Remember.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes re Keith Ellison’s letter to Hamas:

What, already? It’s only been 5 years. What’s the rush, Congressman?

And why such forceful action? Co-signing a letter to Hamas Leader-For-Now Khaled Mashaal, coming without warning, without any preliminary negotiation or preconditions, joined only by 11 other headline-seekers . . . that seems preemptory and a unilateral. Where is the international support?

But perhaps this letter is a signal of some strongly held belief? An act of fierce moral urgency? What, exactly, do you mean when you say:

“”It just seemed like a humane, decent thing to do,” Ellison said of sending the letter. “I don’t think [Shalit’s captivity is] helping the Palestinian people get a state, which I earnestly pray that they get. I think it hardens Israeli hearts and makes it more difficult to move the ball.”

Frankly, Congressman Ellison, it doesn’t sound as if you condemn the tactic of attacking Jews or taking hostages in principal, only that you think the tactic didn’t work out as planned in this particular instance, so you urge a different strategy.

You’ve gotta wonder.

I’ve told this story before; a few years ago, I appeared as a panelist on an internet talk show; Ellison was a guest.

I asked him if he repudiated the bits and pieces of the Hamas charter that called for the extinction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews – and by asked, I mean “with almost obsequious politeness”.

His response?  “How many Palestinians do you know?”

I donate that insult to my intelligence to all of CD5’s voters with consciences.

Doakes:

I’m certain that’s a comfort to the people living in Israel to know that a junior Congressman from Minnesota signed a letter to the leader of an organization explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel, advising them to shift tactics to complete the Holocaust. Jews everywhere should sleep soundly tonight. The rest of us – especially those living in Minnesota’s Fourth Congressional District – should hang our heads in shame.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Oh, I feel the shame.

But I’m not hanging my head.  I’m raising my (rhetorical) fist.

Ellison is an embarassment.

Is the New Yorker’s account of the Bin Laden raid accurate?

History will tell us – maybe, someday.  Maybe not.

But fact, trail-obscuring fiction, or somewhere in between, it’s a gripping read.

(Does it seem likely to you that a SEAL – one of the “quiet professionals” – would say what the article says he did, the title of this post, on shooting Bin Laden?  It seems just south of plausible – but you wanna think so, anyway…)

Fearless Prediction: the chorus of lefties who are now chanting that Anders Behring Breivik is “conservative” – to try to equate the accused mass-murderer with Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, naturally – will be chastened to learn that he was more “anti-Muslim” than actually political – and that “right-wing” means something very different in the context of European racial and religious politics than it does here…

…oh, who am I kidding?  Left wingers are never chastened for making overwrought, bigoted statements about American conservatives.

(See: Jared Loughner, Bill Sparkman, Larry Piderman, John Patrick Bedell, Maurice Schwenkler, the Tea Party “racist chants”…)

It’s only a prediction.

Merely wanting peace doesn’t give you peace.

At least 80 people died when a gunman opened fire at an island youth camp in Norway, hours after a bomb attack on the capital, Oslo, police say.

Oslo police are questioning a 32-year-old Norwegian man in connection with both attacks.

The man was arrested on tiny Utoeya island outside Oslo, where police say he opened fire on teenagers.

Earlier, the number of dead from the Utoeya shooting spree, which is among the world’s most deadly, was put at 10.

The earlier bomb attack killed at least seven people. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose Oslo offices were among those badly hit by the blast, described the attacks as “bloody and cowardly”.

The shooter apparently impersonated a cop:

Hours after bomb blasts shattered the holiday calm of downtown Oslo, a man arrived at Utoya island, 50 kilometres from the Norwegian capital, by ferry.

He was wearing a police uniform and packing several weapons, including at least one submachine gun and possibly a rifle.

The stranger beckoned to some of the 550 young people attending a summer camp organized by the youth wing of the ruling Labour Party.

“Come here,” he said, claiming he was performing a routine security check after a bomb blast hours earlier in downtown Oslo killed at least seven people and injured many others.

