File under: Root Causes of Terrorism

Only a terrorist truly knows from where his motivation comes, but that does not stop any number of people from speculating on the "root causes" and such. Here's a reason that not even Al Gore himself considered.

Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.

"We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence," Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations told a London conference on "Climate Change: the Global Security Impact."

"Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around."

He cited Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts.

BIN LADEN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain's Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries," al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden wrote in a 2002 "letter to the American people."

So there you have it--conclusive proof of the link between the Environmental Movement and Al Qaeda. If only we would have signed the Kyoto Protocol, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

Can Birkenstock wearing, pachouli-scented, tree-hugging suicide bombers be far behind?

Five Years On...

I find it astounding, that five years down the road 36% of the population takes seriously 9/11 conspiracy theories.

As astounding as it may be, conspiracy theorists are not necessarily crazy. As Eric Rauchway points out on his TNR blog:

Conspiracy theory is not, Hofstadter and McLemee note, crazy: It's
super-rational. In conspiracy theory, someone is in charge--someone meant for
things to be this way. This is obviously, if oddly comforting to lots of people:
Maybe it's a wicked world full of snares for the unwary, but at least there's a
spider at the center of the web.

The alternative metaphor is harder to accept: This bad world is like an onion whose layers you peel back, weeping, only to find there's nothing at the center.

Popular Mechanics went to great lengths to debunk all of the 9/11 conspiracy theories that existed over a year ago. Yet there are those who still maintain it was an inside job.

Today, the editor of Popular Mechanics, James Meigs, had this to say :

Conspiracy theories alleging that 9/11 was a U.S. government operation are
rapidly infiltrating the mainstream. These notions are advanced by hundreds of
books, over a million Web pages and even in some college classrooms. The movie
"Loose Change," a slick roundup of popular conspiracy claims, has become an
Internet sensation.
Worse, these fantasies are gaining influence on the international stage. French author Thierry Meyssan's "The Big Lie," which argues that the U.S. military orchestrated the attacks, was a bestseller in France, and his claims have been widely repeated in European and Middle Eastern media. And recent surveys reveal that, even in moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey and Jordan, majorities of the public believe that no Arab terrorists were involved in the attacks.

The real conspiracy is the conspiracy that states there's a conspiracy.

Appeasement is a Dead End

It appears that Canada's high-minded opposition to the invasion of Iraq has not been enough to offset the damage caused by participating in NATO's efforts in Afghanistan--at least that seems to be the case in the eyes of their own homegrown Jihadis.

TORONTO - Police said Monday more arrests are likely in an alleged plot to bomb buildings in Canada, while intelligence officers sought ties between the 17 suspects and Islamic terror cells in the United States and five other nations.

A court said authorities had charged all 12 adults arrested over the weekend with participating in a terrorist group. Other charges included importing weapons and planning a bombing. The charges against five minors were not made public.

A Muslim prayer leader who knew the oldest suspect, 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, told The Associated Press on Monday that Jamal's sermons at a storefront mosque were "filled with hate" against Canada.

Always, ALWAYS the shock!

Some people who know the suspects said they were astonished by the arrests.

But Faheem Bukhari, a director of the Mississauga Muslim Community Center, said Jamal, the oldest suspect, had taken to giving hateful sermons and preaching intolerance to young Muslims at a small storefront mosque in Mississauga, a city near Toronto where six of the suspects lived.

"These youth were very fun-loving guys, soccer-loving guys, and then all of sudden they were not associating with guys they used to," Bukhari told AP, referring to some of the younger suspects.

He said Jamal once told "the audience that the Canadian Forces were going to Afghanistan to rape women."

I do believe I saw a similiar storyline in the better-than-expected Showtime series Sleeper Cell once.

Thankless Pacifists

This morning I woke to the following headline: U.S., British Troops Rescue Iraq Hostages

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and British troops Thursday freed three Christian peace activists in a rural area of Iraq without firing a shot, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said the hostages were being held by a "kidnapping cell" in a house, and the operation to free the captives was based on information from a man captured by U.S. forces only three hours earlier.
(Proof that when we torture poor sheep farmers with underpants and barking dogs they can yield useful information.)

As the article states, these were the comrades of the recently murdered American Tom Fox, all members of the Christian Peacemakers Team based in Chicago. From the heading on their website, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" I gather that they are pacifists in practice and at heart.
Doug Pritchard, the group's co-director speaking from Toronto, had this to say about the rescue operation:

"They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers," Pritchard said.

He also called for coalition forces to leave the country.

"We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq," Pritchard said.

