According to the logic of his various travel bans, surely he must, to "keep America safe!"
An
Uzbek rented a pickup truck and used it to careen down a bicycle path
in Manhattan, mowing down bicyclists, 8 of whom died. After about a mile
of mayhem, he crashed into a school bus, whereupon a cop shot him and
he was taken to hospital, where he is under guard. This vicious asshole
lived in Paterson, New Jersey, and decided he needed to kill some people
in New York. He will go unnamed by me as he is not worthy of that
recognition. There's a good chance some or all of his victims opposed
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, or Israeli oppression of
Palestinians, two of the Islamofascists' grievances.
In addition
to the deaths, there were a dozen injuries. Five of the dead were
Argentine visitors, one was German or Belgian, depending on the media
report, and two were Americans. So the ISIS-manqué did a mediocre job of
killing Americans. The attacker has a wife and two young children,
whose well-being is apparently of little or no concern to him, since he
has effectively abandoned them and they will be objects of opprobrium if
not worse, and without a breadwinner for the family. He also must be
indifference to the crap his Muslim neighbors will now endure.
The
politicians and police have branded the attack terrorism, because he
presumably had a "political" motive. (The use of a vehicle to commit
homicide is one of ISIS' suggested ways to harm people in its
exhortations to launch attacks, and was used previously in Germany,
France, and Britain. A note in Arabic in the truck hailed ISIS,
proclaiming obviously falsely that it would live "forever. Nothing in
the universe does that. The killer was an Uber driver with 1,400 trips
under his belt. Uber has swung into action and banned him from now on.
Good idea.)
[1] Whatever fear is generated by this
"terrorism" is being generated by the incessant media drum-beating on
it, with the same scant details reiterated over and over, and
politicians stirring the pot with exaggerated, doleful statements. One
of the worst is the Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has been positively
maudlin. To hear him tell it, every New Yorker has just courageously
endured an unspeakable ordeal yet remains unbowed and unbroken. (I'm not
exaggerating, that is how he's talking.) In terms of the scale of
tragedy, this is the same as a bad traffic accident! (And the Uzbek sure
had a fearsome arsenal: a paint gun, a pellet gun, and some knives.
Terrifying! Luckily a "hero" cop shot the guy. A cop so "
humble," related the police commissioner, that he feels he was just doing his job! Amazing!)
As
for what Trump should do, if he follows his own "logic," just banning
all Uzbeks from entering the U.S. won't be "tough" enough. This man is a
permanent legal resident and entered the U.S. in March of 2010. So to
be truly "safe," the U.S. must DEPORT all Uzbeks.
However, a Muslim from
any country could become a "terrorist." Shouldn't
all Muslims be banned? After all, "we don't know who these people are!" as Our President has repeatedly pointed out.
But
the U.S. loves religion, so it doesn't want to "discriminate" against
Muslims. Nor are U.S. Federal judges showing an inclination to disregard
U.S. anti-religious-discrimination law. So it needs to ban
all people from countries where there are Muslims. That would be most nations on earth.
But
I'm sure Trump, being a reasonable and sensible man, will instead call
for some weak half-measure. Actually he'll probably just use this to
argue for the necessity of his latest ban, which is irrelevant to this
incident (he's never banned people from Uzbekistan entering the U.S.,
and as I said, the bicycle-butcher has been here since 2010) just as
most of the gun control proposals are irrelevant after each
headline-grabbing mass shooting. (Most shootings involve "legitimate"
gun purchasers using legally-obtained weapons, so more background checks
or background checks on gun show purchases or banning whatever are
irrelevant. Banning buttstocks that increase the rate of fire, and large
capacity ammo magazines, would probably lower the number of casualties
in mass shootings, but would not eliminate them. But the U.S. Congress
won't even do that, and the two-thirds of U.S. states controlled by the
GOP have been removing restrictions on carrying guns in public, even
allowing them on college campuses.)
Trump took absolutely no
action and called for no new laws or regulations whatsoever after the
recent Las Vegas gun massacre that killed 58 people at a concert and
wounds and injuries to about 500. So far, in the aftermath of the NYC
attack on bicyclists, he's responded by ordering intensification of
scrutiny of
foreign visitors under his "extreme vetting" regime. I suppose now it's "
super-extreme vetting," "vetting like you've never seen before, believe me."
Totally irrelevant
to this case, as the perpetrator was a legal resident of the U.S. since
2010. He's also calling for an end to the particular visa program under
which the Uzbek got his green card to live in t he U.S. In other words,
punish thousands of completely innocent people. That's a good response,
Trump.
