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| Editorial |
| Symptomatic Boston ... May 1st, Kansas City - The problem that isn't discussed yet ... |
| Once more, I feel, I have to touch a subject, everybody is writing about and look at it from the odd angle. Seems to
be my nature to do such things, and I can assure you, it doesn't always help my popularity. No kidding. But still,
lets be serious for a moment. The Boston Marathon Bombing was a tragedy, a crime and, lets say it frankly, a shame
for those who try to kill innocents to propagate their own insane ideologies. And religions are ideologies, also that
is something, someone has to speak out loudly at this point. But okay, we read about the bombs, the bombers, the victims all days for the last weeks. So-called "experts" tell us, pressure cooker bombs are a new trick in the arsenal. They are not, the plans to build them are in the Internet for about four years, pressure cooker bombs were used by Chechyan terrorists since at least ten years against the Russians. That's not what I would consider "new". Also those "experts" tell us, Chechyan terrorists (and even the family lived in Dagestan, they were originally Chechyans) are new one for America. Maybe someone should have listened what language some of those Taliban fighters spoke they caught in Afghanistan's Tora-Bora complex in 2001. A number of them were from Chechya and Dagestan, volunteers to support Al-Qaeda's fundamentalist Islamic course. And the FBI had a number of cases, where financial support for terrorist groups had been routed via Chechya. The connection was there, since more than a decade. Also not, what I would call "new". No, there is that one point that bothers me, especially since nobody talks about it. It started a lot earlier than with Boston. Remember Major Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter. Now, political correctness forbids us to call it what it was, a terror attack. President Obama prefers to call it "workplace violence" and, for reasons, you has to ask him about, not me, to keep the connection to Islamist terrorism silent. But fact is, Major Hasan was actually never a member of an organzied cell, or part of a bigger terror organization. He was radicalized via Internet and email after the contents of those sites played into psychological vulnerabilites, he shared with a lot of people. A man who lived most of his life in the US, who lived in our culture, who probably loved baseball. And still, he was vulnerable for manipulation into the radicalism. That is, what nobody dares to mention. The creepy fact, that it was possible in the first place. Now, what has that to do with Boston? If you look at the brothers Tsarnaev, you see two young men who basically lived most of their lives in our culture. They were, as journalists point out now, not fully integrated, but they were here, they lived with and in our culture every day. They probably loved baseball and football too. And then, the older one travels home, gets radicalized, comes back and talks his younger brother into setting bombs and killing innocents. It's the same pattern. There was also the Times Square Bomber, Faisal Shahzad. All appears to be clear, Pakistan descend, tribal Pastun. Now, aren't the Pashtuns the guy who made out 90% of the Taliban? Yeah, right! Now, here's the rub. His father is a high officer, he was stationed in England. Shahzad himself lived in the US for a decade, became naturalized. He lived the American way of life in many aspects. I'm naturalized myself (originally German), and while some things appear still weird to me (for example what people here consider as bread), I know one thing about me and a lot of my fellow 1st generation Americans: A lot of us are very American, often much more than natural born citizens, because we made a decision to become Americans, it wasn't just given to us by the accident of birth. Shahzad was in the same situation, so what happened? | If you look at all those people, all those, the FBI caught over time in less known cases, we see a pattern of lack
 The Boston Marathon Bombingof integration, sometimes disappointment and cultural isolation mixed with cultural vulnerability. Now, what is cultural isolation, what is cultural vulnerability? Isolation is easy to explain. We have created pockets inside the bigger American culture. Not only for ethnicities, but also for them. We have Chinatowns, little Russias, New Delhi in parts of New York and little Karachi in Detroit. Neighborhoods in which you can't ask for the way, if you don't speak an obscure tribal dialect from Wahiristan. And yes, Little Cuba, Little Juarez and all other Spanish speaking pockets fall in this category too. But there are more. The problem is not limited to immigrants. Similar pockets exist in the inner cities. What is hidden behind the term "gangland" is in fact also a generic term for a subcultural pocket. It doesn't matter that the cultural template wasn't imported but was created here in the US. It is as foreign as any foreign subcultural template can be. In those pockets live people. A lot of them. And they have, additional to their specific problems also the very same problem as any other area in America or, basically the whole world. They have their percentage of self-acclaimed leaders, of psychopaths, of sociopaths, of killers and of disappointed people. Now, lets look at the last category. What does a natural born American citizen do, if his house is foreclosed? He gets pissed, he protest votes, he maybe commits crimes. But he does so against banks, against those, he declares guilty. Not always he is right with that, but that is the way he feels. Now, how does someone who is not part of the bigger American culture but who is first and foremost part of a subculture existing isolated in a pocket. We also declares someone guilty. But since his value system, his whole cultural orientation, is based on this isolated pocket, he will declare the outside of his pocket guilty. For the blacks in the inner cities, it's all whitey's fault. For the immigrant in Little Dagestan,m it's all America's fault. For the guy in Germantown, it's the beauracrat's fault (Germans and beaurocrats are a neverending story). And so on and so on. Isolation makes it possible. And from isolation to vulnerability, it's only a small step. Significant for America, one can fight it, ignore it, but not deny it, is Christianity. Dissolving those principles are not perceived as "open-midedness" or "tolerance", it is perceived as "degeneration" and as "weakness" by those, who are disappointed. And this cultural discrepancy can be heated up can be used to wide range manipulation. Nobody needs to recruit potential terrorists. All that is needed is a generalistic play into this disappointment, a little bit propaganda with pseudo-logic. Imagine an internet article explaining how Christians and Jews hate Muslims in America. And that your house was foreclosed because you are Muslim. That you have no American friends because the Americans don't want you. Nobody mentions that the foreclosure happened because you couldn't pay your mortgage. You couldn't, you lost your job as million of other Americans did | too. But it
doesn't matter. Because at this point, you start not to feel as American anymore. And you have indeed no American
friends. Not because they don't like you. They don't even know about you because you never left your little pocket
culture. But it doesn't matter, the article appears to be right. You really have no American friends. So, read five or six such articles, see your situation. You feel meaningless, you are maybe caught between the demands of American culture and what you feel as your own culture. Now, think! Not about you, that immigrant from Whereveristan but multiply this one disappointed soul with the number of all disappointed in all those subcultural pockets. This is a big number of people and statistics tells us, it is only a question of time, since the one or other low level psychopath is in this mix and will act on this manipulation. And since there is the ultimate promise in this manipulation, the combination of being infamous for a short time and eternal life with 72 refurbished virgins, this psychological double-whammy has found the next potential bomber! Those structures are hard to break. Mainly because the lack structure in the first place. I admit, I have also no solution I can suggest. As of yet, the idea of a blind fired recruiting mechanism that essentially devoids every physical connection between executive and operative in a terror act, is just creepy to me. It makes preemptive intel worthless and preemptive investigative measures impossible. The only way would be to try and make every event as safe as possible and that would include effectively methods of a police state. Which means, the terrorists win, if we go down that road. So, I have no solution. But to find one, someone had to pull a little awareness of this new variant of diffused terrorism. We can only find solutions to problems, we have recognized as problems, can we? As far as I can see, this method of blind recruiting will force security forces in a new way of thinking and analyzing. Or it would, if they would have recognized the problem already. Right now, they still think, pressure cooker bombs are something new ... and alone that they do is reason for worrying. - PB - |
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