Once a sizeable group had gathered, the man — who looked like a typical Norwegian, with blond hair and spoke with an eastern Norwegian accent — said this was just the beginning and opened fire.

The campers, aged 15 to 25, scattered in panic, many throwing themselves in the water in an attempt to escape the island, which had no bridge to the mainland. Others cowered in nearby buildings.

A 16-year-old named Emma said she thought at first it was just somebody fooling around, but after she saw two people shot dead she realized it was serious.

“Me and my boyfriend Erik, we ran to the sea and we hid ourselves in [a cave]. After a while … we heard the gunshots right from above us and we could actually smell the — what’s it called? — the gunpowder and we were so scared so we just waited till he went away,” she told the BBC.

Early indications – and they are very early indeed – are that the killer was a lone madman, not connected with any international terror organizations.  The politics, if any, are unknown.

Asked  whether it’s a good idea to profile Muslim males under 35 years old, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano says (with emphasis added by me):

“You’re not using good logic there. You’ve got to use actual intelligence that you received. And, so, you might — all you’ve given me is a kind of status. You have not given me a technique for tactic or behavior. Something that would suggest somebody is not Muslim, but Islamic, that has actually moved into the category of violent extremists,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a forum on U.S. security and preventing terrorist attacks.

OK, so isn’t that an endorsement of the Israeli system?

To say nothing of stopping the intrusive pat-downs of children, octogenarians,airline pilots, law-abiding citizens, parents hauling children with them…

…OK, pretty much everyone?

Here’s Israel today:

Note the brown glob of the West Bank and the little strip between Gaza and Rafah – owned by Israel, with sizeable Palestinian populations.  These populations are largely highly hostile to Israel.

Here was Israel in 1967:

Doens’t look much different, does it?  And it’s not – except for the fact that there are Israeli troops securing the West Bank.  Note the numbers.  They’re distances to Israel’s major population and economic centers.   When Arabs controlled the West Bank before 1967, every major population center in Israel was threatened.  Today, with Iran supplying Hamas and Hezb’allah with more modern rockets, terrorists can scourge most of Israel at will, if the “peace process” breaks down.

As it will, inevitably.

Obama is insane if he thinks this is a rational solution while the Palestinians are controlled by people who still reject the idea that Israel has a right to exist.   The Israelis are right to reject it out of hand.

The “Fisk” is to blogging what the T formation is to football; almost a historical artifact.

But unlike the “T”, every once in a while a good fisk is a wonderful thing, if only to blow the carbon out of the old rhetorical cylinders.

Sisyphus over at Fraters uncorks one on Noam Chomsky.

Oneo of many highlights, with Chomsky in italics:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

I would answer myself that I would be strongly against it, because I am on the side of America and not al Qaeda-Iraq. If Taliban commandos landed at President Obama’s compound and assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic, I would be strongly against that, because I am on the side of America. If anti-linguistics terrorists landed at Noam Chomsky’s Martha’s Vineyard compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic, I would be strongly against it because Noam Chomsky is not a mass-murderer – he is merely the mass-murderers’ not-so-useful idiot.

Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s …

I don’t think the noted linguist understands the meaning of the word “uncontroversially”. No, it does not mean “whatever dumb ass notion Noam Chomsky believes”.

Read the whole thing.

Chuckles Schumer demands a “Do Not Ride” list for Amtrak

Sen. Charles Schumer is calling for better rail security now that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound has turned up plans to attack trains in the U.S.

“Anyone, even a member of al-Qaida could purchase a train ticket and board an Amtrak train without so much as a question asked,” Schumer said. “So that’s why I’m calling for the creation of an Amtrak no ride list. That would take the secure flight program and apply it to Amtrak trains.”

Of course, except for the tiny fragment of America living in the congested mid-Atlantic strip, Amtrak is largely on Amerca’s “do not ride” list.  Amtrak is an epic money pit.

