a lucky break by finding an employee outside the
office who they forced to punch the code necessary to enter the
building. After the shooting, they crashed their escape vehicle and left
identification papers behind when they abandoned it.
Co-conspirator Amedy Coulibaly’s spree appeared even less organized,
shooting a police officer, a street sweeper and a jogger before storming
the kosher supermarket. The weapons Coulibaly and the Kouachi’s used
weren’t financed or provided by organized terrorist groups, but purchased from a known criminal for less than 5,000 euros, which Coulibaly obtained through a fraudulent bank loan.
They did succeed at killing 17 people, which is tragic. But spree shooters here in the United States racked up similar death tolls,
in some cases before graduating high school, or saddled with serious
mental illnesses. It doesn’t take sophisticated training to pick up a
gun and kill lots of unarmed people.
Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes. We face dozens of more likely ways to die every day, but for some reason, people really freak out if Muslims kill some people, somewhere around the world, sometime. I don't get it. Well, I suspect that many Christians fear Muslim terrorism as part of some kind of Holy War, and Israelis have their own reasons for making a stink about the attacks, but I see absolutely no reason why anybody would think this minuscule threat to American lives is worth spending trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of non-American lives, and having a crazy police state apparatus record every phone call and email and web search around the world in order to "protect our freedoms." Our freedoms (whatever those amount to in a surveillance state) are not under threat from those scary Muslims. They are under threat from our government and our cowardly reaction to sporadic incidents of violence committed by Muslims.
