275. Responding Safely to Islamist Terrorism

The trouble with my saying that a culture can be a threat to a state (preceding post) is that Hitler would love it.  Jewish culture spawned subversives.  It was the water Bolsheviks swam in.  And Bolsheviks, who were they eliminating?  Anybody spawned in bourgeois culture.  All Stalin's executioners needed to see in a Ukrainian was a mark of it.

There it was, the clearest warning sign the twentieth century left us, and I was skating right up to it.  I was suggesting that Muslim culture encouraged terrorist acts.  Take my suggestion and you'll be persecuting those people.  Your thought police, your virtue squads, maybe even your executioners, are on the way.

How can we make sure we don't go past the sign?  I suggest that we begin by doing what Supreme Court justices do: not even consider the question until we have a case before us.  A legal case.  Concrete, particular, with consequences in the practical world.

We move into court to unburden ourselves.  So much of our thinking is abstract, or polemical, or competitive, or self-serving.  So much of our knowledge is inert.  In front of a case our load is lighter.  The abstractions fall to academic theorists, the polemics to pundits, the one-ups to bloggers and tweeters, and the ego-trips to confessors and shrinks.  As for knowledge, the heaviest burden, the excess is stripped from us by the test of relevance.  We are like a CIA director sorting through a mountain of intelligence.  "Is it actionable?" he asks.  In our case that becomes, "Does what we know about Muslim culture justify a change in our law punishing incitement to violence?"  All other knowledge falls to the marketplace, and takes its place in the general scrimmage.

OK, we know enough about Muslim culture — that the religion that determines the culture does not distinguish private religious responsibility from public political responsibility, that a very high percentage of its followers take the words of its Scripture and its preachers as literal and unquestionable truth, that it glorifies martyrdom, that it takes insults to its Prophet with blood seriousness — to justify considering a change in our laws about public violence.

So we set the law in front of us.  In Ohio (typical) it makes incitement to violence a crime only when the conduct "takes place under circumstances that create a clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed" or when "it proximately results in the commission of any offense of violence."  We close our ears to all shouts from the marketplace, all name-calling, all accusations, all guilt-thrusts, all cries of pain, all yells of triumph.  We close our minds to all judgments of moralists, preachers, priests, wise men, God.  We focus only on the danger.  Does it have to be "present"? 

We say no because we have seen Muslims inspired by the words of imams commit violence well after the words were spoken to them, as when training in Afghanistan or Syria intervenes.  That's a danger and our security is not ensured.  So we drop "present" from the first condition and scratch the whole second condition.  (See Post 273.)

Is the danger "clear"?  We're looking at another of those objective-sounding, confidently used terms (like "reasonable" in "reasonable doubt") that conceal their subjectivity (clear to whom?  reasonable to what mind?).  But, seeing that our common, liberal way of thinking about religions, inductively, will in this case leave us insecure (we're not worried about majority behavior) we think deductively and conclude that this religion encourages, and at least allows, such behavior (see Post 273). In any case we can accept whatever meaning of "clear" accumulated court decisions have given it. 

All right, let's go back and look at that warning sign.  Are we still on the right side of it? 

 I don't see how we can be on the other side, but I do see how we've opened ourselves to complaints about the law enforcement our change in the rules entails.  Our police are going to discriminate among ethnic groups and profile for one of them in surveillance.  Detectives are not going to be sitting in Methodist churches, guards are not going to be flagging Catholics.

I think most of these complaints can be silenced by pointing out that, no denying it, we are discriminating and profiling, but we are doing it in the sense of those words before they acquired the sense that racists, by their arbitrary and random actions, gave them.  Unless they can tail every citizen in the country equally our police will have to discriminate and profile.  It's a concession to their limited manpower.

For the people most directly affected by our discriminating and profiling, our Muslims, we can transpose the problem to Israel (as I did in Post 273).  Illegal settlements are being set up on the West Bank. You're a law enforcement official.  You know that in the line at check points there are going to be people who, taking their Scripture very seriously, believe that God gave them that land.  Do you want your guards to know which ones?  Do you want these believers taken aside for questioning?  And for that would you like to know which synagogue they attended and what the rabbi was saying to them?  A yes answer approves the kind of discriminating and profiling called for in our changes to our incitement-to-violence laws.

To settle an appeal in any of these cases statistics alone are sufficient.  People of this religion, holding these beliefs, have this probability of acting in this illegal way.  Our knowledge of them, our intelligence, is actionable.  We are still on the right, the objective, side of the twentieth-century's warning sign. 

That gives us security in the near future.  But dropping the word "present" also opens up the far future.  Suppose that, while reduced by the measures above, Islamist terrorist attacks are taking place ten years from now.  We can't see any reason that they won't.  The religion and culture are the same.  There's no change in the water in which these fish thrive.  Can we, within the limits our values allow us, do something about that?  Would we be justified in changing the water?  Or even, God help us, exchanging it for fresh?  

Like it or not, capable of it or not, we are in the business of manipulating culture.  How?  With what justification?  Being over-length already I'll have to take up these questions in another post.

273. Western Liberal in Agony

Man, these French Muslims are tying us Western liberals in knots.  Like:  The president of a mosque is asked by a mayor to help keep their town's Muslim youth from going jihadist in Syria and he (according to Midi Libre) says, "This is their choice.  It is not for me to judge them.”

They are free citizens of a free country.  Until they harm a fellow citizen that country, by the central principle of Mill's On Liberty, cannot justifiably do anything to them.  They are exercising their human right. 