Commentary

Pacifism is a fine strategy when the stakes are low. It's easy to make enlightened claims about the virtues of non-violence when the wolves are not knocking at the door. Probably the most famous pacifist of the 20th century was Mahatma Gandhi. He and his followers famously stood down the mighty British Empire, paving the way for an independent India. I can't help but wonder how India would have fared using such a strategy against Chairman Mao, Stalin, or Hitler rather than the largely benevolent British?
Gandhi had this to say regarding the Jews and the Holocaust: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." He believed that the Jews should commit mass suicide in order to make the Third Reich introspectively realize that maybe the Aryan race was not really the master race afterall, and should instead live peacefully with their neighbors as equals. Regardless of whether or not you believe in reincarnation as Gandhi did, recommending mass suicide hardly seems like the recipe for living peacefully on this earth in this moment.

The lack of gratitude that Doug Pritchard and CPT have shown for the brave troops that rescued the hostages is inexcusable. Instead of for a moment setting aside his dogmatic belief "... that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers" and thanking the actual people that rescued his helpless pacifists, he instead took the opportunity to call for the coalition forces to leave the country. Surely he would argue that they would have never been harmed had we never invaded Iraq etc... A chicken or the egg argument if there ever was one. It seems the power and the love of God was a little slow to the rescue. Fortunately for the CPT, our brave Armed Forces were up to the thankless task.
Pacifism is not only immoral, it's suicidal.

UPDATE:
In my recent post, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited" I mentioned the boxes of documents and hours of audio tapes that we've found in Iraq leftover from Saddam's reign. Some enterprising members of Pajamas Media have taken to translating some of the documents themselves and then cross-checking the translations for accuracy. The following link provides evidence that members of Saddam's regime were in contact with Osama Bin Laden via Sudan as early as 1995.
Also, Mark Steyn has written an excellent article that explores the costs of maintaining the U.N. mandated sanctions against Iraq had we continued with the status quo.

Cartoonland

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place for stagnation, resentment and violence for export." --George Bush Nov. 6, 2003

It seems 12 Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed first published 4 months ago have caused quite a stir around the world. I can't help but feel a slight tinge of schadenfreude when I see that it's Europe in the crosshairs for offensive behavior toward the Islamic world rather than the Great Satan for once. The United States has endured endless lectures, finger wagging, and much looking-down-the-nose from our European betters concerning the way we've dealt with the Islamic world over the past 5 years. On the face of it, this current controversy may seem as though it were about free speech; the cornerstone of western civilization. But if one were to give it a little more thought, I think that one would see that these cartoons say more about the arrogance of a continent that sees religious faith as a mark of unsophistication rather than a brave statement about free speech. Although Amir Taheri argues differently here, it's widely accepted that the depiction of the Prophet Muhammed in any way is forbidden in Islam because it may lead to Idolatry.
Many people in this world take their faith quite seriously, and to intentionally offend any faith is callous and irresponsible. A lack of women's rights, the barbarism of Bin Laden and Zarqawi, the Iranian mullahs, or any aspect of perpetual dysfunction that is "Palestine" are all serious Islamic subjects that need to be discussed and could have been addressed. Instead, they rather naively went straight for the faith jugular. You want to court controversy? Here's a triple scoop!
None of this is to excuse the rabid reaction across the Islamic world. Many Christians surely find Serrano's "Piss Christ" depicting a crucifix suspended in a container of urine, and the exhibition a few years ago at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in which a portrait of the Virgin Mary was displayed festooned with pornography and elephant dung quite tasteless, but death threats against the artists and massive rioting in the streets did not follow. If I had to make a comparison, I would say the Islamic attitude toward the rest of the world is a lot like the schoolyard bully who starts by demanding your lunch money and doesn't stop demanding things until you are standing naked and defenseless--then he makes you carry his book bag home before he slaps you around one last time and locks you in the basement for good measure. In short, If it weren't some pretty mild cartoons that were the offense, it would be something else. Islam, it seems, stands ready to be offended at the slightest provocation.

"We want blood on the streets of England," said Muslim protestors in London, though no British newspaper has yet published the offending cartoons. (here's some nice pictures from London)
Saudi Arabia promoted the controversy to distract attention from the trampling deaths of 345 pilgrims in Mecca Jan. 12th, said "The Religious Policeman," a Saudi Web logger. The deaths attracted little attention in the West, but were big news in the Arab world.
Most of the anti-Western violence has taken place in Syria and Lebanon, where the Danish and Norwegian embassies were burned down.
Syria is a dictatorship. A mob could not have burned the building where the Danish and Norwegian embassies were located without the tacit permission, if not the encouragement, of the regime.
Syria also retains considerable influence in Beirut, where the rioting was not spontaneous. Syria would love to distract attention from the UN probe into the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, in which Syria is implicated.

