Families in the aftermath of terrorist attacks
Much fast-breaking news on the London bombings--so fast that, by the time I finish writing this post, new events may have taken over. Things will probably continue to change moment by moment, but the questions right now are: did all the bombers die in the blasts? And, if not, will they be caught? And, of course, who are they?
These details are not known yet. But there is virtually no doubt that the bombers were (or are?) Islamicists, most likely living in Britain for some time. I am also amazed, as I was after 9/11, at the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, and their ability to help the police in cracking the case. In the last decade or so, the use of security cameras has mushroomed, and my guess is that they will continue to be a vital forensic tool.
Unfortunately, though, the cameras only come into play ex-post-facto. They record events in real time, but they cannot tell us what is happening or what will happen; they can only give us information after the fact. Photos that at first look utterly ordinary become chilling and telling only in retrospect, containing information that, but for the cameras, we might never have learned.
Another interesting detail that has just emerged in the London case is that the family of one of the bombers (yes, I know: "alleged bombers") reported him missing after the blast. This is a strong indication that they had no idea of his role in the attack. This is not surprising, of course. I would imagine they are undergoing a very difficult time right now, as they learn what their loved one was actually up to that day.
Of course, sometimes the families of bombers are sympathetic to their cause. Or, sometimes they pretend to be, the better to fit their community's twisted type of political correctness (for example, among the Palestinians). But sometimes family members' sympathies lie elsewhere. The large Bin Laden family is a case in point--quite a few members have spoken out against their most famous relative. And back in February of 2003, a lengthy profile of the family of Moussaoui, the so-called "twentieth hijacker," appeared in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. It was extraordinary for a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting was that it revealed that one of Moussaoui's two sisters is a converted Jew and fervent Zionist. So, one cannot assume much of anything about the families of terrorists.
Speaking of families, I was wondering why we've seen virtually nothing about the victims of the London bombings. It seems that, at least according to this story, which features a brief description and photos of three of the victims, the reason for the delay is that progress has been slow on identifying the bodies and notifying the families.
Those families, and the families of the many other people who are missing and presumed dead, are undergoing a very special and horrific type of torment right now. What they are experiencing is the stuff of nightmare. It is a strange thing to think that, even as I write this, there are families in such widely scattered places as Netanya in Israel, London, and of course Iraq who are all mourning the victims of terrorists. What do these families have in common? Simply this: their loved ones were going about the ordinary business of life, and were blown apart by followers of a branch of Islam that is indeed "in love with death," and which has been allowed to flourish in the fertile soil of Western tolerance.
posted by neo-neocon @ 12:49 PM
15 comments
15 Comments:
I think there is a fair chance that some of these families will receive some type of anonymous compensation. Saddam hussein was generously paying the families of palestinian homicide bombers .This does not necessarily preclude the fact that most likely said families had no knowledge of the pending homicidal detonations. I suspect this is an operational consideration more than anything else. The fewer that know, the less chance of being discovered. We will never know if said families are truly grieving or celebrating. Isn't it odd that the media will interview the families of victims, yet these family members won't be interviewed in a Public sense of the word? What if one of the family members of the bombers said in affect that the bomber was now in paradise? My my! The Liberal press wouldn't want that getting out, now would they? I for one do not give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no harm done, no divine transgression for taking advantage of the enemy from a fundamentalist point of view. On the other hand, London Muslims are speaking out, a senior cleric in Egypt is speaking out against terrorism and British intelligence forces are hard a work.
I heard yesterday that there is one New Yorker missing. Since he was in London at the time and hasn't been heard from, they presume he must be among the bodies. Or the scattered remnants od bodies.
The surveillance cameras are here to stay, despite the libertarian protests. There is too much evil in the world that has been exposed by cameras for us to ever take any down.
I find it sad that your politics, neo-neocon, changed after 9-11. You say you were a liberal. Liberalism did not cause 9-11 or any of the other bombings and terrorist acts. On the contrary, it has been largely our encouragement of the militarism of Zionism and the genocide of the Palestinians which has led us down this path. 'Liberal' is simply short-hand indicating respect for all human life. 'Neocon' is short-hand for 'new con-men', as the present group in control murder with impunity whilst lying about the reasons for the blood-bath they have wrought. Don't tell me that in excess of 100,000 innocent Iraqis and 1700 American troops had to die because of 9-11! What a crock! And what about the tens of thousands maimed by the debacle in Iraq? What is happening now is known as blowback, and unfortunately it is likely to intensify in coming years. This is exactly what the experts who were fired by your fearless leader warned us about. What a pathetic mess.
