Focus on Muslims Misplaced After Shooting

Focus on Muslims Misplaced After Shooting

Nicholas Johnson

Iowa City Press-Citizen, June 17, 2016, p. A5
[This column appeared in the Press-Citizen's online edition as Nicholas Johnson, "Focus on Muslims Misplaced After Shooting," Iowa City Press-Citizen (online), June 16, 2016, 6:51 p.m. It draws upon the earlier blog essay, "Keeping Up With ISIS; There Is Another Explanation for Orlando," June 14, 2016. The column to which today's [June 17] column refers and responds is Ian Goodrum, "Finger-Pointing After Orlando Massacre," Iowa City Press-Citizen, June 15, 2016, p. A9.]

Ian Goodrum has reminded us, with writing befitting our City of Literature, of both the causes of the home-grown mass violence in Orlando, and how such tragedies are seized upon by those promoting political or other causes. (“Finger Pointing After Orlando Massacre,” June 15.)

He notes the killers’ “common denominator” is that they are “young, angry men,” and then provides insight into the pathology of their anger.

Among those promoting causes, he observes, are “bloodthirsty pundits and politicians” now calling “for state-sponsored discrimination against believers in Islam, along with a general ramping up of our military presence in the Middle East.”

Goodrum’s right on all counts, as I see it. Our enemy is not Islam. It’s a few of our home-grown, American “young, angry men;” mostly citizens, with a diversity of histories, persuasions, mental conditions, motives, weapons and targets. More domestic hate crimes involve perpetrators who would claim to be Christian than Muslim. Their targets are no more predictable than where a lightning strike may hit — federal buildings, universities, African-American churches, gathering spots for Latinos, Asians, Mormons, Catholics, Jews and the LGBT community.

To reduce mass violence, we must focus on our young, angry men. Our mission: to treat their anger before we have to treat their victims.

That is but one of the reasons why focusing on Muslims is counterproductive. Even if it were not unconstitutional and inhospitable, as President Barack Obama points out, it is precisely what ISIS wants us to do — confirm their assertion that we have declared war on Islam and its 1.6 billion followers, giving an enormous boost to their recruiting.

The “bloodthirsty pundits and politicians” who think more troops and bigger bombs are the answer are clearly not our friends. This is a high-stakes whack-a-mole drama in which all the world is ISIS’ stage, where for every bomb we drop more actors come on stage to respond with creative acts of violence.

ISIS has proven creative and adaptable. When we X-ray passengers for guns, they switch to plastic shoe bombs. When they lose a city, they move elsewhere. When they begin to lose on every battlefield, they invite and train terrorists to execute ISIS-orchestrated slaughter in Europe and elsewhere. When the West’s intelligence capabilities to track their messages, movements, and money begins to interfere with such organized efforts, they need a new strategy.

Here it is.

Our State Department describes Abu Mohammed al Adnani as the “official spokesman and a senior leader of Isis." In September 2014 he used ISIS’ sophisticated communications networks to propagate the following message:

"If you can kill a disbelieving American or European, French, an Australian or a Canadian, then rely upon Allah, and kill him. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place. Don’t try to communicate with us. Don’t expect our help, he said. Just do the killing, and pledge allegiance to ISIS."

Since that time, in each of those named countries, using the itemized means of murder, followed by declarations of allegiance to ISIS, there have been killings.

Goodrum is right that the Orlando shooting wasn’t the result of “direct involvement or orchestration by” ISIS; as were Orlando officials’ conclusions the shooter wasn’t a “member of ISIS.” But ISIS’ latest strategy may have been at play.

None of which changes the numbers. One day in Orlando, 49 were gunned down. But every day in the U.S., nearly 100 die from guns. An Islamophobic focus on this carnage is both self-defeating and close to statistically irrelevant.

Meanwhile, somebody better tell those “bloodthirsty pundits and politicians” who didn’t get the memo that they’re three strategies behind ISIS, running a trillion-dollar program as old as Windows 95.
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Contact Nicholas Johnson of Iowa City through www.nicholasjohnson.org.

