Yes, the Press Might Do a Joe McCarthy on Trump; Just Not the Way You Think

I am not particularly impressed with protestations that the Fourth Estate is going to solve our Donald Trump problem by speaking truth to power, exposing his low, dishonest, and inflammatory rhetoric, and the filthy bigotry in which he traffics.

There’s a lot of people—a lot of voters—down in the sewer with Donald Trump.  Apparently the smell doesn’t bother them.

Nor do I hold out hope that elite opinion-makers like Thomas Friedman will lead the stampede of asses that will trample Trump into well-deserved oblivion.

And I do not have much patience with the trope that all the media needs to do is put on its big-boy pants and stick it to Donald Trump in the name of decency just like the press did to Joe McCarthy in the glorious days of Ed Murrow in 1954.

This hagiography is enshrined in George Clooney’s biopic of Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck (excellent film, by the way), which characterizes Murrow as having the courage to step forth and confront McCarthy with a scathing series of televised exposes in March 1954 when nobody else would.

Indeed, Murrow took up the cudgels in 1953 when few others were willing.  Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly openly characterized the famous See It Now reports as pre-planned advocacy, not reporting.  As quoted in Ralph Engelman’s biography, Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism, Friendly declared:

I think we were balancing how what we knew how to do well against what he did superbly well, which is to be a demagogue.  And I’m sorry we had to do it that way. But it was the challenge of a lifetime, a desperate moment for the country, and not to have used it because of a series of rules that we would apply to ourselves and that Senator McCarthy would abuse to the ultimate would have made history judge us very harshly. [Engelman, pg. 125]

McCarthy was a world-class creep and demagogue.  He was also an eager bottom-feeder in the murky waters of the American security state, which were lavishly chummed by J. Edgar Hoover with real and faux evidence to ensnare real, faux, potential, and imagined Communists.  Eventually McCarthy got big and intimidating enough to upset a lot of people.  Declaring the Democratic Party the “party of treason” and questioning the patriotism of two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was a start.  But I think just the start.

We can take it as a given that certain media outlets were determined to stick it to McCarthy.  But in deciding whether the media today has the mission and chops to properly identify an existential demagogic threat to the nation and righteously sh*tcan it, it would help to explore the assertion that CBS and prestige media were able to reach beyond its core audience of disgruntled Democrats and liberals to bring down Tailgunner Joe. 

For a more plausible alternative, try President Eisenhower and his anger at McCarthy’s attack on the Army, which started with a gaudy search for Communists in the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

Ike apparently no like.

President Eisenhower initiated a secret campaign to nail McCarthy in the beginning of 1954.  The story was first told in the 1980s by Eisenhower staffer William Bragg Ewald in his book Who Killed Joe McCarthy?  It will be told in greater detail in 2016 by David Nichols of Southwestern College, Kansas, in an as yet untitled book based on the Eisenhower archives and other declassified sources.

Here’s what Nichols had to say in an excerpt posted by the National Archives:

Eisenhower carried off his anti-McCarthy operation by means of rigorous delegation to a handful of trusted subordinates; these included Chief of Staff Sherman Adams; Vice President Richard Nixon; Press Secretary James Hagerty; Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., and his deputy, William Rogers; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the administration’s representative to the United Nations; and Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred A. Seaton, who collaborated with H. Struve Hensel, the Pentagon’s general counsel. While less intimate with the President, Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and Army counsel John G. Adams played critical roles. These men were expected, like foot soldiers in war, to put their lives and reputations on the line to protect the President and extinguish the political influence of Joe McCarthy.

Yup, even that devoted anti-Communist Richard Nixon saw which way the wind was blowing and signed on to ratf*ck McCarthy.  And it looks like J. Edgar Hoover helped cut off McCarthy at the knees by repudiating a document McCarthy brandished during the Army hearings.

In January 1954 Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams instructed the Army’s Chief Counsel to write up a report describing the harassment of the Army instigated by McCarthy’s pit bull, Roy Cohn, in the matter of fellow staffer David Schine, with whom Cohn appears to have been infatuated.  By February, the job of preparing the report is in the hands of the Assistant Secretary of Defense and the General Counsel of the Army.

