This Would Itself Be Seen as Terrorism

Photo by Atia Mohammed/Flash90.

I've been suggesting without a lot of actual evidence that I know the Israeli bombing of Gaza, especially in the northern part of the strip, has been indiscriminate and in violation of the IDF's own targeting rules, let alone international law, ever since October 19, 9 days into the campaign, when The Economist published an assessment of the damage up to that point based on satellite images from the first five days: 11,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. In the rigorous standard procedure, an airstrike cannot go ahead until it is individually approved by an advisor outside the military deciding that the possible civilian casualties are outweighed by the value of the target; I couldn't believe it was possible to do that for 6,000 bombs in 120 hours (50 strikes per hour or about one every 72 seconds).

Now some reporting has emerged, by Yuval Abraham in the great Israeli online newsmagazine +972, based on interviews with seven current and former members of the intelligence community including some directly involved in the operations, and it's pretty disturbing: IDF has indeed loosened the rules relating the number of potential civilian casualties, they've expanded authorization for hitting nonmilitary targets, and they're using an AI system to generate targets—I was right about the number of targets being a clue, there were literally too many of them for humans to decide on unassisted.

The nonmilitary targets include private residences and high-rise apartment blocks (all those shattered buildings we see in the videos where whole floors have slipped off their supports) along with public buildings and infrastructure, and called "power targets" (matarot otzem), and what it means to say they are nonmilitary is that striking them isn't aimed at a military objective—killing combatants or destroying their facilities—but at frightening the civilian population:

The Church of 9/11

One of the Reflected Absence pools at the September 11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan, photo via Concrete Decor.

The inestimable Talia Lavin asking a big question:

i meant this as a genuine question. it was indisputably tragic, world-changing, evil and despicable, and a turning point of history. but “sacred” is a particular word with its own religious meanings, and i wanted to pinpoint what it means to call such a day “sacred” specifically.

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) April 14, 2019

Which apparently drew a lot of fire from people who thought she was mounting an attack on Republicans:

West of Eden: Listing Terrorists

Brian Hook, a State Department Iran policy adviser,  on NPR to propagandize for Trump's (or Prime Minister Netanyahu's, or Crown Prince Mohammad's, depending who you ask) decision to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, offered a list of terrorist things they're said to have been responsible for, including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, which killed 305 people including 241 US military,  the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 including four Israeli employees and 25 Argentines, the 1994 bombing of the Associación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Buenos Aires, a local Jewish community center, killing 85, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US Air Force personnel and a Saudi national, and detaining US citizens—

Wait, what? Not that I approve of these cruel and unlawful imprisonments, which include four or five people still jailed at the time of writing, but is it the IRGC that did it, as opposed to other organs of the Iranian government, and is it correctly described as terrorism?

T]he term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. (US Code, via Wikipedia)

“Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based” and anyone who questions the King or the government or supports any group, party, organization other than that of the ruling elite inside or outside the Kingdom is a terrorist (Saudi Arabia, same source) 

Also, Trump's best friend Kim Jong-un runs a government that's holding US citizen Kim Dong-chul on bogus charges with a 10-year prison sentence, and Vladimir Putin's Russia has held Paul Whelan since December.

But if you leave it out, it looks like 22 years since the IRGC was involved in any terrorist acts, by the US State Department's count, which makes listing it as a terrorist organization now seem like some peculiar timing. Especially since it's election day in Israel, whose embattled prime minister (under threat of indictment for bribe-taking) jumped in to make sure voters understood it as an example of his pull in Washington, Trump's personal favor to him:

“Thank you, my dear friend, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, for having decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization,” he wrote in Hebrew on Twitter on Monday. “Thank you for responding to another of my important requests, which serves the interests of our countries and countries of the region.”

Jameh Mosque, Isfahan, via.

Too many things coming to a head here

My screengrab.