Iran is going to sponsor a Holocast cartoon contest in retaliation--as if anti-semitic cartoons were not already the norm around the Middle East. It speaks of the Islamic world's deep pathological dysfunction that they have to resort to Jew-bashing in protest of secular Denmark.

I'm with Ralph Peters on this one:
For once, we Americans can sit back and watch the fight (pass the popcorn, please). The Europeans are going to get a few more teeth knocked out. As for the Islamist bigots intent on destroying what's left of their own decayed societies, they'll lose at least a few of their European apologists — the sort who make excuses for terrorists, as long as they only kill Americans (or Muslims).

Europe may be forced to give up on the touchy-feely multicultural delusion that has taken root since the end of the Cold War when they realize appeasement is really a symptom of powerlessness. If so, I fear a very sharp nationalistic backlash may be in the works. If that happens, European Muslims will come to rue the day they chose not to assimilate in their host countries; and realize that there are serious consequences for their entire community when they allow a few among them to spew hate-filled rhetoric.

P.S. Here's a fascinating piece about Shame and the Arab Psyche and Islam

DoublePlusUnGood

"We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war."
--North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1990 interview with historian Stanley Karnow

Although that quote is 15 years old, change the tense from past to present and it could have been said by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , the man claiming responsibility for the majority of bloodshed in Iraq today. As happend following the Tet Offensive in 1968, our nation's Senators seem to be losing their stomach for the task at hand in Iraq. It is one thing to have not supported the war from the onset--everybody is entitled to their opinion. It is quite another thing to change your story at this point in the game as many formerly pro-war Senators from both sides of the asile are doing; even if it is the politically expedient thing to do. It is quite another thing altogether to do as former President Clinton did when he told a group of students recently at the American University in Dubai that the Bush Administration had committed a "big mistake" by liberating Iraq. "Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done," said the former President.

This is the same man who in 1998 made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act.

Why would so many politicians go to such lengths to change their story? Victor Davis Hanson thinks he knows why:

...what then is really at the heart of the current strange congressional hysteria?
Simple — the tragic loss of nearly 2,100 Americans in Iraq.
The "my perfect war, your messy postbellum reconstruction" crowd is now huge and unapologetic. It encompasses not just leftists who once jumped on the war bandwagon in fears that Democrats would be tarred as weak on national security (a legitimate worry), but also many saber-rattling conservatives and Republicans — including those (the most shameful of all) who had in earlier times both sent letters to President Clinton and Bush demanding the removal of Saddam and now damn their commander-in-chief for taking them at their own word.
In the triumphalism after seeing Milosevic go down without a single American death, the Taliban implode at very little cost, and Saddam removed from power with little more than 100 fatalities, there was the assumption that the United States could simply nod and dictators would quail and democracy would follow. Had we lost 100 in birthing democracy and not 2,000, or seen purple fingers only and not IEDs on Dan Rather's nightly broadcasts, today's critics would be arguing over who first thought up the idea of removing Saddam and implementing democratic changes.
So without our 2,100 losses, nearly all the present critics would be either silent or grandstanding their support — in the manner that three quarters of the American population who polled that they were in favor of the war once they saw the statue of Saddam fall.
In short, there is no issue of WMD other than finding out why our intelligence people who had once missed it in the First Gulf War, then hyped it in the next — or what actually happened to all the unaccounted for vials and stockpiles that the U.N. inspectors swore were once inside Iraq.
So the real crux is a real legitimate debate over whether our ongoing costs-billions spent, thousands wounded, nearly 2,100 American soldiers lost-will be worth the results achieved. Post facto, no death seems "worth it". The premature end of life is tangible and horrendous in a way that the object of such soldiers' sacrifices — a reformed Middle East, a safer world, enhanced American safety, and freedom for 26 million — seems remote and abstract.

The reason of this post is to point out the revision of history that is taking place before our eyes in the Senate. You, the reader, would do well to recall or read George Orwell's 1984. In it he describes the Records Department where the protagonist Winston works revising old news stories to reinforce Big Brother's version of history. Inconvenient facts as well as any stray piece of anything were tossed into the Memory Hole, never to be referenced again. Judging from the Senate's behavior of late, I'd say it must have been on their Summer reading list.

Side Note: Military deaths are as tragic at the individual level as any death. In an attempt to keep perspective on things I came up with what I think is a good demographic comparison to our Armed Forces: motorcycle riders. They're mostly young and mostly male just like a soldier afterall.
Single vehicle motorcycle crashes account for about 45 percent of all motorcyclist fatalities. More than 38,000 motorcyclists have died in single vehicle motorcycle crashes between 1975 and 1999. (Source)
If you do the math that works out to a little over 2,000 deaths per year. I realize this is not an exact comparison as the number of U.S. soldiers that have been killed in Iraq spans almost three years, and surely there's more motorcycle riders than soldiers in Iraq so the sample size is different. However, if you look at it strictly in deaths per year, riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than soldiering in Iraq.

