Rahami was already known to be a bad apple, but…what to do?
It’s such a familiar story.
After acts of terrorism (or even non-terrorist mass shootings) we hear one of two refrains: he (or she, but it’s almost always a “he”) was a quiet and regular guy and no one saw it coming; or everyone knew he was bad news.
The latter story is more common. Extremely common. A history of fighting with family and/or neighbors, threats, small offenses, sometimes relatively minor violence, an aura of strangeness or anger, involvement in lawsuits. For non-terrorists, often a history of some sort of mental problems and violence, often going way back. For terrorists, often a naturalized immigrant from a Muslim country, plus multiple trips back home or to other Muslim countries, and recent increased religiosity.
Rahami fit the basic pattern, as you can easily tell from a host of articles detailing his history of family strife (including a stabbing of his brother). He had had an illegitimate child with a high school sweetheart. He had made many trips to his native Afghanistan (he had come here as a child), some lengthy. He brought back a wife from Pakistan.
And in 2014 his father had reported to the FBI that he suspected his son was a terrorist:
The father, Mohammad, told New Jersey police in 2014 that Rahami was a terrorist when his son was arrested after a domestic dispute and accused of stabbing his brother.
The information was given to the Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI in Newark, New Jersey. Officials opened a so-called assessment and interviewed the father ”” who then recanted, the paper reported.
An official said the dad made the comment out of anger at his son. It was unclear if Ahmad was also interviewed…
“He stabbed my son. He hit my wife. And I put him in jail,” Mohammad said after speaking with FBI agents at his home Tuesday.
In 2014, the younger Rahami was arrested on weapons and aggravated assault charges for allegedly stabbing his brother in the leg, The Times reported.
He spent over three months in jail, a high-ranking law enforcement official told the paper, but a grand jury declined to indict Rahami.
FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney referred Monday to a “domestic incident” in which he said the “allegations were recanted.”
The father also now says he didn’t know anything about Kahami’s recent attack, and hadn’t really thought he was a terrorist.
With that sort of fact situation and others like it being so common, what to do? And the answer “ban Muslim immigration” doesn’t cut it for many reasons (see this, for example), including the fact that these people emigrated here 15 years ago and have become citizens. How many other radicals or potential radicals like Rahami are already here, both in the US and in Europe? I don’t know the exact answer—no one does—but we know there are enough to cause major trouble and to be very difficult to track.
The more general problem of prevention and predictability is not limited to terrorists, either; it’s somewhat similar to the issues I discussed in this post about preventing mass murders in general. Preventive detention of citizens who have not been found guilty of anything is not an American value, nor should it be. But PC thought that bends over backwards to be kind doesn’t help at all, and fear of lawsuits such as the one Rahami’s family had filed against the city of Elizabeth probably play into that desire to be extra kind to immigrants of the Muslim persuasion:
According to the [2011] lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, the Rahami family said Elizabeth police officers repeatedly forced the closure of their family restaurant, First American Fried Chicken. The lawsuit alleges one man frequently entered the restaurant and told family members “Muslims don’t belong here” and “Muslims are trouble.”
Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage confirmed the longstanding issues with the family, but said the city’s actions against their restaurant were strictly code-related.
“It was strictly about neighbors calling about noise,” Bollwage said. “It was never ethnicity or religion or beliefs or anything like that.”
Then again, this particularfamily did turn out to be “trouble,” didn’t it?
I’m sure their will be numerous pieces in the leftist press this week from poor Muslim victims like CAIR members, The only thing many of these “victims” have learned about the US is how to be a victim. There should e mandatory parenting courses instructing these people how to raise their kids so they can fit into life in the US. Since many of these people come from strong-man cultures, we should let them know we are the strong man. They should also have to read books about other immigrant groups so they learn something of how other groups learned to fit in. You can’t raise a child to live in the pretend land you left years ago.
But PC thought that bends over backwards to be kind doesn’t help at all…
No, it sure doesn’t help.
My modest suggestion is that we treat Islam like the Ku Klux Klan. They are both groups with supremacist belief systems and histories of violence aligned with those beliefs.
Which is to say, we keep radical Muslims under the close eye of law enforcement, we sue Muslim organizations as we sued the Klan, and most importantly, as society we give no cover to Islamic bigotry and terrorism — indeed we shift to actively confronting Muslims for both.
The Klan didn’t fade away because we asked “Why do they hate us?” and struggled with our oppression, real or imagined, of Klan folk. We pushed back hard and uncompromisingly.
Somehow liberals can’t recognize violent supremacism when Southern whites aren’t involved.