And then in early March, per Nichols…

Sherman Adams’s good friend, Vermont’s Republican Senator Ralph W. Flanders, ridiculed McCarthy in a speech on the Senate floor. Flanders words dripped with sarcasm: “He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops…”

Murrow quoted Flanders’ speech in his famous See It Now broadcast the same night . 

Murrow’s legendary program makes for interesting viewing.  

It was immediately recognized as a high-minded hit piece designed to show McCarthy at his least attractive.  One of the more ham-fisted segments shows an apparently juiced Tailgunner Joe, his comb-over sagging into a bedraggled spitcurl on his forehead, engaged in some dinner-speech blather.  As McCarthy struggles to keep his wits about him and finish his speech, the camera portentously pans to a rather naff mural behind him depicting George Washington in a heroic pose.  Compare and contrast, the message here.

I was struck by a clip he showed of Eisenhower energetically asserting his prerogative to handle executive branch loyalty issues without congressional committees (i.e. McCarthy) butting in.  Incongruously, the famously placid Eisenhower in his physical appearance and temperament strikingly resembled that famous shoe-banger Nikita Khrushchev. 

The worst thing Murrow comes up with is catching McCarthy lying (or as we’d say today, “perhaps intentionally misrepresenting”) the ACLU as a proscribed Communist organization while he bullyrags a State Department boffin for a book he wrote in the 1930s.

The program concludes with Murrow’s justly famous peroration. 

Then, per Nichols:

Those events set the stage for March 11, 1954. That day, on Eisenhower’s secret orders,Seaton released a 34-page, carefully edited account of the privileges sought for David Schine to key senators, representatives, and the press. The document ignited such a fire-storm of negative publicity that, on March 16, the McCarthy subcommittee agreed to hold televised hearings. McCarthy would temporarily step down as chair…

The hearings were broadcast by the fledgling ABC and DuMont networks with gavel-to-gavel coverage for 36 eye-glazing days.  It will be very interesting if Nichols’ book addresses the hows and whys of the collapse of McCarthy’s poll standing (from the 50s to the 30s) during the hearings for the understanding of modern onlookers.    

Here is a clip of the apparently cathartic “have you no decency?” slam from Judge Welch to the applause of the gallery.  The indecency in question was McCarthy hounding Welch over the issue of a member of his team that Welch had to send packing back to Boston because he had belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization HUAC deemed a Communist front.  After the decency jab, Welch still had to deploy a hissy fit and end his examination in order to deflect McCarthy’s determined efforts to make hay out of the embarrassing incident, so it’s difficult for me to grasp how this was a decisive high-five moment for the anti-McCarthy team.  But apparently so.

Much more effective in my opinion are the cutaways to the mesmerizingly sinister apparition of Roy Cohn, who looks and writhes like a hagfish impatient to swim off and burrow into a welcoming corpse. 

On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was condemned by the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22.  This is usually reported as “censure” but it wasn’t, as the contemporary account in the New York Times made clear.  Richard Nixon presided over the session and finessed the adoption of the resolution.  It took a lot of finessing and some low comedy to deliver a satisfactory outcome in the evenly-split (44 Rs, 44 Ds, 1 Independent) Senate.

The only transgression cited in the resolution was McCarthy acting like an insulting, high-handed jerk toward a number of senators who were investigating him.  Apparently the investigation itself hadn’t produced anything deemed suitably awesome—or maybe it was always intended as just a waystation in the road to Senate condemnation.  In any case, the anti-McCarthy forces simply nailed him for his demeanor.

People who remember Clarence Thomas’ “high tech lynching” stunt before the Senate Judiciary Committee will be amused to learn that one of McCarthy’s main transgressions was characterizing the proceeding against him as “a lynch-party” or “lynch bee.”

All 44 Democrats voted for the resolution.  Twenty-two Republicans also voted in favor and twenty-two against, leading one to believe that Eisenhower-inflected party politics rather than good old small d/Large D/Murrow-fueled democratic indignation was in play.  Senator Flanders, the good buddy of Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, introduced the resolution. 

Afterwards, McCarthy faded away and died from hepatitis.  Again, it will be interesting to see what Nichols has to say about any Eisenhower-related maneuverings that may have prevented McCarthy from bouncing back.

Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, became very close to Eisenhower, describing Ike after he left office as “a part-time correspondent for CBS News” because of all the TV specials the ex-President did with CBS Reports.  I leave it to the inquisitive to explore when those close relations began, and whether the well-connected Murrow et. al. had any inkling that Eisenhower and his team were maneuvering to drop the hammer on McCarthy as the famous See It Now broadcast was assembled.

One of my favorite journo stories concerns the carefully choreographed leaking of the vital Army report to the press on March 11, two days after Murrow’s famous broadcast.  Press coverage of the allegations created the outrage boomlet that midwived the fatal Army hearings.  The anecdote comes courtesy of Art Spivak, then working for International News Service:

... the Army’s counsel, John G. Adams slipped to some senators and to the Baltimore Sun’s reporter Phil Potter a 34-page single-spaced “chronology” of efforts by Cohn, with McCarthy’s backing, to force the Army to give Roy’s recently-drafted buddy G. David Schine a direct promotion to lieutenant, assign him to serve his military term on the staff of the subcommittee, and enjoy sundry other favors. The bottom line was a charge that Cohn threatened to “wreck the Army” if his wishes were rejected.

Adams, a fellow South Dakotan and long-time friend of Potter’s, knew Potter would make use of the anti-Cohn, anti-McCarthy chronology, Potter, in turn, knew that the chronology was potential dynamite and his unsyndicated story would get nowhere unless other news outlets had it too.

The way Potter told it to me later, he therefore offered a copy of the Adams chronology to Arkansas Democratic Sen. John L. McClellan, ranking minority member of McCarthy’s subcommittee. McClellan was an arch-conservative and at first didn’t oppose McCarthy, but he grew to despise the Wisconsin Republican’s tactics. And so, with Potter’s guidance, McClellan invited a small group of reporters to his Fairfax Hotel apartment in Washington and leaked the chronology to them. I was one of those invited. Others included reporters for AP, UP, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
...

There was only one copy of the chronology available at McClellan’s suite, so the four other reporters and I laboriously hand-copied each of the 34 single-spaced pages of the document, passing each page to the other reporter until all were finished copying. We didn’t finish until close to midnight. From the hotel, I phoned a “bulletin” and brief story to the INS news desk in Washington, to catch the wire at the end of what we called the “A.M. cycle” for morning papers.


...

At the time, and for years afterward, I thought Adams had prepared and leaked his chronology on his own, in retribution for his and his Army colleagues’ treatment by McCarthy and Cohn.

Thirty years later, the full story came out in Ewald’s deceptively titled “Who Killed Joe McCarthy” book. Ewald provided chapter and verse on how Adams was only one player in a broadly mounted but confidential assault on McCarthy and Cohn by the Eisenhower White House, Department of Defense, and Department of the Army. The President himself was described as publicly silent but vitally active in orchestrating the developments that spawned the Army- McCarthy hearings.

Yes.  Faithful steno work and an inability to see the big picture and the guy behind the curtain—Eisenhower.  That’s how the press helped bring down Tailgunner Joe.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Donald Trump meets his political end, perhaps for some legal or tax entanglement.  That is, if there’s anybody in the political establishment adept as Eisenhower who wants to remove a disruptive, independent-minded demagogue.  If there is, I don’t doubt that the journalists will be ready to hold up their end.

The Lights That Failed: Terrorism Double Standards in San Bernardino, Paris...and Baicheng?

There have been some darkly amusing moments as the media in United States and France have pushed back against the PRC's efforts to shoulder its way into the privileged ranks of civilized nations that have innocently suffered terrorist attacks.  

More problematic is the unspoken corollary: that the PRC doesn't get the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower lit up in red & gold whenever a few dozen of its citizens get butchered because maybe, even if the victims were 100% innocent, the perpetrators were not quite 100% guilty.  And the PRC & CCP had a share in that guilt.

In my opinion, this is a sterile moral and intellectual debate in the metaphysics of murder, and a slippery slope for those searching for nuance and extenuating circumstances in the straightforward act of one human being killing another.

Condemn PRC's policies all you want, in other words.  But don't try to excuse or explain murder.

On the other side of the coin, the argument about "who deserves" a big budget public commemoration of their violent death is as empty as the argument over "who doesn't deserve it."

My proposal: no more special light shows just for victims of the "terrorist attacks" who happened to meet their ends in the "membership has its privileges" states of the Western alliance at the peak of the news cycle.  