In vast swathes of the US, terrorists would be the only person on an Amtrak train.

This should really help!

First, the good news:  the call to civil rights activists earlier in the week was answered, big-time.  The Senate was overwhelmed with calls from human rights activists asking for a hearing on Senate File 1357, the companion to HF1467, the “Stand Your Ground” bill.   And the hearing will happen today.

And that’s the…well, not “bad” news.  Just another job that needs to get done.

The Senate is holding hearings today:

The Defense of Dwelling and Person Act of 2011 (SF1357) will be heard in the Minnesota Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee tomorrow (Friday, May 6) at 5:00 p.m.

There’s a catch:

Seating is extremely limited: you will need to arrive at 3:30 p.m. to line up for tickets, which will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at 4:00 in Room 15 of the Capitol.

This is our first and best chance to really show the Senate that Minnesotans back this common-sense civil rights bill.

Minnesota civil rights activists have always shocked the legislature with the depth and power of their support.

Now’s no time to stop.

I’m going to try to make it.

Few of the Democrats’ 9/11 memes irritated me more over the years than the one in which Michael Moore has cavorted and romped like an obese sweaty pixie for all these years; that George W. Bush was distracted and incompetent because after he got the news about 9/11, he finished reading My Pet Goat to a bunch of first-graders…

…while his staff frantically figured out what was going on.

The kids to whom he read – now juniors in high school – are finally getting their say:

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Florida.

Seven-year-olds can’t understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult’s face is telling them something is very wrong — and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels’ class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the sudden, devastated change in Bush’s expression when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the Al Qaeda attack. Lazaro Dubrocq’s heart started racing because he assumed they were all in big trouble — with no less than the Commander-in-Chief — but he wasn’t quite sure why. “In a heartbeat he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified,” recalls Dubrocq, now 17. “I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?”

I’ve always felt – with good reason – that the Democrats who ragged on Bush for finishing the story also believed that government works like an episode of  West Wing or 24; that omnipotently competent bureaucrats always have instant real-life knowedge of everything that goes on around them, that they can zoom in on everything that happens across the land and instantly make perfectly-calibrated decisions.

Real life, even at the highest level of government, isn’t like that.  Especially when an unprecedented situation like 9/11 is breaking out.  Nobody in the Federal Government knew what was going on on 9/11, and it showed; at one point there were reports of as many as six hijackings, and a bomb blast at the State Department, among many others.

And one of the things a leader does is keep things in perspective while chaos is breaking out all around him.

All sorts of similar kid fears started running through Mariah Williams’ head. “I don’t remember the story we were reading — was it about pigs?” says Williams, 16. “But I’ll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just seven. I’m just glad he didn’t get up and leave because then I would have been more scared and confused.” Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees: even today she’s grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was finished. “I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out,” says Guerrero, “so we all wouldn’t freak out.”

I’ve often wondered – what did the Dems think the President was supposed to do in the opening seconds of the war?  Jump up, run to the Presidential limo, and order an attack on…someone, somewhere?  Tell NORAD to scramble planes (they do that on their own, although on 9/11 they weren’t equipped to track aircraft inside the US)?

Or keep his composure and not send everyone around him – a classroom full of first-graders – into a blind panic until he actually had something to act on?

Even if they didn’t freak out, it’s apparent that sharing the terrifying Tuesday of 9/11 with Bush has affected those second-graders in the decade since — and, they say, made the news of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. commandos on Sunday all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview High School in Sarasota, doubts he’d be a student in the rigorous IB, or international baccalaureate program, if he hadn’t been with the President as one of history’s most infamous global events unfolded. “Because of that,” he says, “I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place, and that there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good.”

The whole piece is worth a read.

A pity Time magazine couldn’t have run it, say, six years ago…

It didn’t take long for people to note that Bin Laden was killed on the 66th anniversary of Hitler’s death.