There is no good reason to take in muslims from places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria; unless we are talking about people and their families who have worked for us in those countries. The sanctioned Somali Minnesota invasion is an example of national madness. We do more to aid those in need all around the globe than any other nation. We do not have to open our arms to people from the troubled, disfunctional nations of the earth. What is happening in Europe and here should have us shutting off the flood but PC demands we allow fanatical enemies inside the gate.
The backlash against PC nonsense and the invitation invasion of illegal aliens are what has given us Trump instead of Cruz or Fiorina. It also makes it easy to convince the public to accept more intrusions into our fundamental rights and our privacy.
Power Line bloggers say the President should ban all Somali immigrants.
Cornhead:
One of the points I attempted to make in this post is the fact that there are many such immigrants already here, and many are already citizens.
Sorry to bring up his name, but Trump ha suggested that potential immigrants be screened for their beliefs. Two religious beliefs that should be unacceptable are intolerance toward other religions (belief in forced conversion or death for all non-believers) and a desire to live under Sharia law. If that screens out all Muslims, so be it.
We are told by Muslims like Zhudi Jasser that there are Muslims like him who only want to practice the moderate form of the faith where prayer, fasting, charitable works, tolerance for other religions, and separation of church and state guide their actions. Let us see how many there are who can openly meet that standard.
Though his motives are highly suspect, London’s new Muslim mayor may ironically be correct in that we will have to learn to live with terrorism.
Given that we can’t/won’t expel Muslims (ending Muslim immigration is insufficient), nor force Muslims to apostatize themselves, much less outlaw Islam… all of those being unconstitutional, we are literally forcing ourselves down a path that leads to nuclear terrorism.
Israel’s history is demonstrable proof of where trying to ‘get along’ with Islam leads. Demonstrable proof that fighting the ‘radicals’ cannot cure the disease.
For a preview of our future, read of “Moshav Hagor”;
DEFENDING OURSELVES TO DEATH
“Why, despite their good intentions, Israeli leaders are failing the country.”
This will not end well until the West realizes this is a clash between civilization and bloodthirsty savagery.All PC coexist diversity BS must end. All who promote this BS are enemy provocatuers. Many are uninformed LIV fools. But in a time of a war of survival, what do their motivations matter?
If we are not prepared to fight total war, nothing but total surrender acceptable, we are lost. It will require many tens of thousands of deaths before we will learn to do what is necessary.
JJ,
It is impossible to know what lurks in the mind of anyone, but we hve a good guess what lurks in the minds of millions of muslims. It ain’t tolerance and just say no to female genital mutilation.
Since a lot of the people turning to jihad are second aand third generation immigrants, there has to be something wrong with the way theey raise their kids.
Historically Muslims have been held in check by military superiority. Even today that remains somewhat true compared to Muslims’ dreams of total jihad retaking Israel and Andalusia and then the rest of the world.
One can argue whether the Iraq War was worth the blood and treasure expended on it, but it did have a salutary effect on beating back Islamic terrorism and on reducing Muslim polls favoring Bin Laden, suicide bombing and the like.
Of course, Obama was happy to throw all that away and now radical Islam looks like the strong horse again.
So in further answer to the topic question, we could resume the thankless job of fighting and defeating radical Islam, which will discourage Muslms from jihad until the odds look better.
But direct war on radical Islam is expensive and we lack the national unity to accept the sacrifices and do the job right.
Theocracy = “A form of government in which God or a deity is recognized as the supreme civil ruler, the God’s or deity’s laws being interpreted by the ecclesiastical authorities.”
Does that sound like a Muslim country with Sharia law? Why yes, yes it does. Anyone who wants to immigrate to this country who won’t officially renounce Sharia law, is a person who favors a theocracy. This country cannot admit people with those ideas. It is like admitting a Fifth Column. (“A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group–such as a nation.”) We are a tolerant people and favor freedom of religion, but we now have to define what a religion is The framers never dreamed that advocates of theocracy (And one with its eyes set on world domination) might one day be coming to this country in numbers. At some point our leaders have to address this issue. The Constitution should not be a suicide pact.
An article about some of the victims of the stabbing has a telling final graf:
http://www.startribune.com/young-couple-stabbed-in-mall-attack-were-stunned-by-uniformed-attacker-s-sudden-frenzy/394039021/
“We didn’t think anything about it because he was in a uniform,” Bohnenkamp said of Adan.
>b>“Those are the people who are going to keep us safe, not stab us.”
Democracy can not and would not successfully fight terrorism. So inevitable conclusion is that at some point when the very existence of Western civilization will become challenged the democracy will be abolished, even while temporary. Then all-out war with Arabs and other belligerent tribes will began followed by expulsion of all Muslims from Europe and USA and occupation and recolonization of Africa, Central Asia and Middle East. This will not be pretty, for sure, but a lesser evil than capitulation to savagery. Do you want to bear White Man burden or not, eventually you will have to – or die.