Light up the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower...and Tian An Men...and Red Square... for everybody.  Every night.  Lord knows there's enough murder to go around. 

Don't play favorites.

On one level, the tussle over who's a certified Grade A terrorism victim is just another exercise in great power point scoring.  On another, various countries--not just the PRC, I think--benefit from the additional impunity in security operations that identification as "terrorism victim" provides.

But there's more to it.

The canard that some victims are more...meaningful? ....significant? ...worthier?... innocent? than others is, in my opinion, one of the most cynical and destructive strategems of the "war on terror".

"Terrorism" has never been officially defined as a term under international law thanks in some part to the desire to retain a loophole for asymmetric national liberation struggles.  The BBC, to its credit, refuses to employ it as an editorial characterization of whatever massacre of civilians currently gripsthe public interest, whether or not the the victim/perpetrator combo matches the Beeb's preferred good guy/bad guy alignment.

That leaves governments and politicians free to come up with definitions that suit them.  And they're not squeamish when it comes to asserting the absolute innocence of the victims, the total perfidy of the killers...and the utter blamelessness of the government.  I think that's because they want to dodge any imputation that violence experienced by their citizens is "blowback" i.e. a consequence for government actions that were some fatal combination of immorality, incompetence, and recklessness.  Better, in other words, to shield the government as well as the victims under the umbrella of utter innocence.

In addition to odious moral posturing and runaway national security states, the terrorism narrative brings with it another nasty corollary: the desire to assign the guilt elsewhere that governments are incapable of assuming.  That can get ugly quickly, especially when governments, politicians, demagogues, and opportunists find the pursuit of scapegoats near and far convenient and advantageous.  And the government wants its citizens feeling like victims instead of looking at the problem and demanding a solution.

My rule of thumb is: the louder the government says it's terrorism, the more I think it's blowback. 

My proposal: when it's blowback, call it blowback.  And keep the lights on.  For all humanity.

With that preface, here's a look at the intersection of three major terror tussles in the PRC, France, and the United States which occurred over the last few weeks.
 

CH

December 7, 2015 might turn into a new “Day of Infamy” if the gambit Donald Trump announced—banning the entry of Muslims into the United States “until we figure out what to do” about terrorism—successfully normalizes religious discrimination in American social and political life.


If so, it will represent not necessarily represent a victory for terror,  but another case of blowback for the “terror” narrative that governments and politicians are eager to exploit and citizens increasingly willing to adopt.

It’s a global trend.  And when “terror” narratives collide, the response can be enlightening.

Pre San Bernardino, while Paris was still the focus of the Western terrorism narrative as a result of the November 13th attack, the PRC attempted to piggyback on the wave of revulsion in order to gain acceptance of its own brutal campaign against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.  The PRC focused on its pursuit of the perpetrators of a spectacular slaughter of 50 Han security personnel and miners at a facility at Baicheng, Xinjiang as an “anti-terrorist” operation—with flamethrowers!—equivalent to the massive manhunt for the Paris attackers.

This did not go down well with the Beijing correspondent of the French magazine L’Obs (previously Le Nouvel Observateur), Ursula Gauthier, who dismissed Chinese claims to innocent victim parity with France.

Gauthier wrote:

l’attaque de Baicheng ne ressemble en rien aux attentats du 13 novembre. Il s’agissait en réalité d’une explosion de rage localisée...

The attack at Baicheng in no way resembled the events of November 13.  It was in actuality an explosion of local rage…

In the “rough” English translation Gauthier provided “in no way resembled” came out as “not at all like”.  I leave it to linguists to determine if her translation “in no way resembled” or was “not at all like” the original.

This passage was perhaps not Gauthier’s finest hour as a journalist, because there does not appear to be any documentation or reporting for this sweeping assertion concerning the identity and motives of the Uyghur assailants who lived, murdered, and died anonymously and beyond the reach of Gauthier’s inquiries.

And that did not go down well with Global Times, and with nationalist netizens, who savagely excoriated Gauthier in on-line forums.  And that did not go down well with Foreign Correspondents Club in Beijing, which issued a statement supporting Gauthier, decrying her harassment, and taking the PRC government to task for apparent delays in processing her visa renewal.