Anonymous 2:28: You are right in part. Liberalism or conservatism didn't cause 9/11 or 7/7 in England or 3/3 in Madrid or several thousand other such attacks in many places. The jihadis simply believe that you and your children and your way of life must be killed in the name of allah. They caused 9/11, etc. Wow! What a unique concept, huh? Imagine that! People who blow themselves up actually cause the death and destruction. DUHHH! I would suggest your abject fear and terror of these folks is such that you curl up into a ball then froth at the mouth over anyone willing to take action against these animals simply because they can't make them go away fast enough and simply because your world view and self concepts refuse to believe that some people have to be killed in order for the rest of us to live. That's the real rub, isn't it?
As far as your beloved palestinians go, read some history for once before you blather the tired old Zionism line against the Jews. The expulsion of the PLO from Jordan resulted in how many palestinian deaths, anonymous? 40,000? I've read 70,000. And how many palestinians were displaced by invading arab armies that tried to conquor and destroy Israel? And how many palestinians were killed during the attempted invasions when arab armies would take up positions in the midst of civilians? That's a real popular tactic you know, still being employed in many parts of the world. You really need to do some serious reading, anonymous.
Your 100,000 innocent Iraqi figure has been debunked too. Hide! Whine! Snap and froth! Jihadis were coming for you and your children long before 9/11 and George Bush. Read Al Qur'an and pretend you are looking for a simple answer in your life and a simple means of ending your problems and someone to blame and you will see that it becomes necessary to blow up UN and Red Cross administration buildings and to saw off the heads of Aid workers and detonate yourself in markets and hospitals all over the world. You are a fool, just like the person that follows you with his ILA, I loathe America, tripe. Fortunately it doesn't take but a little reading into a post to know what follows, hence in the future I can and will ignore you, Burkah Boy, as I do Ho hum.
Anonymous: Liberalism did not cause 9-11 or any of the other bombings and terrorist acts.
I think, sadly, that that's wrong -- "liberalism", of the type on display in this and Ho Chi Minh's comments, is very largely responsible for 9/11 and the current wave of terrorist murders. Not in the sense of any conspiracy theory (so beloved by the left), but in the sense of being an integral part of the so-called "root causes" of the rise of Islamist terror. And this is because this terror campaign has been very carefully thought out to rely upon precisely the sort of wimpish, guilt-ridden, neurotic cultural miasma that characteristizes the contemporary liberal-left. That is, these terrorists have built a plausible strategy of attack built upon their sense that the liberal-left culture which they see as dominant in the West, is fundamentally weak, can in fact be terrorized into a standstill, and, using its own easily-induced guilt-complex as cover, can be effectively undermined from within.
Their strategy has been at least partially thwarted by an unexpectedly vigorous response from Bush and (even more unexpectedly) from Blair. But the basis for the strategy is clearly evident in comments here, and throughout the liberal-left blogosphere, not to mention much of the dominant voices in the main-stream media.
“...hence in the future I can and will ignore you, Burkah Boy, as I do Ho hum.”
One should make a point of understanding the arguments of the hard core leftists. Other than that, I have learned not to waste precious time on them. Few will ever get their act together. One should instead focus on how best to marginalize these buffoons.
Keep it up, Ho. You make this blog interesting.
David, from my own days in the extreme radical Left, I know that I was able to abrogate personal responsibility via my ideology, and dwell in the sociopathic bliss of never having to assume any responsibility for my actions/beliefs. Had I been born in another culture back then, I would have been a jihadi. There is nothing like having a ready-made villain, the infidel establishment, that is so readily responsible for all the wrongs in the world. Freedom is having a well defined villain. Right on, man! This of course robs the mind of inquisitiveness, imagination, empathy, reason and the ability to live a mundane life, which is required in order for any society to endure and progress. On occasion I do feel a mild 'pull' to regress and once more feel the elation of total defiance and self-righteous anger, but being abrupt and curt with Lefties seems to keep that in check. Power to the people!!
Ho: Or does none of that matter?
Not really, no. Not after 9/11, 7/7, Bali, Madrid, and all the other atrocities on "the bloody borders of Islam".
It might be, of course, that Ho would do much better handling the intricacies of Middle East diplomacy all by himself than all the people in the State Departments of nine different US administrations, as he seems to think -- but then again he might not. In any case, arguments over this go on indefinitely. What matters more than any of that right now is that, as in the 30's, a psychotic culture of murderous violence is loose in the world, and it must be eradicated.
By the way, isn't it interesting that the proponents of "blowback" never think that it might apply in the other direction? But if I were a terrorist or terrorist-sympathizer, I think I might start to worry about that by now -- "blowback" going the other way may be orders of magnitude worse. Just ask the survivors in Germany and Japan.