The Left and much of the Libertarians or independents or internet culture, believes Bush II did not keep them safe or did not deserve credit for stopping terrorist attacks.
After all, attacks that never happened, were never stopped, correct. Now these days, it’s been some odd years since 2001 for a comparison.
For all that people talked about bombing the Middle East making them feel unsafe, contrast it with the current modern day casualties. Making people feel safe, is what the sheep want. They don’t actually deserve to be safe, because that takes sheepdog or individual responsibility, instead of outsourcing your power to DC hoping they make it all go away.
Theocracy = “A form of government in which God or a deity is recognized as the supreme civil ruler, the God’s or deity’s laws being interpreted by the ecclesiastical authorities.”
That is, of course, little different from judges and lawyers in the US commanding us to Obey the Law or else. After all, in both instances, humans make the laws and determine the punishment, not God or divine level beings.
The Constitution should not be a suicide pact.
The US Constitution was forged in the fires of a sort of contract with the Founding Fathers’ God. In return for the grace and protection and technological inspiration of God given to humans on this continent, America and Americans will dutifully follow the man made but divinely inspired protections of human rights, of which freedom of religion and conscience was necessary for a person to believe in or come back to the righteous path.
If the US Constitution was merely a matter of luck or of stealing the resources of the native Indians… well, humans would have figured it out a little bit sooner given our trial and luck basis of experimentation.
I keep reading that the Rahami family came to the US as refugees. I also keep reading that family members kept going back to Afghanistan to visit friends and other family members. If they showed no reluctance to return to Afghanistan, then why were they ever given refugee status?
At Frontpage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield says that the Rahami family should be deported. (http://tinyurl.com/gqggbvn).
At first I thought that the argument was just a rhetorical device, but seriously, why not do it? Why not deport large numbers of Muslims? Currently, the FBI argues that terrorism is inevitable because there are too many KNOWN suspects to keep under surveillance. Why not deport some of them? This doesn’t have to be an unconstitutional approach.
Ymarsakar: “That is, of course, little different from judges and lawyers in the US commanding us to Obey the Law or else. After all, in both instances, humans make the laws and determine the punishment, not God or divine level beings.”
The main difference being that, in a democracy, the judges are either elected or appointed by elected officials, thus doing the will of the people. The laws can be changed and the judges can be (except for the Supremes) can be gotten rid of by the people.
In a theocracy there is no such appeal to the will of the people and the laws. They are Allah’s laws, after all and cannot be changed. Theocracies have been common down through history. They are dictatorships wrapped in the cloak of a certain faith. What is faith? Faith = “A strong belief or trust in some power or deity that can not be proven by observation or experiment.” Faith can be a comfort to the individual, but it makes a poor basis for a representative government. Government is about the relationship among people of a tribe, sect, state, or nation. Faith is about each individual’s relation to what they perceive as a deity, force, creator, or ? The two do not mix well together.
You may think that our government system is rotten to the core (And I could agree with that), but it is still somewhat reactive to the will of the people. Otherwise how do we explain the Trump candidacy. The people are speaking, even though many don’t agree with what they are saying.
Cornflour:
It depends on whether they are citizens or not. The Rahamis have been citizens for quite some time. Some were probably born here, as well. Deporting naturalized and/or natural-born citizens definitely has constitutional issues.
Seems to me there ought to be some low-hanging fruit of radical Muslim non-citizens under surveillance who have overstayed their visas or whatnot.
Start deporting those — not with the idea of preventing any and all Islamic terrorism in the US but to let the Muslim community know that fun and games are over, that Americans and the US government take Islamic terrorism seriously and that there are consequences for being involved with radical Islam.
Of course, they will scream Islamophobia etc. but we need to get over that too.
It burns my backside the Obama administration illegally set the IRS loose on law-abiding Tea Party people but heaven forefend we take action against Muslims illegally in this country involved with radical Islam.
We’ve deported a few bad apples like Dr. Sami Al Arian. I imagine we could do a lot more, had we the will.
Again, we need to think of radical Islam as the Ku Klux Klan.
The main difference being that, in a democracy, the judges are either elected or appointed by elected officials, thus doing the will of the people. The laws can be changed and the judges can be (except for the Supremes) can be gotten rid of by the people.
There have been civilizations ruled by judges, but they can be just as for the righteous path under God as against it. Yes the people choose some of those judges and leaders, but if the people are corrupted, then the judges are corrupt and evil too. Thus they will then say to anyone preaching the true path of righteousness, that the people have spoken and chosen their judges, thus their judges cannot be incorrect.