Per the Guardian:

Following its publication on 18 November, Gauthier was the subject of inflammatory editorials in the state-controlled Global Times and China Daily, plus several websites linked to the Chinse military.

Websites carried thousands of aggressive comments about Gauthier (including death threats) which also published her photograph and her address.

She was also summoned to the foreign ministry where officials unsuccessfully, sought an admission that her article had been wrong.

The FCCC’s statement said: “Receiving criticism is a normal and necessary part of journalistic work, but this is neither proportionate nor reasonable.”

This ugly incident can be dissected on several levels.

First, Gauthier is unabashed chain-yanker of the PRC on the Xinjiang issue.  Her heart is clearly with the Uyghurs as innocent victims of Chinese oppression, and she is prepared to cut the PRC zero slack when it tries in its turn to claim innocent victimhood in the case of Uyghur attacks.

In March of 2014, just a few days after the massacre of 29 Chinese and the wounding of 140 by, apparently, Uyghurs at the Kunming train station,  Gauthier visited Xinjiang and filed a report on a “Voyage to an Empire of Fear”.  It is a good, revealing picture of PRC’s oppressive strategy and tactics against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

However, she appeared to get caught in an analytic grey zone by going for “compare and contrast” on the situation in Xinjiang and the event at Kunming.

Gauthier wrote of the Kunming massacre as China’s “first ‘experience’ with terror” delivered at the hands of Uyghur assailants, but she contrasted this with the continual terror experienced by Uyghurs in Xinjiang:

Mais si l’on veut savoir à quoi ressemble vraiment la terreur au quotidien – celle qui s’immisce dans tous les interstices de la vie, empoisonne les relations et paralyse les esprits les plus sereins – il faut se rendre précisément au Xinjiang, à l’extrême ouest de la Chine.

But if we want to know what everyday terror really looks like - one that interferes in every crevice of life, poisons relations and paralyzes the spirits of the most serene - you have to go to Xinjiang specifically, to far west of China. 

Gauthier characterized Kunming as a transient event, an experience, a belated, one-time taste of the chronic terror that Uyghurs have endured at the hands of the PRC in Xinjiang for years.

She seemingly invited the audience to draw connections between the two events to the detriment of Beijing’s “innocent victim narrative” for the Kunming bloodbath.

In other words, Blowback.

This approach undoubtedly put Gauthier on the CCP’s radar, and not in a good way.

When she trotted out the trope a second time in November 2015, this time contrasting genuine terror in Paris with Beijing’s faux terrorism in Baicheng—and as a bonus raising the specter of blowback in “China’s magnificent mega-cities” and not just the second-tier backwater of Kunming “so long as the Uyghurs’ situation continues to get worse” --  the propaganda people were ready for her: a harsh but not terribly inaccurate editorial in Global Times, followed by a vicious hounding on the Chinese Internet.

Aside from frustration and anger and a desire to stick it to Gauthier, I assume the CCP is keen to uphold the “terrorist” classification of ETIM, the purported Uyghur independence movement that George W. Bush granted to the PRC, and which helps shield the PRC from international condemnation for its Israel-in-Palestine type policies in Xinjiang.

Western governments and media have demonstrated a tendency to chip away at the Chinese claim in recent years, and the PRC has pushed back.  There was an outbreak of official and apparently authentic public indignation when the US government and Western newspapers apparently resisted characterizing the Kunming slaughter as terrorism.

An example of US chariness in anointing the PRC with the chrism of “authentic and approved terrorism victim” was seen in the immortal response of State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki, even after the UN Security Council had obligingly condemned the Kunming attacks as terrorism:

Well, we acknowledge that China has characterized the incident as a terror act. We extend our condolences for the loss of life. We of course oppose terrorism in all of its forms, and based on the information reported by the Chinese media, this appears to be an act of terrorism targeting random members of the public. We don’t have any other independent information, but again, we of course deplore violence intentionally directed at innocent civilians in any case, regardless of whether — regardless of the cause. So that is where we are.

Thanks, Jan.

Recently, the PRC has become extremely aggressive in pursuing the return of Uyghurs who have fled the country to various countries in Southeast Asia.  The PRC calls it the legal return of illegal immigrants; human rights groups characterize it as “refoulement,” under international law the illegal return to their home country of refugees fearing persecution.  The most striking recent case was the return of over one hundred Uyghurs by Thailand, which attracted vociferous criticism—criticism that the PRC finds easier to ignore as long as it asserts it is handling an internationally acknowledged terrorist threat from ETIM.

