CSotD: Nothing to fear but fear itself
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German cartoonist Heiko Sakurai offers a commentary on the difficulty of spotting terrorists, or, perhaps, of defining terrorism.
I don't have a specific solution to the security issues, but I know this: The policy of "jail them all and let God sort them out" is immoral, antidemocratic and ineffective.
Obama has stated, rightly, that Guantanamo is a powerful al Qaeda recruiting tool, but, having said that, what are you gonna do about it?
Nothing? Can we not, in the current climate, even release the ones whose names have been cleared?
Apparently not.
Worse yet, it doesn't just create new militants. It fosters support for them within communities that would otherwise shun their excesses. Militancy cannot succeed without community support.
When I hear the outrageous, bigoted comments about Islam that emerge on the Internet and talk radio, I fear that this hateful, ignorant attitude has already spread from a small group of dangerously demented morons to a public that has been whipped into a frenzy of fear and is searching for the easy answers people always look for.
Which is to say, I'm less worried about the terrorist with the backpack than about the terrorist with the microphone and the friends in Congress.
I don't have an answer, but here's what I know: I surely could have gotten myself into some serious trouble, if the zero-tolerance attitude that prevails today had been in place back in the early 1980s. And I more than suspect that my experience has its parallels today.
I was in an Irish ballad group that was nationalist, though not indiscreetly or violently so. But "neutrality" isn't neutral. Neutrality itself is a political position.
We sang the songs the ex-pat Irish wanted to hear, but, at the same time, we tried to avoid attracting pot-bellied buffoons in bawneen sweaters, those American wannabes who had no idea what was going on in the Six Counties but were delighted and excited that it was.
I came into things knowing that the IRA newspaper, an Poblacht, was likely spinning the news to their own benefit, and I scoffed at those who believed what it said.
But the same reports appeared in The Irish Echo, which was much more of a Paddy-in-America sort of publication, decrying the drunkard jokes of St. Patrick's Day but still devoted to the wee little shamrock and promoting NYC-area corned-beef-and-cabbage dinners at this or that Police Benevolent Society or parish fundraiser.
And the scary stories of British and Unionist atrocities reported in the Irish Echo were confirmed by the ex-pats I knew, who came from the North of Ireland and were not only getting reports from back home but had experienced some of the violence and excesses first hand.
They didn't think arming the IRA was a solution, and we sang songs of anger and sorrow, but not the ones that advocated bombing.
Today, even that tepid level of objection would make us terrorists. I look at stories of Muslims being hauled away for "supporting terrorism" and think, lord, that could have been me.
Yes, we opposed internship without habeas corpus, without being able to see the evidence against you. We opposed the "enhanced interrogation" that went on in Long Kesh and other prisons. We objected to people being denied the rights of criminals but also being denied the protections of the Geneva Convention.
And we weren't alone.
Not for them a judge and jury,
nor indeed a trial at all:
Being Irish means you're guilty,
so we're guilty, one and all!
There was support for the prisoners, and for their families, because the prisoners were often simply hauled out of bed and thrown into Long Kesh because of the neighborhoods they lived in or the people they knew or … well, no reason that would stand up in court, if there'd been any courts involved.
Cardinal O'Fiaich told me of coming home at night and stopping at a roadblock. He was waved through, but two young men who were out of their car and being searched cried out "Father! Don't go! They'll murder us!" and so he pulled over, simply to bear witness, because driving on might indeed have meant the disappearance of the pair, into the prisons or maybe just into the nowhere that people sometimes disappeared to in those days.
And he didn't tell it as "this terrible thing that happened" but as "this is the sort of thing that happens all the time."
It's important to note that it wasn't Maggie Thatcher's "murder is murder is murder" Iron Lady approach, nor the tough-guy policies of her predecessors, that broke the hold of terror and violence on the Six Counties.
It was the relentless, non-violent but supportive work of people like the Cardinal, and the Peace People, and the groups that worked to get young people from both communities together for soccer matches and other social reasons, and it was jobs. It was the chance for young men to work for a wage rather than hang out on the streets, unemployed, that broke the hold of the militants of both sides.
Terrorism is real, and it's a lot less localized today than it was a generation ago, when most of the IRA and Unionist violence remained in the ghettoes of Belfast and Derry, and when the most of the excesses of government response were equally kept within those areas.
That is, we heard about the killing of Aery Neave and Lord Montbatten, and the government killings on Bloody Sunday and at Gibraltar, but we didn't hear about the almost daily minor atrocities of life, the mundane horrors of which Yeats wrote, "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."
So when I see crackdowns on those who "sympathize with the terrorists," I wonder how the government differentiates between a call for armed jihad and a call for common garden-variety justice and fair play?
Make no mistake: There are real terrorists.
But who are they? And how do you identify them without inflicting the kind of collateral damage on a whole community, and on a whole system of democracy, that keeps their perverted mission alive?
Force-feeding hunger strikers doesn't solve the underlying problem.
And neither does force-feeding the public.
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