If Emperor Trump wanted to create some kind of Reichstag fire excuse for declaring a national emergency, if you know what I mean, he couldn't do better than declaring that the Palestinian peace process is dead and that from the US point of view Israel is basically all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. I'm not saying that's what he did—I don't think it is at all what he did—but I'll bet at some point as Mattis and Tillerson were trying to talk him down from his decision to proclaim his intention of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of them said it would provoke terrorist incidents, possibly even inside the US, and he made one of those dumb macho responses to the effect that we can't let the terrorists tell us what to do.

As I've said before, the object of these people is never to prevent bad things happening but to dramatize the difference between the Good, us, and the Evil, them.

Sigh

A "typical reunion" of former students of the Instituto Politécnico Superior "General San Martín" in Rosario, Argentina, from the school's Wikipedia article. Photo by Fernando Lopez Anido. I was just looking for a campus picture and found this.

Sitting at a desk a couple of miles from the killing yesterday afternoon watching it unfold on the Twitter, heart-sickening. Those paths, a ribbon of parkland, only a few yards wide in places, almost completely ring Manhattan nowadays, and I spend a lot of time in them, on the Hudson River side, mostly not that far downtown. They are really peaceful and happy places. Every once in a while a little Parks vehicle tootles by, and everybody scurries easily out of its way. I can't get the thought out of my mind of the five men from Argentina, Hernán Mendoza, Diego Angelini, Alejandro Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernán Ferruchi, who were in New York, in a party of eight, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their graduation from the Escuela Politécnica in Rosario, when the truck hurtling up the path cut them down and killed them. How incomprehensibly random is that?

There are Jews in the world who run moneylending operations charging exorbitant interest rates, in addition to millions of non-Jewish usurers. There are African American men who are shiftless and lazy alongside shiftless and lazy people of other races. There are Muslims who commit appalling acts of terror. It's so disheartening every time you have to acknowledge the existence of such people reinforcing the worst stereotypes. In mid-afternoon it seemed possible that this was some kind of road rage incident; there were reports of a violent quarrel between two truck drivers. Then the news that the killer driver had shouted the "Allahu akbar", at first from unreliable sources, at last corroborated by authorities. The haters on the Twitter grew palpably more and more excited, taking a savage joy in seeing their hatred justified and their beliefs confirmed.

Trump is already blaming the whole thing on Chuck Schumer. He heard it on Fox & Friends.

The terrorist came into our country through what is called the "Diversity Visa Lottery Program," a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

"Senator Chuck Schumer helping to import Europes problems" said Col.Tony Shaffer. We will stop this craziness! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

Not a word about why Uzbekistan isn't on his #MuslimBan. Or Europe, for that matter, since Col. Shaffer brought it up.

Comically enough, Schumer is not only not responsible for the Diversity Lottery (he did help create it, in 1990, as a Brooklyn congressman; it allows in some 50,000 immigrants a year from unusual countries, mostly in Africa), he voted to abolish it in 2013, as part of the "Gang of 8" immigration reform proposals that died from the opposition of the Trumpiest anti-immigrant Republicans.

The most consoling thing is New York City, which doesn't get terrorized, as Roy notes.

So we don't have to fight them here

Palace of Justice, Damascus, March 15, photo by an anonymous stringer for AFP/Getty images, via Chicago Tribune.

Nobody should ever have to undergo the kind of horror Britain has been undergoing with the Westminster Bridge attack of March 22 (killing four and injuring 50), the Manchester bombing of the Ariana Grande concert May 22 (killing 22, many children, and injuring 116), and last night's London Bridge incident (killing seven and injuring some dozens, 21 critically).

