We Should Fear Ourselves

Events like those that just happened in Paris, Beirut, Ankara, over the Sinai, and just this morning in Bamako Mali are severely depressing.  Not so much the attacks themselves, but the subsequent response.  ISIS is terrifying.  They are a group with a nihilistic medieval ideology, battle hardened, well-funded, well organized, and there is no doubt that if they could, they would make the United States part of the caliphate.  Here is the thing though; they cannot even come close.  What they can do however, is provoke us into costly wars, to surrender our values and freedoms, and distract us from our own problems.

ISIS and organizations like them are not existential threats to us.  ISIS is not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Confederacy, or the Soviet Union and yet judging by the media coverage and the response of many of our political leaders they might be all that and worse.  Donald Trump has advocated a database and ID cards for all Muslims.   Jeb Bush has advocated religious tests for entry to our country.  John Kasich has advocated creating a new government agency specifically to promote Judeo-Christian values (whatever those are).  ISIS believes they are waging a holy war against the west and many of our political leaders are eager to oblige.

Governors and mayors of cities across the country are refusing to settle Syrian refugees fleeing the very people responsible for these attacks.  As if 10,000 refugees, a tiny percentage of whom could be here for nefarious purposes, pose a serious threat to a nation of 350,000,000.  These people are not leaders.  They are cowards and they are laying the groundwork for fascism.

Suddenly after an attack that did not even occur on American soil many of us are perfectly willing throw out other people's rights.  In 2014, there were 13,741 murders in the United States mostly committed by Americans.  Since 9/11, 26 people have been killed on American soil by Islamic terrorists and 48 by radical right wing groups.  Yet when it comes to round the clock surveillance on Muslims, racial profiling, torture, going to war, and purifying our immigrant pool there are plenty of people perfectly willing to go along.  Suggest gun control however, and suddenly these same people become civil libertarians.  In America, the Constitution is only important when it protects the alleged rights of predominantly white males.

Even here in Vermont, where we have a history of taking in refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, the Congo, and elsewhere; the two Republican candidates for Governor Phil Scott and Bruce Lisman want to delay resettlement for Syrian refugees whom have already been waiting for years to enter the country.  This is despite the fact that Vermont has an aging workforce, shrinking tax base, and in the long run would almost certainly benefit economically from people dedicated enough to travel thousands of miles despite great cost and risk to go live in a strange new place.

The whole fear of Islamic extremism in the United States is illogical as fear often is.  After 9/11, we responded by invading and occupying a country that had nothing to do with the attack and was holding the various political, ethnic, nationalistic, and religious factions together via a secular (albeit tyrannical) regime.  Now there is a power vacuum and it has been filled with the most violent and fanatical fighters among them, ISIS.  This is a problem largely of our own making.

Perhaps the most difficult part of all of this is the realization that there might not be that much we can do about it.  National borders in the Middle East were drawn by colonial powers where ethnic groups we played off against one and other.  Brutal regimes were propped up and domestic politics were interfered with by outside powers.  Now Humpty-Dumpty has fallen and all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put him together again.  The best thing the United States can do is not repeat the same mistakes that got us into this mess.

If we actually want to prevent terrorism, we should resettle as many of these refugees as possible.  Nothing lends itself to extremism more than ghettoized people with no hope and no prospects.  Is there better propaganda for ISIS then treating Muslims as second-class citizens or killing more innocence?  I don't think there is; it confirms everything they've already said about us.