Michael Yon has an even more poignant, and in hindsight more satisfying, anniversary.  It was the sixth anniversary of the death of Farah, a little girl killed by a car bomb likely set off by an Al Quaeda sympathizer in pre-surge Iraq:

Major Mark Bieger found this little girl after the car bomb that attacked our guys while kids were crowding around. The soldiers here have been angry and sad for two days. They are angry because the terrorists could just as easily have waited a block or two and attacked the patrol away from the kids. Instead, the suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers. Major Bieger, I had seen him help rescue some of our guys a week earlier during another big attack, took some of our soldiers and rushed this little girl to our hospital. He wanted her to have American surgeons and not to go to the Iraqi hospital. She didn’t make it. I snapped this picture when

Major Bieger ran to take her away. He kept stopping to talk with her and hug her.

The soldiers went back to that neighborhood the next day to ask what they could do. The people were very warm and welcomed us into their homes, and many kids were actually running up to say hello and to ask soldiers to shake hands.

It was perhaps the most iconic photo of the war; perhaps one of the most so of any war.

I hope his 72 virgins all have crabs.

The credit for the news of the deqth of Bin Laden fairly goes (in addition to the intelligence, military and even some local Pakistanis)  to the President.  If it’d failed, it would have rested on his shoulders; it’s only fair that we credit him for the risk he took –  different though that risk is from the ones the SEALs, the Army chopper pilots and the rest of the guys on the ground took.  To be honest, given his record so far, I’d have expected him to have launched a Predator strike – something that would have killed him (or someone) without the political risk – but also without the certainty.

Now, here’s the part I’m looking forward to; watching the left walk back the fact that so much of the policies – and so many, I suspect, of the discrete military and intelligence activities that led to this day – were continued under the Bush administration.

Which, again, is no knock on Obama.

But I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions of the elements of the Twin Cities media who, 24 months ago, were acting like a bunch of 15 year old girls who’d just gotten Justin Bieber tickets after having been allowed into the presence of Seymour Hersh, who was talking (along with Walter Mondale) about a story from “upcoming book”:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

According to Hersh, this mattered  because…:

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

It was JSOC troops – officially SEALs, along with Army Special Operations Aviation, but JSOC missions reportedly mix in other troops, Rangers and “Delta” and other units pretty liberally – that carried on the “execution”.

Just saying.

Over on Facebook, Gary Miller writes about the killing of Bin Laden:

[I have] as much blood lust as the next guy, but has the sinking feeling folks don’t realize OBL got everything he wanted: U.S. brought to the brink of insolvency; the very freedoms we went to war to protect we voluntarily took from ourselves; our prestige in the region irrevocably sullied; our military depleted; our best and our brightest killed and maimed, and — the cherry on top — martydom.

True to a degree.

He had plenty of help bringing ourselves to insolvency; Medicare Part D and “Too Big to Fail” and eleventy-trillion dollars in public pensions all play their role as certainly as did the war.  We “gave up” some freedoms during the War on Terro – but no more than we took away from ourselves over “the war on drugs” since 1970, and we didn’t give up the means to get them back (a guy can dream). We never had much prestige to sully in the Middle East, to be fair.   And he was going to be a martyr even if he died choking on a sandwich.

As to the best and brightest…well, there’s no clever quip there.

…this may be the biggest boon for Navy recruiting…

…since Top Gun.

Almost hard to believe that, after all this, there were reportedly four five killed in the Bin Laden raid; Bin Laden, one of his sons, two “couriers”…

…and a woman whom one of the terrorists used as a human shield.

I’m shocked – but not surprised – to hear that Bin Laden was “hiding” in a multi-milion-dollar “hideout” in Abottabad, Pakistan – a good-sized, garrison town; it’s be sort of like finding him in Louisville, Kentucky.

The event was, naturally, twittered:

A man in Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed by the U.S. on Monday, inadvertently live-tweeted the attack as it started.

The man, who uses the Twitter handle “ReallyVirtual”, identifies himself as Sohaib Athar, “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops.”

