The Enemy Is Us (4/26)

The New York Times also reported today that Peter Clarke, Great Britain’s antiterrorism chief, was reported as saying that “Al Qaeda had survived ‘a prolonged multinational assault’ and that its supporters had established ‘an inexorable trend towards more ambitious and more destructive attack planning (in their nation),” as quoted in the article.

By the way, when it comes to evaluating the threat of terrorism facing us and the world, I take the British more seriously than I do our own elected officials.

One of my concerns is that, when we look at the threat facing our country, we have an implicit understanding that homegrown terrorism from paramilitary groups, lethal a threat as it is, does not possess the same danger as thoroughly indoctrinated radical Islamists. The perception may exist that, since paramilitary groups such as those emboldened by the standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge have not engaged in suicide bombings, then that is not part of their repertoire of violence.

Or, as noted here by author Kaja Perina…

Attempts to understand suicide terrorism are understandably culture-bound. Western media emphasize a Palestinian society awash in calls to self-destruct: Iraq and Saudi Arabia pay thousands of dollars to the families of suicide terrorists, and schools teach reverence for martyrs alongside arithmetic. Palestinian mental health professionals counter that Westerners ignore the despair inherent in this logic. Mahmud Sehwail, M.D., a psychiatrist in Ramallah, says that post-traumatic stress disorder abounds among the potential – and eventual – suicide bombers he treats and cites surveys indicating that more than a quarter of all Palestinians are clinically depressed.

To me, there isn’t much of a difference between a bigot spouting anti-discriminatory garbage against gays, Jews or African Americans, for example, and someone recruited for an al Qaeda cell in this country currently waiting for some coded command to launch an attack. Both demonstrate a potential for violence, and we are foolish to think that there could never be an overlap between these types of individuals (and by the way, that includes anyone prone to act against immigrants, illegal or otherwise – that’s one of the reasons why people like Lou Dobbs should know what they’re talking about on this issue before they decide to start pontificating about it, so they don’t unwittingly provide motivation for these people).

I think the most dramatic example of this is Timothy McVeigh, obviously because of the horror of his offense (aided by severe depression along with drug abuse, methamphetamines in particular), but also because the book he and other terrorists consider their “bible,” if you will, is The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. As noted in the linked information, McVeigh’s destruction of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City was patterned after an attack on the FBI headquarters in Pierce’s book, and the book’s last entry concludes in the successful suicide bombing of the Pentagon in 1999; afterwards, Aryan forces triumph and “the New Era” begins.

I don’t know if white supremacists could ever make common cause with Islamist terrorists against our country; I don’t see how that could be possible because of cultural differences, but as I said, we should anticipate that possibility anyway. I think these people have more in common than not, namely insanity stemming from depression quite possibly fueled by drug addiction and indoctrination into a methodology of murder.

In addition to voicing my own personal concerns, one of the points of this post is to link to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group in the vanguard of the fight against intolerance (which, when all is said and done, terrorism is all about anyway).