As a measure of how irrelevant this is, ISIS hasn't even
claimed responsibility for the attack! Apparently they find it
disappointing. ISIS is quick to take credit for any mayhem it plausibly
can, whether it was their operation or not.
The local media
are reporting that the culprit is "bragging" and "unrepentant" and
"unapologetic" from his hospital bed. They were expecting an apology?
One
thing this shows, which no media notes because it conflicts with their
desire for threat inflation (which is also a prime motivation of
politicians and secret policemen) is this shows how WEAK ISIS is. ISIS
DID NOT mount this attack. It did not infiltrate operatives into the
U.S. It has no sleeper cells in the U.S. (I'm sure with ISIS being
squeezed out of its territorial conquests, it would have activated them
if it did.) It did not even
train this jackass. He's being
described as a "lone wolf" attacker by people like New York State
Governor Andrew "Son of Maximum Unction" Cuomo. What kind of powerful
organization is
that? [On the afternoon of Nov. 1, a day after
the attack, news broke that the FBI was interested in a second man in
the attack. Also the attacker was identified in a previous terrorism
investigation but wasn't the "subject" of that investigation. I wonder
if they planted tiny cameras in his home, like they do to non-violent
dissidents.]
As for the Attack Of The Uzbek, the FBI has seized
charge of the New York investigation. The BBC announced that the FBI
will be reaching out to other agencies, including abroad, to learn about
this man's movements and contacts. BBC, the British government's global
propaganda arm, said
for sure this would be a multi-agency investigation. They forgot to mention the most
important sources
of data about people and their connections: the NSA and its junior
partners in the "Five Eye" countries, which includes GCHQ in the UK. The
FBI has free access to the NSA's stupendous database of the world's
Internet, telephonic, wire, and other traffic, including records from
license plate readers and surveillance cameras. Using facial recognition
software, they can search for places the man has been in the past.
The
FBI will search the government's database of airline travel (they know
everywhere you've flown- they have that automatically, oh, and all your
financial and medical records too) and arrest records in the U.S. and
abroad. Cooperating foreign police and secret police agencies will cough
up whatever is in their files on the man. (Unless it would reflect
badly on them. Like if he was once an informer, or worse, for one of
them.) By 11 AM the next day the New York City Police (NYPD) informed
the press at a "news conference" that they knew the killer exited the
George Washington Bridge at 2:43 PM when their license plate capture
system recorded his vehicle, and a surveillance camera outside the
Holland Tunnel recorded the beginning of the attack.
Does living
in an omniscient police state stop "terrorism"? Does it make people
safer? It certainly doesn't make victims of state political persecution
safer. Already the BBC's Uzbek correspondent has reported that the
secret police there are expected to use this opportunity to increase the
already severe repression in that nation.
The "terrorists" give
the secret police of every nation just what they want: an excuse to
tighten their chokehold on the lives of the citizens. In Kenya, the
regime of the "democratic" dictator Uhuru Kenyatta, who just got himself
"reelected" "president" unopposed, runs death squads under the tutelage
of the U.S., Britain, and Israel, that murder hundreds of people a
year. This is known as "counter-terrorism." Watch the excellent
Al-Jazeera documentary exposing this ongoing campaign of extreme
criminality by four states, which has been totally blacked out by the
establishment media of the culprit countries. Which means
those media are accomplices to state terrorism and murder and by rights should be held criminally culpable. [2] Al-Jazeera
is run by the government of Qatar, which is currently under blockade by
Saudi Arabia, its Persian Gulf lackeys, Egypt, with the U.S. piling on.
The main demands of the Saudi -led assault on Qatar, publicly endorsed
by Donald "Pussy-Grabber" Trump, are three: adopt the same hostile
posture towards iran as these states have; stop "supporting terrorism"-
no explanation of what they're referring to; and
shut down Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera
isn't hated by only the Saudis. Al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side
of the U.S. since 2001, for reporting things the U.S. doesn't want
reported. The U.S. has responded with verbal attacks, branding it
"terrorist propaganda," and with physical attacks, bombing Al-Jazeera
offices at least four times, kidnapping its staff, one of whom was
imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay torture center for years, where the
U.S. tried to force him to agree to be a U.S. spy inside Al-Jazeera, and
launching cyberattacks on it. Tony Blair, the loathsome,
self-righteous, oleaginous former British prime minister who conspired
with Bush the Younger in the invasion of Iraq, had to talk Bush out of
bombing Al-Jazeera's main headquaters inside Qatar! Where the U.S. has
military bases! Talk about being drunk on power. I guess Bush found a
substitute for alcohol and cocaine.