Today, I wrote on my weblog about the endlessly verbose foreign policy expert, i.e., Ho Chi Minh.
www.HarleysCars.com
You know, you might almost think Ho Chi Minh is a right-wing troll, the way he/she is able to isolate the key elements of left-liberal guilt and fear, and display them in all their naked glory. Which is what makes it such an enjoyable pastime to note them:
Ho: ... this is nothing new to them, we've been fucking them for half a century already.
Actually, of course, we've been helping them for the past half century or so, not least through the enormous amounts oil wealth transferred to them, and through generous immigration policies. In fact, in those ways and others, we've no doubt been too helpful. Nor have we -- yet -- been involved in any "blowback" (a primitive policy of revenge and retaliation) for atrocities originating in this region and culture. But if the present policies of Bush and Blair to install the seeds of democracy in the region fail, as of course they very well might, and the terrorists gain a new wind, then I think you will see something like that "clash of civilizations" come to pass. And then we will see, throughout the Middle East and the Islamic ummah, a level of violence that will make words like "blowback" or "fucked" seem trivial. Those with any knowledge of the "evolution of conflicts", in other words, should and would be hoping and praying that the Bush/Blair policies succeed.
It is desperate people, with no other alternative, the least of which is diplomacy, that transforms them into terrorists.
But, as we've seen, the terrorists themselves aren't "desparate" in any normal sense of the word -- by and large they've been well-educated people with good jobs or prospects; some of them, clearly, have been wealthy. No, we're not dealing with desparate people, clearly, we're dealing with deranged people of a particular sort, the sort of political/cultural psychosis that seized a goodly portion of entire nations a few generations ago.
So good work America, let's turn the screws a little more, and see how many terrorists we can create.
This, of course, is the central fear of the liberals -- that in meeting violence with force of any kind we may be "creating more terrorists". And it's true, we may be, and then we'll just have to kill more (granting them the death they claim they love), as this conflict comes to a head. What the liberal mind -- which wants so desparately (!) to be thought of as "nice" -- cannot grasp at all, however, is the idea that passivity and meekness can be seen as mere weakness, and that this in turn can be an invitation to aggression and violence. Bin Laden, on the other hand, understands that very clearly: "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse". In other words, the liberal impulse to appease, temporize, back down, or look always to "negotiate" in the face of naked threat may be what gives Islamist thugs the idea that mass murder might actually work for them -- and ends up, ironically, "creating more terrorists".
Ho's latest couple of missives have lost some of their entertainment value, as they largely just repeat his familiar stew of America-bashing, Western self-flagellation, and terrorist sympathizing. Lately there's been added a peculiar theme of Nazi apologetics as well, implying that, like the current Islamo-facists, the whole little Third Reich business was simply another example of justified "blowback" for some kind of dark Anglo-Gallic-American anti-communist conspiracy. Hard to know whether Ho is an embittered neo-Nazi, or an unreconstructed communist. Hard, in fact, to know the difference. And, in any case, hard to care -- either way, he/she's just a nut.
There is an interesting theme that's a little buried here, though, and that has to do with the admitted comparison of contempory Islamist terrorists with the thirties malignancy of a swelling fascism. And with the link between those phenomena and the earlier rise of communism, all three being examples of the great horror of modern times: the emergence of a utopian and murderous totalitarianism. What should be the lesson of the past century is that such monstrosities, once created, are not amenable to negotiation or appeasement. Ho is at least right to say that "Yet like W.W.II there are many voices of sanity that were ignored, many ways out of that war passed over" -- one of the major examples of such voices, of course, was Churchill's, who advocated a firm and forceful early response to Nazi "blowback", and was not heeded until it was too late. We shouldn't make that mistake again.
"You may choose to interpret my recounting of history as "America bashing", "self--flagellation" and "terrorist sympathizing", but I'm only interjecting the bits, and vital ones at that, that American conventional wisdom has conveniently left out, ..to manufacture the consent of bone-heads like yourself to support yet another of our Imperial wars."
The really surprising part of Ho's diatribes is that he doesn't recognize himself as a purveyor of "conventional wisdom." Jesus, I've lived in leftist communities for 35 years and I've heard that crap spouted 7 hundred million times. It's the party line.
Ho, what in the hell is it that makes you think that your thinking is original?
Your comments are hardly worth answering, but I'll try. You're not a very smart man.
Who in the hell said I was a conservative? How do you know this? Somehow, in the weird vernacular of your kind, anybody who disagrees with you is a conservative.
Here's some original thinking for you. War is part of the human condition. War does not arise from people lying. Humans can probably not eradicate war, at least without paying a huge psychic and spiritual cost.
Your thinking is the great moral and philosophical error of the 20th century. It seems simple to you. War is bad. Fix it. This is stupidity and evil incarnate.
Munch on it for a while. Try actually thinking. It's not something you've ever done.
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