To me the name or manner of the system doesn’t matter so much as how they figure out to choose righteous leaders, and righteous people under the leaders. A democracy can easily become another type of oligarchy or theocracy, except this time the theocratic dogma of a democracy isn’t necessarily about a higher power. For Clinton and the bureaucrats and lawyers of the State Department and now the FBI and other US government alphabet soups, the Gospel and Dogma does exist, but they do not serve a higher being. They serve power and dominion over humans, which to them is sufficient of a dogma.
But as for a democracy choosing our judges… well, look at our current system of lawyers. Have we chosen them at all on the Supreme Court? Or is it merely the illusion of choice. I don’t think to corrupt humans, it matters what manner of label they put on their government. Even now the bureaucrats of DC believe they are Obeying the Law, man made Laws are supreme after all. So what if Iran and a theocracy believes they are obeying God’s laws? They are just as human and just as corrupt, potentially, so nowhere would you find more righteous people guaranteed. The system does not and probably cannot guarantee the existence of righteous people. If a theocracy was full of righteous people making decisions, I’m sure it would be an enlightened society… for a time. If a democracy is full of Clintons and State Department traitors and power mad ambitious fools… it probably isn’t going to be a very successful country for long. (Athens was the same)
Democracies are not inherently superior to theocracies, any more than people are inherently superior to another person in another country just because they were born to different classes of parents.
The problem, as I see it, with believing that the system of government you were born under or which you inherited, provides righteousness is because humans cannot change their spirit or way of thinking, by believing in those things as Salvation. Those things are not their Salvation and it cannot be, given human nature.
So what if Americans were given an inheritance of God graced divine protection and prosperity in the US? They can become just as corrupt and evil as Iran. Nothing in their inheritance stops that. Righteousness and freedom (of virtue) does not pass in the blood. Just because your forefathers were righteous, doesn’t really mean anything for their descendants.
So this idea that we can provide Salvation to the people, morally and economically, by getting them under Democracy or the Rightful System, is erroneous. Certainly some systems work better than others. Republics and representative democracies work better than Islam, Marxist economies, socialism, Democratic Socialism, or Stalinism, or even Maoism. But even with a “better system”, the people can be just as corrupt. In fact, they are more corrupt and evil, for having known the fruits and benefits of good and righteousness, they have knowingly turned away from their Forefathers, Founding Fathers, and ancestors, in order to willingly and eagerly take up the evil of decadence, sexual impurity, and dominion over humanity.
Compared to some ignorant stick living out on the Amazon, which would be more immoral, evil, and corrupt? Obviously the one that lived at a higher standard of knowledge and prosperous blessings. They knowingly collapsed their moral civilization, whereas the ignorant guy is just doing what his forefathers taught him.
As for R, the supposed terrorist, in Europe it is 2nd and third generation immigrants who go terrorist. The same is probably happening in the uS, on a lighter scale.
These “sleeper families” so to speak, should be studied. I don’t think humans have all the answers there, and getting it wrong, can have interesting effects.
I’ve always assumed that the second and third generation terrorists, the young ones anyway, are in large part rebelling against their parents.
Radical Islam is a good fit for Muslim kids seeking something rude, pure and romantic as opposed to the usual plodding lives adults necessarily lead.
Radical Islam is a good fit for Muslim kids seeking something rude, pure and romantic as opposed to the usual plodding lives adults necessarily lead.
When the Arab/Persian families came to Germany, their kids were acting in rather interesting ways.
Suffice it to say that they behaved much like black kids who were taught to sodomize, rape, and slap around girls and people weaker than them.
Why? Because their parents were like that.
In Arabia, you know one of their fun things they do? Find stray dogs and then run them over. That’s hilariously fun for Arabs and certain tribes.
As for teenage rebellion, that’s something Americans talk a lot about because of the Leftist alliance’s influence in many ways. I read some articles and magazines to the Youth, directed at them in the 1970s. Interesting stuff.
Some communities were capable of resisting the Left’s call for “rebellion” so to speak, and their methods were not much talked about.
As for immigrant families, they often feel divided between two cultures. Sometimes not being accepted by either one for various reasons. In Germany, of course, even 2nd/3rd generation families aren’t considered Germans. So there’s reason for the separation and rage at the local System in some ways. France has similar problems.
But in America, it should have been different. But it isn’t. Perhaps we owe that to Hussein’s Regime of Miraculous Healing Powers right. The Light Will Shine Down upon us all and we will Believe in Him, right.
That Light just might be the next Shrapnel Nail Bomb tho.