So when a Western journalist asserts that the massacre of 50 miners and security personnel is not a “terrorist” act, it’s time to protect the franchise.

And the Uyghur resistance is showing signs of evolving beyond the spontaneous, righteous axe-wielding enthusiasts sympathetically chronicled by Gauthier to something that looks more like terrorism.

Thanks to the PRC policies, there are Uyghur militants in Afghanistan, Uyighur jihadis in western Pakistan, Uyghurs who escaped China and acquired a taste for jihad in South East Asia, Uyghurs recruited as paramilitary assets by the elements in the Turkish security forces, Uyghurs with a mind to obtain training and experience in Middle East battlefields and wreak havoc on their oppressors…

…just as the Paris attackers—Europeans, every one of them, journeyed to Syria for inspiration, comrades, and skills for their carnival of murder in mid November.

The Uyghur attackers perforce use axes and “machetes”; the Paris attackers also took up the weapons at hand— improvised home-made explosives and, thanks to the effective offices of Belgian gunrunners, machine guns and rocket launchers.

One passage of Gauthier’s article which is, I regret to say, inadvertently ironic, OK, I'll admit I laughed out loud, which is terrible thing to do, is her earnest account of the genuinely awful indignities that the PRC metes out on the Uyghurs on top of its omnipresent security activities:

Pitiless repression… is wiping out all aspects of Uyghur life – culture, language, religion, access to education, jobs, even a passport. …

A few examples:

A number of traditional Muslim given names have been banned. Anyone with such a name must change it…
Uyghur restaurants are now obliged to offer their clients cigarettes and alcohol…

Civil servants must eat in public during Ramadan…

Any man wearing a beard is naturally suspected of religious extremism, along with any woman wearing a headscarf…

And now, any young man who stops smoking or turns down the offer of a beer is also suspected of extremism.

OK, that’s Xinjiang.  Let’s look at France.

Starting with the historical big picture, you’ve got the brutal, failed French neo-colonial exercise in Algiers (estimated 700,000 lives, mostly Algerian, lost), which Gauthier perhaps regards as a precedent for the PRC in Xinjiang.

The biggest “terrorist” incident in France prior to the November 13 outrage was the extrajudicial slaughter of an estimated 200 pro-independence Algerian demonstrators by French police in Paris in 1961.
 
As for more recent affronts to the dignity of French Muslims supposedly enjoying the post-colonial French nirvana, I’ll outsource this to Time:

In 2008, a French court denied a Moroccan woman French citizenship on the grounds that her veil and her submissiveness to her husband were “assimilation defects.” Though the New York Times reported “almost unequivocal support for the ruling across the political spectrum,” one Muslim leader told the paper he worried the decision set a precedent for arbitrary decisions of what constitutes a radical Muslim lifestyle. In 2010, the French Senate banned public wearing of face-coverings, including the Muslim face-veil, the niqab. And in 2013, the government launched what it called a Charter for Secularity in School, a set of guidelines on 15 key points of secularism to be posted in classrooms as an attempt to keep religion out of school. The then-government education minister, Vincent Peillon, insisted it was an attempt “to get everyone together,” but it had the opposite effect, with Muslim leaders claiming it stigmatized their community.

Here’s a post-Paris-massacre national emergency bonus, courtesy of Al Jazeera:

France is likely to close up to 160 mosques in the coming months as part of a nationwide police operation under the state of emergency which allows places of worship that promote radical views to be shut down, one of the country's chief imams has said.

The “chief imam”, by the way, is Hassan El Alaoui.  He is France’s prison-chaplain general, and is the first Muslim to serve in that post by virtue of the fact that Muslims, who comprise 8% of the overall French population, compose 70% of its prison population.  In addition to his duties in keeping the lid on the furious, radicalized Muslims inside the prisons, El Alaoui “is in charge of nominating regional and local Muslim imams.”

Post-attack, France has also opted out of the European Human Rights Convention, thereby allowing the government “to impose house arrest without authorization from a judge, conduct searches without a judicial warrant and seize any computer files it finds, and block websites deemed to glorify terrorism without prior judicial authorization."