Nor should it happen in Baghdad, where over the same period 23 were killed and 45 wounded by a car bomb in the suburb of Hayy al'A'amei on March 20, and a suicide truck bomber killed 17 and injured at least 60 at a police checkpoint in the southern part of the city March 29; seven people were killed and 12 injured in three bombings, one in a fish market in Yusufiya, one in a construction site, on April 5, and two more killed and 11 injured by bombings on April 6 and 7,  and a suicide car attack on a traffic police compound in the center of the city killed five and injured six on April 28; one killed and two wounded in separate incidents of May 3, two killed and three wounded in bombings in western Baghdad on May 6, one killed and three wounded by a bomb in southwestern Baghdad on May 9, and another killed on May 10, an employee of the education ministry, four killed and ten injured by a booby-trapped vehicle in Al-Sho'la on May 11, one killed and five wounded by a booby-trapped car near a bridge on Al-Rubaie Street on May 14, one killed and two wounded by an explosion in the north of the city on May 16, two killed and eight wounded in two shopping-district incidents including one at the market in al-Nasr wal Salam region in Abu Ghraib district of May 18, one killed and three injured in a blast near a market on May 19, 35 killed and 45 injured in four suicide attacks around the city on May 19, and three more injured on May 22, also near the market in al-Nasr wal Salam, and then on May 30, four days after the fasting month of Ramadan began, at least 30 killed and 40 wounded by a car that blew up outside the al-Faqma ice cream parlor.

Twenty-one Years

Updated 5/25

Photo by Manchester Evening News, June 1996.

Just 21 years ago, on June 15 1996, the city of Manchester (which has, like most big cities in the north of England, a very large Irish Catholic population) was rocked by the explosion of an enormous bomb, 1500 kg and the largest bomb ever detonated in Great Britain in peacetime, in a truck parked on Corporation Street. The perpetrators, the Provisional IRA, had sent a warning an hour and a half in advance, allowing the police to evacuate some 75,000 people from the area, and nobody was killed, but 212 people were injured, and you can imagine the chaos and distress in the city as friends and parents and lovers tried to assure themselves of each others' safety, and emergency medical workers sought out the victims—it's a whole story that they were confused by mannequins lying in the street after the blast blew them out of their shopwindows.

In the horrible business of deciding which terrorist attacks are worse than others, you'd have to say this bombing wasn't nearly as bad as last night's attack on the Ariana Grande concert audience at the Manchester Arena, which gave no warnings, aimed specifically at an event where most of the participants were children, and has killed at least 22 people, but it was horrible all the same.

Cheap shots: Daily Caller trying to terrorize us

This movie exists! Though it was a pretty pathetic flop. I bet it's great. It's an adaptation originally by Arthur Miller of Henrik Ibsen's great play, in which McQueen's character is a scientist who exposes the bourgeoisie of a Norwegian town profiting from water pollution. making him the enemy of the title. Let's all be #EnemiesOfThePeople.

Almost as many as the Republicans being checked out for collusion with Russian agents https://t.co/UuH9MpmCnu via @dailycaller

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2017

Seriously, .@DailyCaller, did your anonymous source explain discrepancy with official DHS report 2 weeks ago saying refugees are no threat? pic.twitter.com/pDrDrIFJmn

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2017

The citation is from AP story in USA Today.

.@DailyCaller Also, I thought Mr. Trump told you not to use anonymous sources. Are you the enemy of the people now?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2017

Nice

#NiceAttentat : dans le hall du Negresco transformé en hôpital. Les témoins sont entendus par les enquêteurs pic.twitter.com/FsBjNfRVQw

— Alban Mikoczy (@AlbanMikoczy) July 14, 2016

Newtie (via Raw Story), seeking to exploit the horror on Promenade des Anglais for his own personal profit, goes way beyond Trump's illegal proposal. He wants to give that Muslim test not just to people who want to travel here but to people who are here already, including citizens by naturalization and by birth:

“Western civilization is in a war,” Gingrich told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “We should, frankly, test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up Sharia? Glad to have them as citizens. Perfectly happy to have them next door. But we need to be fairly relentless about defining who our enemies are.”

I'm not going to make any effort to figure out what he thinks "Sharia" means. The man has a PhD in history and should learn to use technical terms correctly. But Sharia is a religious law and our First Amendment guarantees the right of anyone to follow its principles (not to institute it in American civil and criminal jurisprudence, or to do things that violate US law), just as it permits people to keep Kosher or even to refuse blood transfusions or throw their money away on Scientology. And how would you "test" people on whether they "believe" in it or not anyway?

