Terrorism: July 2008 Archives

I haven't seen Raph Worrick since November 21, 1979. He was using crutches due to some leg trouble he was having, which made him look particularly clumsy as we all scampered from terrorists who were attacking our American-run school in Islamabad. While we hid in gym locker rooms, the jihadists dispensed only minor mayhem around our school grounds, perhaps because they were already exhausted from a long day of destroying the American embassy across town. That latter story is detailed here in this Washington Post story (written by a former student of our school). These Carter-era events, among the first signs of growing anti-American Sunni rage, are also recorded in painful detail in entire chapters of Ghost Wars and The Siege of Mecca.

Raph and other American foreign-service brats were promptly evacuated, while I stayed in Islamabad for another year. We touched base by post or phone only a couple more times over the next few years. Then 25 more years ensued before the magic of Facebook allowed us to get back in touch. He's now a talented singer/songwriter, and one of his newer songs brings back some wild and bitter memories.

"Atom Girl" is his ode to Ayesha Khan, the pretty but brutally snobby girl who stole his heart just as skillfully as her fatherm, A.Q. Khan, stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands. A.Q.'s theft made him a hero to ordinary Pakistanis who had felt bullied by a nuclear India. And his subsequent marketing of that technology made him a hero to rogues around the world.

Scroll to the bottom here to listen to Atom Girl, a great little melody with some hilarious lyrics. It will make you think about what an odd world we live in, and it will remind me, again and again, of that elitist Ayesha, the girl who mocked me during square dancing, who beat me in a class president vote that I still think was rigged, and who was the scion of one of the most controversial men on this planet.

What a small, strange world. An interesting footnote: We used to proudly refer to our school as ISI, short for the International School of Islamabad. Now that ISI is more commonly used to refer to Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency, the school now differentiates itself by calling itself ISoI.

Dan Rather slips here and refers to Obama as Osama. And yet the Osama-loving, I mean Obama-loving MSM dismissed this Southern California prophet as a mere Fear Engineer when he said that Obama will hand the country over to folks like Obama. Eat some crow, you silly doves.*

* nonliteralness disclaimer for the sarcasm-challenged.

On a less sarcastic note, I've long felt that the election will not go to a black liberal whose name rhymes with Public Enemy #2 (Public Enemy #1 always was Saddam, my more hawkish friends insist). Colin Powell, maybe. He's a military heavy who rhymes with no discernible enemies.

I, for one, think the notorious new New Yorker cover is good satire. Obama should show a little more of a sense of humor about it.

"If you would diminish something, you would first increase it," said Lao Tzu a few millennia ago. In precisely that fashion, people like Stephen Colbert and the New Yorker editors are defusing a jingoist scare tactic by amplifying it in a comical way. Obama's best tactic is to laugh along at it - while saluting Old Glory, sporting a flag lapel pin, and munching on some apple pie.

A "clash of civilizations" could become self-fulfilling prophecy, especially as politicians and partisan pundits use anger at Muslims to redirect attention from domestic failings. Americans and the Muslim world are polarizing increasingly. Consider the manner in which Investor's Business Daily (subscription only) subtly conflates "Muslims" and "enemies" in a July 3, 2008 editorial on Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf:

Rewind to 9/11 and imagine the strongman of a Muslim country sheltering bin Laden and dictating to the White House the terms of how we can bring him to justice... If we were reliving those raw days -- back when we were still pulling bodies from Ground Zero -- we would justifiably tell this Muslim leader to stand aside while we invade the territory where our enemy's holed up. And we would withdraw not a moment before we flushed him out of hiding and put his head on a pike... Ultimately, the commander-in-chief must decide who's running this war against Muslim terrorists -- him or a Muslim general.

Imagine if the word "Muslim" were replaced above by "black" or "Jewish" -- you would find it hard to believe that the writer would escape a sharp rebuke.

This piece also shows that the newspaper's editorial board is obviously unaware that Musharraf resigned from the army more than six months ago; and the piece revealed great ignorance on many other issues too. I wish that they would all sit down to carefully read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars before they attempt to make sense of who caused what in that part of the world.