Around 11 hours ago, according to the Twitter timeline, Mr. Athar first tweeted about a helicopter hovering above him at 1 a.m., saying it was a “rare event” for Abbottabad. That would have been at about 3.30 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday.

Still, Mr. Athar seems to have thought of it as a mere annoyance, as his next tweet was “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”

Within minutes, he tweeted: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad”

This is going to make life interesting in Pakistan.

According to the White House, Bin Laden is dead:

Osama bin Laden, the glowering mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of Americans, was slain in his luxury hideout in Pakistan early Monday in a firefight with U.S. forces, ending a manhunt that spanned a frustrating decade.

How Many Shots?

“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama said in a dramatic announcement at the White House.

I’ts like to take this opportunity to say it:

It’s Bush’s fault.

For seven years – from 2002 until Bush left office, this was used as the measurement of the war, as witless Democrats chanted “where’s Bin Laden?” with a knowing nudge and wink, as if finding a guy in a dishdasha and a beard hiding in the mountains among millions of followers were as straightforward as passing a congressional resolution.

I wish I’d heard the word; I actually went to bed early last night, so I missed the big announcement.  Other Americans were luckier:

A jubilant crowd of thousands gathered outside the White House as word spread of bin Laden’s death. Hundreds more sang and waved American flags at Ground Zero in New York — where the twin towers that once stood as symbols of American economic power were brought down by bin Laden’s hijackers 10 years ago.

Another hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon on that cloudless day, and a fourth was commandeered by passengers who forced it to the ground — at cost of their own lives — before it could reach its intended target in Washington.

The United States attacked Afghanistan within months, pursuing al-Qaida, and an invasion of Iraq followed as part of the Bush administration’s global war on terror.

I heard via Twitter/Facebook that some people got together at the State Capitol. Wish I coulda been there.

I guess next Saturday’s NARN show is pretty well planned out.

Unarmed British soldier captures Taliban leader and bombmaker by ripping him off a passing motorcycle and beating him down:

Private Lee Stephens, from Solihull, central England, gave chase to the insurgent before jumping out of his tank and grabbing him from a speeding motorbike as he made his getaway, close to the town of Gereshk, southern Afghanistan.

Private Stephens said that he “goose necked” the man, grabbing him around the neck and dragging him towards his vehicle.

“I jumped out off the wagon and I grabbed the geezer,” Private Stephens said. “It was one left, two right fists. That was it. No weapons, just my hands.”

The captured man turned out to be a bomb maker and the highest ranking Taliban captured by regular British forces.

I hope the Minneapolis Police hire the guy and put him on downtown skateboard patrol.

…but only did it in a half-in, half-out, half-assed kind of way, so that when all was said and done our intervention really didn’t lead to our intended result at all?

Forces loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi continued to push rebels out of positions along coastal oil towns, further delaying the rebel drive on Tripoli and testing the limits of the coalition air strikes at a time when the alliance is considering arming Col. Gadhafi’s opponents.

So let’s get this straight; we went to war a month late, in support of “rebels” who very well may end up our enemies – and we may fail anyway?

Wow.  Too bad we couldn’t find a ward heeler with some foreign policy experience.

Andrew Exum, a former Ranger officer who blogs at Abu Muquwama (which is affilaiated with the Center for a New American Security) on a a factoid about the “rebel”, eastern part of Libya:

I was looking through the Sinjar documents (.pdf) today because I remembered (incorrectly, as it turns out) that Benghazi had sent more foreign fighters to Iraq than any other city in the Arabic-speaking world. On a per capita basis, though, twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya — and specifically eastern Libya — than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. Libyans were apparently more fired up to travel to Iraq to kill Americans than anyone else in the Middle East. And 84.1% of the 88 Libyan fighters in the Sinjar documents who listed their hometowns came from either Benghazi or Darnah in Libya’s east. This might explain why those rebels from Libya’s eastern provinces are not too excited about U.S. military intervention. It might also give some pause to those in the United States so eager to arm Libya’s rebels.