So Lahoucine Goumri (the mosque president) can stick it to the mayor of Lunel (and me): Do you want me to condemn a man for simply exercising his human right? to make his own moral choice? to hold his own beliefs?

And we (at least I) find ourselves answering, "You're damned right we do.  We can't wait for those beliefs to play out into consequences.  They're too awful.  And they follow so obviously.   Believe the history (that ever since the Crusades the West has been out to get the East), believe the sociology (that Westerners exploit Easterners when they live together in the same country), believe the morality (that abstinent, God-fearing Easterners are ethically superior to indulgent, God-defying Westerners), believe the theology (that there's a special place in Heaven for Eastern martyrs) and you've got a high probability of an attack on Westerners.  Including Westerners whose faith in John Stuart Mill keeps them from making you a security risk."

So here I am, a Mill liberal, patrolling as a thought policeman.  How painful.  And the pain gets worse when the New York Times tells me that "instead of condemning the surge of young recruits, Mr. Goumri told local news media that the policies of President François Hollande were the main culprit and complained that it was not his job to denounce the jihadists when nobody protested French citizens who traveled to Israel to help the army 'kill Palestinian babies.'"

Unless there's protest on the other side terrorist acts by Islamists — taking down airliners, blowing up schools, killing Western journalists — are justified.  If he believes that he's dangerous.  And if he believes that martyrdom is a good thing he's more dangerous.  Dangerous beliefs make dangerous people.

Dangerous people?  Because of what they believe or how they worship?  That's the thought of a fascist.  And of medieval persecutors.  "You're the sort of people who need Christian blood for their matzo balls." 

I'm hurting.  But with Mr. Goumri twisting the knife at least I've got a pain I can calibrate.  I see that it will vary directly with the guilt I feel for supporting Israel in its actions against the Palestinians (see Post 214).  Israeli strikes have killed Palestinian babies.  Go all the way backing the original takeover of Palestinian land (from which nearly all horrors inflicted by Palestinians follow blamelessly) and I'm crushed under it.  Back only the measures to stop rocket attacks from Gaza and my head is nearly high.

So the best I can do is turn the dial down.  I don't back the original takeover but I back protecting what's taken over. 

"Not back the move into Palestine?  You'll deny the poor Jews of Europe, those remaining after the Holocaust, a sanctuary in their ancient homeland?"  

It's the old contest, the voice of the tribe against the voice of mankind.  And with me the first drowns out the second.  As it did earlier when I walked into Israel (see Post 214 again) and recognized my Judeo-Christianity.  So I have to support the takeover of Palestinian land.  Mr. Goumri has a case.

All I can do now is argue that it's a weaker case than mine, which has to be strong enough to justify serious restrictions on Mr. Goumri's freedom.  I can't argue it properly here but I can sum it up in one sentence: Since your beliefs are a threat to me and my people I am entitled to act against you.

There you are, right away, what we liberals all gag on.  To swallow it you have to, first, credit the claim that beliefs play out into consequences.  Then you have to quit thinking inductively about religions.

A good test of your gag reaction is found in Israel, where we have fundamentalist Jews sneaking into the Occupied Territory to set up illegal settlements.  Do you gag on the notion that this action has something to do with their belief that God literally gave them that land?  Would you say that somebody who holds that belief is more likely than others to take extreme, illegal action?  If so you have sufficiently suppressed your gag reaction to swallow the notion that those Muslims who hold certain beliefs (like those historical, sociological, moral, and theological beliefs listed earlier) will be more likely than others to take extreme, illegal action.

You may note here that you have quit thinking inductively about religions.  An inductive thinker asks, "What behavior is characteristic of believers?"  He discards the exceptional, the extreme.  If he's a traditional liberal he will go on to make a case for tolerance.  The deductive thinker asks, "What behavior follows logically from these beliefs?"  It won't matter whether the behavior is characteristic or not because the correlative questions are, "What behavior do they encourage?  What do they allow?" 

We are distinguishing among religions by looking at their edges.  We discriminate for purposes of our own security.  In the case of terrorist acts that kill thousands one tenth of one percent will suffice. "What deeds do its alienated youth characteristically perform in order to feel what all alienated youth want to feel, powerful and admired?  What turns its losers into winners?  What satisfies its psychotics?" The answer will vary with the religion and when we find one that threatens our security we are justified in restricting the freedom of its preachers. 

That, to my mind, makes a stronger case than Mr. Goumri can make.  I don't know how accepting it would play out in France, but I can see how it would play out in the U.S.  Say Mr. Goumri lived in Ohio, my state.   The law (Ohio Revised Code, Title 29, Chapter 2917) now makes incitement to violence a crime only when

(1) The conduct takes place under circumstances that create a clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed;

(2) The conduct proximately results in the commission of any offense of violence.

The legislature would vote to remove the words "and present" from the first specification and drop the second.   By deduction from the beliefs of the religion Mr. Goumri preaches the danger is clear.

Satisfying the law is one thing; satisfying the liberal conscience is another.  The latter tells us that we are discriminating, we are profiling, we are seeing harm where no harmful acts have been performed, we are curbing freedom of religion, we are denying freedom of speech. 

Each will answer his conscience in his own way, and I don't expect it to be easy.  We are seeing harm where no harm has been done, we are curbing freedom of religion and freedom of speech.  That will torment us unless we see that we are doing it all for the sake of our security, to which we give a higher priority.  (If you don't give it a higher priority now, conscience, you've got more explaining to do than we have.)  As for discriminating and profiling, I think they are handled by getting the conscience to think a little harder about those words "discriminate" and "profile," which have larger application than the liberal conscience customarily assigns.