So no surprise that the
Saudis are demanding Al-Jazeera be killed. It reports real news from all
over the Arab and Muslim worlds, much of which the totalitarian,
hyper-repressive Saudi regime finds threatening. (Just about anything
human is threatening to them.)
Oh, by the way, Kenya is "an ally
in the fight against terrorism." That is to say, it invaded Somalia to
help out the U.S., which prompted Al-Shabab, the Somali Islamofascist
organization, to counterattack inside Kenya, against "soft targets" like
the shopping mall and university attacks. Notice the pathological
symbiosis between Islamofascist fanatics and state terrorists. Each
creates the conditions for the perpetuation of the other. Repression
breeds resistance, which leads people with no other options except
surrender and acceptance of random state murders and other forms of
oppression, or joining up with the only armed opposition available to
them, the Islamofascists. The continued existence of armed terrorist
groups gives the regimes excuses to increase political repression and
murder pesky dissidents and political opponents, along with "potential"
or "likely" or "identified" "terrorists." That latter category, in the
case of Kenya, is supplied by U.S. and UK "intelligence," and those
named are duly "eliminated" by one of several Kenyan government death
squads.
As Dick Cheney said, "we have to go to the dark side," or
in the words of CIA goons like Cofer Black, they've "taken the gloves
off." Which is to say, governments are flat-out murdering people they
don't like. In Kenya, this has happened in cases after the government
has taken people to court, where they were acquitted. On such thin
"evidence" the government then proceeds to murder the victims, because
in their minds, suspicion is certainty. Not suspicion of actual crimes
either, but of
possible future crimes.Now, there's
nothing to stop the Kenyan government from setting up internment camps
for people with "radical views." Those are the so-called "terrorists"
that Western "intelligence agencies" and the Kenyan regime have
"identified."
Between the totalitarian Islamofascist rebels on
the one hand, and the repressive "democracies" and make-believe
democracies like Kenya trying to crush them (and eliminate dissent in
the process) on the other, a normal human being must say:
a pox on both their houses.1]
A fellow Uzbek described the 29-year-old killer to the BBC as a
malcontented loner. Apparently ISIS propaganda provided him with an
explanation for his unhappiness, and ideas for discharging his rage on
random strangers. The attack occured around 3 PM on Tuesday October 31.
If this pathetic, malevolent jerk had waited a few hours, he could have
attacked the annual Halloween parade just north of where he attacked.
It's claimed a million people were there. He could have disrupted fun
for a million people. Or in a few days this Sunday there's the annual
New York Marathon, a major event that such an attack could potentially
wreck. Yet the city mayor, Clinton machine politician Bill deBlasio, has
been carrying on as if it's 9/11 all over again. (De Blasio insisted on
hogging the mic at a "news conference" the next morning with the
Governor, the city police and fire commissioners, the boss of the New
York City FBI field office, and other government poohbahs.) So in terms
of disrupting life in the city, this nasty fool was inept. Most of the
disruption has come from the reaction of "the authorities."
The
BBC calls the Uzbek truck attack "the main news" today, thus continuing
the Western media's bad practice of inflating the significance of
violent acts by people who self-align with ISIS, encouraging more
attacks, and adding to ISIS' stature. Not only is it disproportional to
the significance of these events, it makes the "terrorism problem"
WORSE. And of course the U.S. media is waving the attack like a bloody
flag. The "coverage" of what this one unhappy asshole did is nonstop,
repetitive, and way overdone.
Here's some perspective: every
year, about 250 pedestrians are killed in New York City by motor
vehicles, plus about 50 bicyclists. So this is 8 more. It makes no
difference to the victims whether it was accidental or deliberate or
what the motive of the driver might have been. Dead is dead. Tens of
thousands of people a year die in traffic in the U.S. The same goes for
"terrorist" knife attacks. Many thousands of people a year get stabbed.
Why is an "ordinary" knife attack yawn-inducing, but a "terrorist" one
an occasion for near-hysteria? No good reason. The
bad reasons
are political: To induce the population to submit to police state
measures and acquiesce in endless wars abroad. Those wars, by the way,
are the motivation for the "homeland" attacks using trucks and knives
and occasionally guns. That doesn't necessarily mean ending the military
role against Islamofascism is the correct course of action. It means
that it is disingenuous and dishonest to pretend the attacks are acts of
inexplicable madness. (The Uzbek has already been labeled a "madman" by
NYC radio station WCBS. His motives are comprehensible.
To understand is not to condone.)
2] "
Al Jazeera Investigates - Inside Kenya's Death Squads," on YouTube.com.
Posts