Of course (as a commenter notes) it could be that Qaddhafi used Iraq as an excuse to get ride of Muslim militants that could just as easily have bedeviled him.

But the Middle East is like unravelling an onion.

“Why don’t Muslims crack down on their terrorist elements” has been a pretty standard question since 9/11.

The short answer – they, largely, are:

It used to be that there were plenty of mosques in the West run by radicalized, or very conservative, clerics. But no more. Since September 11, 2001, Western nations have cracked down. Radical clerics were either expelled from the country (these guys tend to be migrants), or police investigations of criminal activity by these firebrand clerics put them in jail, or on the run.

Which is not to say there was never a problem:

 Turns out that in the 1980s and 90s, a lot of mosques had been taken over by a small number of radical members. Threats and violence were used, and it often got quite ugly. This was ignored until the 1990s, and not tolerated much at all after 2001. While this kept the radical Moslems quiet, it did not always change their attitudes. But these men were usually migrants, often from the same country, or region, as their fellow congregants.

As with so many things, 9/11 changed all that:

After 2001, Moslems in the West, particularly the United States, knew that they were responsible for the terrorist activity of Moslems they worshiped together with. They could usually recognize another migrant who might be up to something dangerous. Action could be taken to stop it, or drive the troublemaker away (or turn him in to the cops). But the new converts were harder to read. Thus the growing tendency to scrutinize those seeking instruction to become a convert.

And it’s having an effect:

Even before September 11, 2001, al Qaeda warned its agents to not hang out with American Moslems, who were known to turn in suspected radicals. Now American Moslems are letting the FBI know about suspicious new guys seeking to convert. That has led to the arrest of some active terrorists. But in many European countries, local Moslems are less prone to let the police know of someone suspicious, and there are more active Islamic radicals (because the Middle East is closer, and Moslem migrants are less likely to be accepted by the natives.)

Unmentioned in the piece; is the Twin Cities’ extremely fundamentalist Somali Muslim community an exception?

Paul Schmelzer at the Mindy doesn’t address rumors that the Soros-supported “news” front is about to change its name to “Dump Bradlee Dean” – but he does give lots of Xs and Os to the new “loose mores blow up stores” campaigns at Walmart and the Mall:

Today Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Walmart’s participation, according to a DHS press release. The nation’s largest retailer will have 230 stores participating immediately, with as many as 588 eventually taking part. The Mall of America’s participation was announced last week; it’ll be joined by “the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries, and state and local fusion centers across the country.”

The expanded campaign, unveiled at a mall ceremony last week, will include print and video advertisements throughout the complex.

So – posting terror warnings in public places is good?

Well, now that it’s a Democrat!  Let’s go back a few years:

During the 2004 elections, Kiffmeyer made national headlines when she decided to post terrorist warning signs at polling places throughout Minnesota urging voters to be wary of people appearing at precincts with “shaved head[s] or short hair” who “smell of unusual herbal/flower water or perfume,” wear baggy clothing or appear to be whispering to themselves.

So when Janet Napolitano tells you to watch out for those crazy neighbors (especially if they’re tax protesters, second amendment people, pro-lifers or Tea Partiers, naturally), it’s a good thing, but when a Republican does it…

…well, we all know how it works, don’t we?

Good news: the FBI has arrested a Somali teen for attempting to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland Oregon.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out whether Mohammed Muhammed, the alleged bomber, is  an anti-tax terrorist, or a pro-second-amendment kind of terrorist, or pro-life terrorists, or one of the anti-gay-marriage kind of terrorists?

How does the President and Secretary Napolitano expect us to fight terror if they won’t tell us what kind of domestic terror was involved?

Until maybe the mid-eighties, “terror target” and “Israel” were more or less synonymous – going back hundreds of years, reaching a peak over the past seventy years or so. 

In response, the State of Israel has become very punctilious about learning the who, what, where and why of terror.  It is a matter of individual and national survival, for a people that spent the middle of the Twentieth Century being shot, starved, gassed and burned nearly out of existence in what Helen Thomas called their homeland.