Say the magic words

Whenever you say, "radical Islam," a duck resembling you comes down and terrorism stops. pic.twitter.com/r4WaGBTSXi

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) June 14, 2016

Shorter David Brooks, "Religion's Wicked Neighbor", New York Times, June 17 2016:

Obama is wrong not to say "Islamic terrorism". What he shouldn't say is "religious terrorism", because it isn't religious at all. It's just Islamic.

Brooks on a brief visit home from the psychophilosophical wilderness to his National Review roots, perhaps as a kind of Father's Day tribute to old Mr. Buckley, playing the traditional game of making the elaborate Jesuitical argument to justify some stupid conservative slogan, in this case the denunciation of the president for refusing to say the magic words that will—well, it's not clear what they'll do. Probably we'll never find out. Thanks, Obama!

Barack Obama is clearly wrong when he refuses to use the word “Islam” in reference to Islamist terrorism.

That's pretty cute, given that Brooks himself is using the word "Islamist" in contradistinction to "Islamic", meaning not of Islam ("submission" to God and to nothing else) but of Islamism, the idolatrous worship of the religious edifice instead of the deity. In fact he doesn't know he's doing that, of course. He just thinks it sounds elegant and chic. He may have gotten it from Hillary Clinton, who consciously used it the other day (I think)—

More death

Funeral in Iskandariyah on Saturday. Photo by Haidar Hamdani for AFP/Getty Images, via New York Magazine.

Between the horror last week in Brussels, in Europe, and this week in Lahore, among Christian kids in a public playground (which struck me too as very poignantly awful though I don't like the implicit message that the Christianity of the victims makes it somehow worse; because it's not just an attack on Christians but on the ethnic-religious pluralism that has somehow survived in Pakistan, the "Land of the Pure", over the 70 years since Partition), most of us missed out on yet another thing, in Iraq of all places, where at least 41 non-Christian non-Europeans were killed, 17 of them boys aged 10 to 16, at an amateur soccer match in the mixed Sunni-Shi'a town of Iskanderiyah south of Baghdad, and 105 wounded, by another teenage boy killing himself on behalf of the Da'esh, another blow against integration and against even the most uncomplicated and inoffensive forms of happiness.

Chas Danner at New York Magazine (see the picture credit above) adds:

The Associated Press notes that analysts and members of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition believe attacks of this type may proliferate, both inside Iraq and abroad, as the militant group continues to lose ground to Iraqi forces in the country’s North and West.

These awful incidents really are the consequence of the defeat of the Da'esh, its gradual devolution from ideas of statehood to elementary nihilist gangsterism, and I can't say the government forces and its Western backers should stop defeating them, so I don't know quite what to say.

Something just made me Google the Wannsee Conference, detailing the steps of a "final solution" to the "Jewish question" for the assembled ministers of the Reich, held in January 1942 just after a decisive turnaround moment in the progress of the war, when the Soviet forces finally began to counterattack the Wehrmacht outside Moscow and the US joined the allies following Pearl Harbor, and a bad harvest had left Germany short of food; as if the Holocaust were a direct consequence of those events that would assure Germany's defeat, which would obviously be a ridiculous oversimplification of what happened, and no sane person would make it a parallel to what's going on in Iraq and Syria anyway.

Maybe the point of remembering it is just to remember that it's always important, and to remember thereby that attention, as we say, must be paid. If it's the only thing we have to bring to the situation, then we have to bring it.

West of Eden: Brussels doubts

Syrian family in Istanbul. Photo by Jonny Hogg/Reuters (?) on Flickr.

Trump doubled down on his torture advocacy yesterday, naturally:

The billionaire businessman said authorities "should be able to do whatever they have to do" to gain information in an effort to thwart future attacks.

"Waterboarding would be fine. If they can expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding," Trump said on NBC's "Today" program, adding he believed torture could produce useful leads. "You have to get the information from these people."