Feelers vs. Thinkers

There's this economics professor named James Miller at Smith College that writes for Tech Central Station from time to time. His perspective is in the minority as he is a conservative professor at an extremely liberal all women's school. He wrote an article on Monday titled "Feelers v. Thinkers" in which he tried to connect thinkers with conservative thought and feelers with liberal thought. I agreed with much of what he had to say, however there was one paragraph that absolutely dumbfounded me:

Bill Maher, the former host of Politically Incorrect, got in trouble with feelers when he said that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards. A thinker would have to concede that those who deliberately give their lives for a cause, regardless of how horrid the cause, don't fit the conventional definition of cowards. A feeler, however, would violently reject associating any positive qualities, including bravery, with the 9/11 hijackers. A feeler would believe that Maher would have done this only if he sympathized with the terrorists.

I finished the article and continued what I was doing, but that paragraph continued to grate on my nerves, so I decided I would write him a letter and explain to him why I thought he was wrong:

Prof. Miller
I enjoy reading and agree with much of what you write--especially your thoughts regarding lefty bias on campus. Your recent Feelers v. Thinkers is mostly spot on, but I would like to add something to your conclusion regarding Bill Maher's comments about the 9/11 hijackers. You say, "A thinker would have to concede that those who deliberately give their lives for a cause, regardless of how horrid the cause, don't fit the conventional definition of cowards." I believe that is a true statement, however it cannot be applied to the hijackers. Since they believed that their rich reward for their atrocious actions lay waiting for them in the after world, I believe what they did was the ultimate form of cowardice. There's nothing inherently brave about embracing that which has been guaranteed to be yours, no matter what you must do in order to realize it. I believe that point was lost on you, Mr. Maher and anybody else who would believe that the hijackers were anything but cowards.Al Qaeda must know this too, which I would speculate is one of the reasons why not all of the hijackers were aware they were about to become martyrs.
Signed,
J

I felt better after writing that and I did not expect to hear back from him. It's been my experience that people you disagree with seldom write back to defend their position. I was wrong this time. The next morning I had the following message in my in box; short and to the point:

Hi,
Good point, but many of the fire fighters who ran into the burning towers on9/11 believed they were going to heaven after they died. Surely these men and women should still be considered brave.
Jim

OK, now I was confused. Here was a self-described conservative professor sounding like any number of leftist apologists for terrorism. Here is my reply:

Jim,

Unless you can say with a straight face that the entire police and fire response team was made up of unambivalent Christian fanatics, you would have to concede that their motivation for rushing into the WTC was not because they wished to find a shortcut to heaven. Their reason for rushing into the WTC was because they were protecting the public they took an oath to serve. If you ask me that is among the bravest and most noble things one can do--putting strangers before oneself. I suppose you could counter that Mr. Atta and company's sole motivation for mass murder was not to gain early admission to the Land of Virgins and Wine--that they felt they were serving Allah to whom they took an oath to protect and serve, but if you made that argument I might have to conclude that you were trying to draw moral equivalency between the premeditated actions of mass murderers and civil servants doing their job.
I'll leave you with this by Leon Wieseltier writing for TNR. He puts it much more succinctly than I ever could: "A hero is somebody who risks everything for what he believes. A martyr is somebody who risks nothing for what he believes, because he believes that his reward is certain, and that his life really begins with his death. Martyrdom, unlike heroism, is an extreme and repugnantly rigid _expression of certainty. Martyrs make dogmas, heroes make wagers."

Martyr = Atta &.Co = Cowards
Hero = police & fire = Courageous

signed,
J

I have not heard back from him yet but I hope I do. I would love to hear him defend his position from a conservative, or any point of view for that matter. I don't think my thoughts on the matter are specifically conservative, but when contrasted with the crowd that thinks that Islamic terrorism is simply a symptom of the West's failure to understand their grievances, I can see how it could be labeled as such. Most people don't like to have their ideas and assumptions challenged; especially college professors.

Democrats Forked Tongues

I lifted these from Craigs List today.

"As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." -- Nancy Pelosi, December 16, 1998

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." -- Ted Kennedy, Sept 27, 2002


"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." -- From a letter signed by Joe Lieberman, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara A. Milulski, Tom Daschle, & John Kerry among others on October 9, 1998


"Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement." -- Barbara Boxer, November 8, 2002

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." -- Bill Clinton in 1998

"Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people." -- Tom Daschle in 1998

"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." -- Al Gore, 2002

****compare these fools with their 2005 rhetoric

Off to Lollapalooza in Chicago...booUP! booUP!