To Israelis, it’s serious business.

To Americans, it’s part ritual, and part make-work program.  We’ve been subjected to three serious terror attacks on our own soil.  One, the first World Trade Center bombing, failed due to its conspirators’ incompetence and, I’d like to think, the providence of a merciful God.  One – Oklahoma City – was the work of a pair of solitary madmen, or so says our government. And of course, September 11. 

Other attacks – the shoe-bomber, the underwear bomber – failed due to incompetence, possibly caused by the part of countererrorism we do well; going overseas and finding the professionals and killing them, forcing terrorists to go with the red-shirt squad for going after the US.  Still others – Fort Hood, the murder in Little Rock – were relatively (!) small-scale, apparently-spontaneous outbursts. 

We’ve been able to afford to skate on “airport security” that exists more to serve as a bureaucratic feel-good – like “Zero Tolerance” policies – while conforming to current fashions in political correctness – because a generation of terrorist A-squads were killed in Iraq, are laying low and watching the sky in Pakistan or Afghanistan, are holed up in the jungles of Indonesia and the Philippines listening for out-of-place twig snaps, or are sitting in Guantanamo fielding residual offers from Oliver Stone.

There’ll be more.  There always are.   And this past month’s uproar over the Transportation Security Administration’s intrusive-yet-useless groping of random Americans has prompted the conscientious to ask “how do countries with real commitments to keeping travel safe do it?

Jeff Dunetz, er, profiles security, Israeli-style.

I’ll start with the conclusion:

As the United States defends against the ever expanding threat of Muslim terror, right here on our home turf, success depends on throwing off the shackles of political correctness and adopting the methods of our ally Israel.

However the US is stuck in what seems to be an irreversible and deadly policy of treating everyone the same., even though we are all individuals and very different. The ultimate result is an airport security process that gives you a choice of being abused by a machine or the groping hands of an untrained TSA agent. The present TSA policies put passengers and the X-Ray appliances that reveal their bare bodies in the same category as they are both treated like machines.

During her 62 year fight against terror, Israel has achieved a balance between protection of civil liberties and the prevention of violence. Her decision was that the sanctity of saving human lives and preserving personal dignity, outweighs the targeting and possible inconvenience of the extra questioning of a few.

One key difference?  The goal of Israeli security is very different than that of the TSA’s inspection:

The real difference between the Israeli and American approach is the target. Israel tries to identify and stop the terrorist while the U.S. targets the bomb or other weapon. This approach does not change whether there is a left or right wing Prime Minister in power because the government realizes for Israel, the fight against terrorism is a fight for its very survival. Thus her government and citizenry have a view of preventing terrorism that is unencumbered by the political correctness which restrains efforts in the United States.

The ISA (Israeli Security Agency) calls it “human factor.” Some part of that human factor would cause Al Sharpton to show up to picket the Airport if it was practiced in the US. Ethnic profiling of passengers plays a central role in Israel’s multi-level approach. Not just ethnicity is profile, race religion, general appearance and behavior are also part of the information used to profile. And wherever that profile is being made, no matter what country it is being made in, it is an Israeli doing the profile.

While this past month of public, crowd-sources scrutiny has uncovered numerous stories of TSA incompetence and depravity, I’ll resist the urge to jump on the bandwagon of calling TSA staffers universal incompetents because they are low-wage government employees with little, and indifferent training.  I know a few TSA people, and know them to be genuinely concerned with security.

I also know a few people who are genuinely interested in first aid; I wouldn’t let them take out my kids’ appendixes:

There are other differences, most importantly is that you don’t just come off the street and get a job with the ISA (Israel Security Agency). These security agents are all ex-military (as most of the country is) and they are selected based on their intelligence and their ability to behavior profile.

Read the whole thing; it includes excellent insights on Israeli “profiling” and the techniques they use.

And remember it the next time you “fly”.