I think that’s enough ironic juxtaposition for now.

Though it may not go down too well with Gauthier or foes of false equivalence, it can be said France is not the Uyghurs in the blowback/terrorist equation; it’s the Chinese.

And, to be even-handed, I tend to put the San Bernardino shootings in the same class as Paris: not a strategic assault directed by ISIS, but more likely an extremely ugly piece of blowback by Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a devoutly Muslim Pakistani couple perhaps seeking revenge for US violence, specifically in Pakistan through its drone strikes, via Israel against the Palestinian people, and against the ummah in the Middle East generally through its support and conduct of promiscuous military operations that are, quite frankly, impossible to accurately enumerate.

“Terrorism,” which applies moral censure to the perpetrator and bestows innocence by association on the victim, sounds a lot better than “Blowback”.  But it obscures the motive for the crime and vastly confuses the response.

In the case of San Bernardino, we could regard it as workplace murder committed by a psychopathic couple with a warped sense of grievance perhaps intensified by workplace frictions (if one or more of their victims were co-workers who allegedly taunted Farook about Islam, I wonder if we’ll hear about it in the laudatory obituaries)—and, in terms both callous and accurate, the bloody cost of doing business as a global military empire.

Instead, the attacks were, after what appears to be some internal hesitation, characterized as by the FBI as “terrorism,” an attack on the American way of life by a radical Islamist impulse nurtured by ISIS even though the group apparently had no meaningful contact with the couple.  As a result of the San Bernardino murders, the United States is now having a serious conversation, mainly on the conservative side to be sure, about banning Muslims from entry into the United States.

Judging by his television address on December 6, I think President Obama, as well as myself, is bemused and appalled by the runaway development of the ISIS terror narrative.  I expect he would prefer that the nation’s moral and political energies be concentrated on preventing recurrent domestic “terrors” like the school shooting at Sandy Hook—where a US citizen massacred 20 children and six adults (12 more fatalities than at San Bernardino)—through national gun control.

Instead, America is getting a brisk shove down the road to fascism by proposing discrimination against an entire class of people because of their religion…and, if anecdotal evidence is representative, Americans are buying guns by the truckload.

“Terror” transforms a single criminal act into an attack on the nation.  Too often, the response is an exercise in fear and futility.  The perpetrators are usually dead, the accomplices unknown, the threat obscure, the enemy the sense of danger inside our own heads.  A sense of wronged innocence and moral certainty are of limited use in this kind of struggle.  Fourteen years after the War on Terror officially began, after hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and at the cost of some essential human liberties and values, nobody seems very close to victory.

Not the United States, not France, not the People’s Republic of China.

Correction on San Bernardino Shooter/Lal Masjid Link

Yesterday I wrote a post, The Bloody Key to the San Bernardino Massacre: Radicalisation at the Lal Masjid Mosque in Pakistan, based upon unconfirmed news reports that President Obama had notified Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif that a photograph showing Tashfeen Malik, the female shooter at San Bernardino, with fire-eating Pakistani cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz had been found.

The reports have been denied by Sharif’s office, and by Maulana Abdul Aziz personally in a press statement reported by the Pakistan Tribune.

“I swear, I do not know Tashfeen Malik and have never been photographed with her,” he said in a statement issued on Saturday. “I have never even been photographed with my wife and daughters. How can you imagine me being photographed with a na-mahram (woman who is not related to me),” he asked.

…

Umme Hassan, Aziz’s wife and the principal of the Jamia Hafsa seminary, also supported her husband, saying he rarely gives interview to female journalists, and whenever he did give one, Hasan or one of their daughters would sit in the room with Aziz.

“I can say with complete assurance that Malik… never took a photograph with him,” she said.

I find their statements convincing because Maulana Abdul Aziz is apparently allergic to having his picture taken.  Indeed, on the Internet one finds occasional pictures of him in public settings with men, but not women, and no personal “grip and grin” “wall of fame” individual shots with fans and followers, male or female.

And I was too quick to speculate on the possibility that Malik attended the madrassa at Lal Masjid.  As I subsequently found out, she got a degree in pharmacy at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Punjab.

So post in haste, repent in haste.  

There is no demonstrated link between Tashfeen Malik and Lal Masjid mosque or Maulana Abdul Aziz.

I’ve inserted this statement on my previous post.