Recently in Terrorism Category

I'm launching my new book about the so-called clash-of-civilizations Wednesday night at USC. Info on the event is here, and parking info is here. We'll have some copies of the book available for sale, and I'll be around to sign them after my chat with USC religious life dean Varun Soni. Come join us if you can!

My thanks for Mariel G. for running this new piece adapted from my new book.

As one of Gail's "two readers," I find her perceptions of Muslims to be very troubling in this post. No doubt the larger Muslim world has serious issues to work through. I can agree with people ranging from the conservative Bernard Lewis to the liberal Reza Aslan on this. But Gail goes as far as to take Nonia Darwish seriously in the contention that the Muslim world is actively attempting to, uh, infiltrate the West.

To a degree, every proselytizing religion intends to infiltrate the rest of the world. That's the definition of proselytizing. Gail, don't imagine that your evangelical pro-Israel allies don't want the empty churches in Tel Aviv to someday be filled with persons like yourself.

Nonie Darwish reminds me of the former nun, Karen Armstrong, who's become a vocal critic of Christianity and a strong apologist for Muslims. Armstrong criticizes the Judeo-Christian tradition for being too mean to idolaters, but passes over Muslims' intense anti-idolatry. She claims that Christians have sexual hang-ups and that Muslims don't, which seems a stretch. She claims that Islam is more inherently forgiving than Christianity.

Mostly, she seems to be an angry child still railing about the injustices of Daddy. So does Nonie Darwish. Do you really believe Darwish is brave? She's an opportunist, refusing to grow up, because attention and money incentivize her continued immaturity. Both Armstrong and Darwish serve the interests of demagogues who like stirring up action against whole civilizations, by claiming, "But they started it."

Regarding the dilemma of airport profiling, let me go back to a piece from the rival paper that I wrote back in 2002. With some qualifications, i still stand by the basic premise. But having been profiled up and down in Israel in 2006, I find that it's easy for profiling to become obnoxious, which is why I don't much want to go again to Israel anytime soon.

The '00s were the Decade of American Anxiety. Or, perhaps, the Decade of Denial.

This decade began with the popping of the tech bubble in the spring of 2000. Experts had been in denial about the economic laws of physics, claiming the Internet had created a business model in which profits or even income were irrelevant measures of success. Now reality, and anxiety, set in. Temporarily.

9/11 exposed how America wasn't immune to the chaotic effects of the very globalization we had unleashed on the rest of the planet. Yet the result of our awakened anxiety represented still more denial, believing as we did that a whack-a-mole foreign policy would make the rest of the world pay us proper tribute.

Meanwhile, we replaced the techiest bubble with the lowest-tech bubble, surmising that land can't disappear into the air the way bandwidth does. But again we denied the laws of physics, believing that economic productivity had less to do with building new things and more to do with refinancing our homes -- for a handsome profit -- every twenty minutes.

An economic panic nine years into the decade should have signaled that it's time to come to grips with our many hangovers. But once we became somewhat stable, it became time not for serious discussions about the nation we seek to be, but for tea parties and ridiculous mouth-to-ears combat. This hysterical form of pseudo-dialogue represents both our anxiety and our continuing denial that we must grow up.

Denial and anxiety, they placed their stamp on our decade -- and we have postponed resolution of such matters till the next decade. Stay tuned... as if we had a choice.

Oh well. Barack Obama may still end up being a great president, but he's struggling a bit. Earl is right that Afghanistan is the war he always wanted, and there should be no surprise there.

But the disappointment, for me, comes from two sources.

One involves how Obama is positively Bushy in his obliviousness about the roots of conflict -- and especially of the Hydra effect when fighting terrorists in a way that inflames people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who can't keep track of whether the enemy comes from within or from the West.

The other one involves how he doesn't keep track of price tags. I can't buy certain things I once planned to buy, because of fiscal realities. Washington rarely understands this when planning wars or domestic programs, whether a conservative Republican like Reagan or a liberal Democrat like Obama is in charge. Oh, for the balanced-budget days of Clinton...

Some have speculated that an upside of terrorist trials in New York is that the accused will lose their aura of super-villainy amidst the drudgery of the American judicial system. That is good both for Americans and for those who the terrorists seek to recruit. Their "cosmic war" would seem a good deal less glamorous.

But a friend offered me an intriguing insight into those Americans who decry the idea of terrorists being tried by our American justice system instead of secretive military tribunals: they trust the latter more than the former. They believe the former is more capricious and unreliable. They prefer the values of the military more than that of a jury of Americans. Given that our military is supposed to be giving their lives specifically to defend things such as our justice system, that's a bit ironic.

Read this. And weep for our nation. Set aside political correctness for just a moment and call this what it is: Terrorism. Cold, fowl terrorism.

I was in the Midwest yesterday, speaking to a college group about tensions between Muslims and the West, and I argued that Muslims in the U.S. tend to assimilate much more fully than in Europe. A short while later I heard about Nidal Malik Hasan at Ft. Hood. I felt horrified, angered and embarrassed.

Although I come from a Muslim background, I don't pretend to represent Islam, but I care deeply about Muslim family and friends who seek to balance their faith and their love for America. Ft. Hood mocks such attempts at balance.

A few years back, my brother and I penned a piece criticizing xenophobia directed at Muslim-Americans, but we still made it a point to argue that Muslim advocacy organizations such as CAIR "should go further [than just condemning violence], perhaps by establishing philanthropies for communities and families hurt by extremists who have hijacked Islam."

Maybe these groups can begin to put their money where their mouth is, by offering tangible support to families of the shooting victims. Some of those families may angrily reject such aid, because Hasan's act will aggravate latent xenophobia. But still, a steadfast and long-term commitment to such a healing approach represents the generous model of Muhammad at the height of his powers.

Let's try to think about organized hate groups and militias in "shoe on the other foot" terms.

Since 9/11, we've had passionate debates about whether moderate, non-violent Muslims here and abroad are obligated to do more to counter violence among their rabid, frothing extreme fringe.

Groups such as CAIR seem to resent being associated with extremism while not seeming to do much to efficaciously stand up to their affiliated extremists.

Another conundrum is that many moderate Muslims rationalize the anger of jihadists, saying that wackos in Gaza and Peshawar Kashmir take understandable grievances to unacceptable extremes. They suggest that if India or Israel or America adequately address the grievances, the extremist hatred and violence will go away.

That usually rings hollow and tinny to people on the outside. It sounds as though the moderates are acting like enablers in a crazed, abusive household.

Yet now the American right, who has comprised the most vocal critics of such rationalization-and-codependence approaches in the Mideast, will need to rise above their recent tendency to use just the same approach in the Obama era.