That would almost be funny, if it wasn't so horrible, coming at the time it does. On Monday, as Belgian police were talking about the fantastic cooperation they were getting from Salah Abdeslam, without the benefit of torture ("worth his weight in gold," said his lawyer), they happened to mention one of the leads they'd acquired, the false name Soufiane Kayal being used by Najim Laachraoui, a suspect in November's Paris attacks; on Tuesday, the Brussels bombings took place, and today we are learning that that same Laachraoui is a member of the team that did yesterday's slaughter, probably the bomb-maker. The Belgian authorities might well have been able to capture Laachraoui and prevent the attack, thanks to their humane and effective interrogation practice,  if they had been a little luckier.

Don't stultify my fabric, bro!

Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality (1923).

1.

David Brooks on "The Age of Small Terror":

On New Year’s Eve some friends and family members had a drink at a bar in Tel Aviv. The next day a gunman shot up the place, killing two people and wounding at least five. When I heard about the shooting I was horrified, of course, but there was no special emotion caused by the proximity 16 hours before.

Friends and family members of whom? Where was there no special emotion? Whose proximity? He's not actually trying to hide the fact that he has friends and relatives in Tel Aviv, he's more trying to hide the fact that he exists at all, as a specific human being with a body and a family and particular emotions of his own. General David Brooks and his general emotions are focused on the big picture:

These days, we all live at risk of random terror, whether we are in Paris, San Bernardino, Boston or Fort Hood.

I.e., wherever there are Muslims, apparently, but I'll get back to that.

Got paranoia? San Bernardino edition

Moses and the Messengers from Canaan. Giovanni Lanfranco, 1621-24, Getty Center via Wikimedia Commons.

Last night's post (wound up while I was trying to watch President Obama and cook a family meal—yeah, we eat late, like Spaniards—at the same time) was meant to be about Jonah Goldberg, not the San Bernardino incident, and I don't feel happy with it, though it has scored a pretty substantial audience by my pathetic standards, as a matter of fact. I feel it wasn't funny, as Suzan noted in comments; I think because you can't make it funny and about Goldberg; you can't make it not about San Bernardino, because that's too large and Goldberg is too small.

On the other hand, Goldberg's prose is waddling around in the context of a real journalistic question about what happened on Friday. Whatever preconceptions you bring to it, it doesn't make any sense; it's composed of two halves that don't fit together.

From Jonah's world

Jonah-in-the-Whale, via WhatWouldSpideyDo.

I wouldn't presume to know what happened in San Bernardino on Friday, but I think we can be pretty confident it isn't as Jonah Goldberg suggests:

I think the “hybrid” attack theory is still plausible to me. I suspect that the original target wasn’t the Christmas party. My hunch is that Syed Farook went to the party and Bob from accounting stole his stapler or told him the ice-cream cake wasn’t halal and, in a rage, Farouk called an audible. He ran home, told his mail-order jihadist bride, “It’s go-time!” After a brief detour to drop their baby girl off at grandma’s and inscribe themselves in the Book of Worst Parents Ever, they went and murdered a bunch of innocent people. The willing suspension of reason about this is just amazing.

What do you mean by "target"?

Image via CNN.

Well, that didn't take long. From BuzzFeed:

Zigmond Post, who told BuzzFeed News he was a neighbor of Dear’s in Hartsel, said the man once gave him anti-Obama pamphlets.

Post said he once went to Dear’s home to retrieve two dogs that had gotten loose. “We were there for a minute and the guy was already handing us anti-Obama pamphlets,” he said. According to Post, Dear said “Obama was ruining the country and needed to be impeached.”

But this certainly has no direct bearing on the question of whether Robert Dear was "targeting Planned Parenthood" when he shot his way (legally open-carrying an AK-47) into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and killed three people and wounded many more once he got inside. Surely there are lots of Obama haters who couldn't care less about Planned Parenthood. Or used to be, anyway, before a few months ago, right? Along the lines of that guy who called them

Stay classy, Republicans

Image via The Guardian.