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Understanding Terrorist Thugs

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ISIS/ISIL is Neither Islamic Nor a State

Related: Nicholas Johnson, "Sober Risk Assessment Needed to Respond to Terror," Iowa City Press-Citizen, November 28, 2015; Nicholas Johnson, "Syria's Refugees: Job One and Job Two," The Gazette, November 1, 2015; Nicholas Johnson, "Ten Questions for Bush Before War," The Daily Iowan, February 4, 2003


Understanding Terrorist Thugs
Nicholas Johnson
The Daily Iowan, December 3, 2015, p. A4

What Motivates 'Terrorist Thugs'?
Nicholas Johnson
The Gazette, December 20, 2015, p. C4
What is the ultimate goal of those terrorist thugs in Iraq and Syria with their random, if organized, attacks on innocent Westerners?

Until we figure that out, our responses run a serious risk of making us less, rather than more, safe.

Here’s a possible explanation.

In their minds, this is not a battle against the West as an ultimate goal. It is a battle for the hearts and minds of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, designed to bring them into the thugs’ ambit. To achieve this, they need two things. They need evidence the West is, in fact, waging a war on Islam that puts all Muslims in danger. And they need plausibly to argue they offer Muslims protection from hostile Westerners. Where? In a state of their own, their Islamic Caliphate (Arabic for “successor;” in this case successor to the Prophet Mohammed).

To do this they want and need war with the West. Like a bully looking for a fight, terrorist acts that provoke our response of war serve their cause. What better evidence of a war than our organizing coalitions, bombing their territory, and sending in troops? When our leaders oblige, and then call this a “war” or “clash of cultures,” they just help the terrorists’ cause.

When our governors refuse to accept suffering Syrian refugees or say we should admit Christian but not Syrian Muslims, it further confirms the thugs’ case. When Muslims needing our protection are rejected by us, we leave them no option but to look to these thugs for protection.

We further aid their cause when we buy into the assertion that they do, in fact, control a state, using the reference they prefer: “Islamic State” (in the acronyms ISIS and ISIL).

That is why the name used here is “terrorist thugs” rather than any mention of their “state.”

Do they enjoy killing Westerners, by whatever means? Yes. They probably even get a chuckle from our seeming inability to find them with our global, industrial-grade surveillance — and then, when we do, our failures to use and share the results.

But it’s highly unlikely they share Hitler’s vision of taking over the territory of Europe and the United Sates or killing us all. Their goal does not require, nor do they have, such resources. That’s why they welcome our providing the video images of a war waged inside their state. Meanwhile, their public-relations media experts are tasked with the global distribution of recruiting material, along with claims of credit for events such as the downed Russian airliner and the coordinated Paris killings. [Photo credit: Daily Iowan/Associated Press, Evan Vucci]

We calmly accept 30,000 gun deaths every year as our constitutional right, but panic at the prospect of up to 1/10th of 1 percent more killings from terrorist acts. We erect buildings’ physical barriers, increase military and police presence, search fans at college football stadiums, and perform a theater of ineffective “security” in airports. Since the thugs’ provocations involve terrorism rather than war, every time we appear terrorized, more points are put up on their scoreboard.

Suppose a traditional war could be fought there, with a uniformed enemy, and frontlines on battlefields (rather than killing innocents in urban warfare). Even if we won, what then? Why would it be any different from the last time, when we imposed a Shiite government on the formerly ruling Sunnis, chaos reigned, and the opportunist Sunni tribal leaders looked to the thugs for stability?

Some of these tribes have hundreds, even thousands, of years of history. The last time they helped us, we turned our backs and left them to struggle. Why should they trust us now?

But they may be our only hope. Fighting terrorism is like a game of whack-a-mole. The more we kill the more recruits they get. New thugs-in-chief replace the old. Tribal leaders are our only long term hope. In Iraq, all wars as well as politics are local.
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Nicholas Johnson, as U.S. Maritime administrator, managed sealift to Vietnam and maintains FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com. Contact: mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org

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