If GOP plays this politically smart they can end any chance that the Dems win the WH in 2016. War is politics carried on by other means.

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) November 14, 2015

They can wait if they like until next November for the actual balloting, but Donald Trump was elected president tonight.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 14, 2015

It's certainly true that terrorism has sometimes been great for Republican poll numbers. Who can forget what happened to George W. Bush's ratings in September 2001?

Via Gallup.

In fact maybe you guys ought to tone that down, given this week's report in Politico on how much the CIA knew in spring 2001 about the coming attacks, and how the Bush administration decided to ignore their warnings. Somebody might start wondering if they ignored the threat—

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

—merely because they were stupid, as we've always thought, or because they hoped to profit from it. "Play this politically smart," Sheriff Clarke.

Like are you saying racism is intrinsically *bad* or something?

The first Memorial Day or Decoration Day was apparently held in Charleston by freed men and women of color, May 1865, when they went to "decorate" the mass graves of mostly white Union soldiers dead in the local POW camps in love and respect. Via Damario Solomon-Simmons.

I never know what to say on occasions for despair like this white-terrorist massacre in Charleston. I'm good to go with Obama's statement, which I thought was very just though almost too sad to bear, and the things all my favorite people have been writing today, I don't have any special insights of my own.

No, wait, there's one thing, in the area we're all talking about, of the weird insistence of the right wing that we shouldn't call the killer a terrorist, or a racist, or refer to the crime as a "hate crime". Like, I can understand why they'd want to say he isn't a conservative, because that would suggest there's something wrong with conservatism.  But for that very reason it's pretty weird when they avoid saying he's a racist, insisting instead that it's wholly unknowable, like Governor Nikki Haley:

Perverted spiritual ardor

Spencer Tracy as Nationalism, with Walter Brennan tagging along in the role of Universal Democracy. From King Vidor, 1940, Northwest Passage.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Nationalist Solution", New York Times, February 20 2015:

President Obama thinks in combating terrorist extremism we should focus on the economic and political dysfunction from which it arises, like whether young people can afford to buy a Slurpee or not. This comes from his lack of historical and cultural awareness; he's obviously not listening to me. What he needs to deal with is the terrorists' perverted spiritual ardor, by giving them a dose of nationalism, as suggested by Walt Whitman. And the Muslims have to fix their theology, because it's not working right.

I'm not going to lie to you, the program Obama has been laying out this week at the 60-nation Summit on Countering Violent Extremism and summarized in a speech yesterday is not without its problematic aspects, but today's Brooksian critique isn't going to help you understand why. This is because Brooks is criticizing an imaginary speech instead, one that he feels better equipped to respond to:

Islamoid?

Map by Braun & Hogenberg of Damascus, the "most noble city by the mountain of the Lebanon, metropolis of all Syria", 1575, via Sanderus,

Scott Shane at the Times is now joining in to the universal trolling of the president for refusing to say that the United States is at war with Islam, though he agrees with the president that the United States is not at war with Islam, a fairly delicate act:

But Mr. Obama’s verbal tactics have become a target for a growing chorus of critics who believe the evasive language is a sign that he is failing to look squarely at the threat from militant Islam. The vague phrasing, they say, projects uncertainty and weakness at a time when extremists claiming to fight for Islam threaten America and its interests around the world.

I cannot understand why this is a thing. Either we are Crusaders at war with Islam, and Osama bin Laden was basically right, or we aren't, and Osama was wrong, and I'd personally prefer the latter. Even Ross Douthat has climbed down from his Crusader attack of last week to offer a more reasonable position, to the effect that the bad things done by members of a particular religion or complex of religions (it seems crazy to insist that "Christianity" or "Islam" are single, coherent systems of faith, given the range of conflicting ideas both sometimes quite cheerfully accommodate) are not the collective responsibility of the entire community, relatively few Westerners are Crusaders and hardly any Muslims are terrorists, and it just doesn't require that kind of a discussion: