Via Positive Liberty I came across this interview with Ron Paul on John Gibson’s radio show. It was nice to hear him explicitly repudiate Alex Jones and the 9/11 “Truthers”, but I was also interested when he said after the attacks he introduced a bill in the I.R committee that would restrict immigration from terrorist countries (after it passed the House the Bush Administration got rid of it).
I had proposed just that myself a while back, figuring it would be a lot simpler and more effective than all this Homeland Security boondoggle. Like John Stuart Mill I recognize the penalizing of people (those who wish to immigrate here) as a cost that we would be putting up with for the greater benefits with regard to terrorism. I admit I don’t know all that much about the role these specific immigrants play in American society, but it would seem to me the loss from that would be swamped by the benefits of scrapping all the nonsense that has ensued following the attacks (I don’t think we would have invaded Iraq or be discussing attacks on Iran if they had not happened). It’s not like terrorists are uniformly distributed across the globe, so that makes it a lot easier to target them. I think the idea of a “War on Terror” isn’t helpful because a lot of terrorist groups we aren’t really worried about, like the Tamil Tigers. I think just terrorists that attack America, which might even make Hezbollah kosher these days. Lawrence Auster advocates something he calls “separationism”, which initially sounded good to me until I read it involved Us going Over There to keep away from Them, which just seems like a means opposed to its ends. I can understand and be in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan to disrupt an organization (al-Qaeda) which had declared war on the United States and repeatedly attacked it, but Auster’s “separationism” is a long-term strategy toward the entire muslim world which he views as a threat as long as it exists. I don’t think our activities around the world are all that helpful and I don’t see the necessity of them if we don’t let terrorists into our country. Fortunately, unlike Britain, we do not have a homegrown terrorist problem, and I think we should be able to keep it that way.
I suppose one aspect in which I differ with Auster is that he wants to keep out Muslims just because they’re Muslims and he has a big buggaboo about “foot baths“. For me it’s simply about terrorism and the idiotic policies that result from it. I’d be willing to let in Muslims from countries that don’t tend to produce anti-American terrorists, though I’d also consider discriminating between immigrants on the basis of religion (Lebanese Marionites, Coptic Egyptians and Hindu or Sikh Indians would be much less likely to carry out attacks on us). After the latest Clash of Civilizations dies down I’d be willing to relax restrictions. We eventually got over our animosities with Germany, Japan, Russia, China, Vietnam and other places, so I expect after a generation or so jihadism won’t be a big deal.
November 25, 2007 at 7:26 am
Well, let me jump on the bandwagon by saying this same notion occured to me about 5 minutes after the first of the Twin Towers collapsed. In addition to the beneft of subtantially reducing the workload of our cognitively challenged TSA employees, it also introduces a sharp incentive for governments in the Islamic world to crack down on institutions and individuals supporting terrorism, or at least, anti-American terrorism.
These countries are packed to the gills with young men who blame the United States for every misfortune to have visited their lands, including earthquakes (I am not kidding). These same young men, however would quite willingly attempt emmigration to America on a homemade raft if they thought there was a green card waiting for them at then of the ride. In other words, both the young men and their governments, want the surplus population (well, the surplus MALE population) relocated elsewhere.
From the Bush Administration standpoint, one of the problems with this plan is that Saudi Arabia would wind up at the top of that list, and the Saudi’s wouldn’t be pleased. Since they control the flow of oil, and thus, the price of oil . . .
The Bush Administration is either utterly full of shit on the “war on terrorism” issue, or it is composed of people of such monumental incompetence that they really can’t figure out why that fucking square peg just won’t slide into that goddamn round hole, no matter how hard you push, and push, and push.
Speaking of surplus population, this is, I think, one of the most under-reporting aspects of the whole Jihad-threat syndrome. It may be under-reported because it weakens the claims of Norman Podhoretz and his ilk of Fourth World Warmongers.
Anyway, to be deliberately reductionist for a moment, the Islamic world is suffering from the enormous excess of sexually-frustrated, marignally-employed or unemployed young men who need something to blamefor their sorry lot in life, and they’re sure as hell not going to blame Allah, or themselves. After all, they do have that degree in Koranic Studies from King Faisal Community College, and they still can’t land the sort of cushy government job their dad has been “working” the past 25 years.
“It must be the work of the infidels!” (Again, I’m not kidding.)
These guys are very frustrated, and fairly pathetic, and their worldview is prety one dimensional, but then again, so is most everyone elses. But my point here is that if you look at the population figures, we won’t have them to deal with them for all that much longer, because birth rates are sharply dropping around the Islamic world. Soon, they’ll be fat 30-something shop clerks and taxi drivers, watching reruns of “Friends” every evening with Mom and Dad, and wondering how it all went wrong. But by then, they’ll be too lethargic and depressed to do anything about it.
By the way, TGGP, you aren’t a JEW are you? (Just kidding)
November 25, 2007 at 12:38 pm
I expect after a generation or so jihadism won’t be a big deal
Islam has a particular history of aggression, so I wouldn’t be so sure of this. I’d suggest we see a good 2 to 3 hundred years of peace before we consider letting Muslims back into our countries.
November 25, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Terrorists aren’t poor and uneducated. They tend to be the more well-off and educated members of their societies. They also generally studied engineering in school rather than islam. That doesn’t stop them from being idiots, as the “Doctor’s Plot” showed.
I am quite willing to believe the Bush admin is utterly idiotic.
Thursday, before the Iranian revolution, who was worried about islamic extremism? I think it likely that our grandchildren will find our fears strange and alien.
November 25, 2007 at 2:59 pm
I’m not jewish at all. I’m Scots-Irish, baptized Catholic, raised Protestant, currently a non-believer.
November 25, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I didn’t say they were poor. The poor are used to being poor, so it doesn’t fuck with them so much. The middle class is not. The children of the middle and upper middle class in Arab countries expect opportunities that no longer exist for them. In their parent’s generation, if you had a university degree in anything you were set. Now, if you have a university degree, you get stuck as a clerk at an electronics store.
The crack about Koranic Studies comes from the fact that up until fairly recently, any Saudi with a college degree in ANYTHING was guaranteed a government job, and slews of them majored (and still major) in the study of Islam.
“They also generally studied engineering in school rather than islam.”
I disagree. Terrorists like OBL, the ones you’re likely to have heard of, may have studied engineering, but that’s like saying most people serving in the US Navy attended Annapolis. The foot soldiers didn’t study engineering.
November 25, 2007 at 9:38 pm
GNXP had a post on the engineering background of terrorists here. Crooked Timber had one here.
In their parent’s generation, if you had a university degree in anything you were set. Now, if you have a university degree, you get stuck as a clerk at an electronics store.
I wasn’t aware of those kind of changes in the Middle East.
The foot soldiers didn’t study engineering.
Check some of the links I posted. They did.
Your point about demographics was good though. In Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington discusses the relation of demographic bulges to the seemingly unrelated matter of Sri Lanka. I’ll quote from that in my next comment.
November 25, 2007 at 10:04 pm
“Changes in the demographic balance were one such factor. The numerical expansion of one group generates political, economic, and social pressures on other groups. The collapse in the early 1970s of the thirty-year-old constitutional order in Lebanon was in large part a result of the dramatic increase in the Shi’ite population in relation to the Maronite Christians. In Sri Lanka, Gary Fuller has shown, the peaking of the Sinhalese nationalist insurgency in 1970 and of the Tamil insurgency in the late 1980s coincided exactly with the years when the fifteen-to-twenty-four-old “youth bulge” in those groups exceeded 20 percent of the total population of the group.27 (See Figure 10.1.) The Sinhalese insurgents, one U.S. diplomat to Sri Lanka noted, were virtually all under twenty-four years of age, and the Tamil Tigers, it was reported, were “unique in their reliance on what amounts to a children’s army,” recruiting “boys and girls as young as eleven,” with those killed in the fighting “not yet teenagers when they died, onle a few older than eighteen.” The Tigers, The Economist observed, were waging an “under-age war.”28 In similar fashion, the fault line wars between Russians the Muslim peoples to their south were fueled by major differences in population growth. In the early 1990s the fertility rate of women in the Russian Federation was 1.5, while in the primarily Muslim Central Asian former Soviet republics the fertility rate was about 4.4 and the rate of net population increase (crude birth rate minus crude death rate) in the late 1980s in the latter was five to six times that in Russia. Chechens increased by 26 percent in the 1980s and Chechnya was one of the most densely populated places in Russia, its high birt rates producing migrants and fighters.29 In similar fashion high Muslim birth rates and migration into Kashmir from Pakistan stimulated renewed resistance to Indian rule.”
Figure ten depicts the population levels of Sinhalese, Tamils and total Sri Lankans and points out the peaks of insurgencies and some riots. I don’t have a scanner to put it here.
From pages 259-260.
Citations:
27. Gary Fuller, ” The Demographic Backdrop to Ethnic Conflict: A Geographic Overview,” in Central Intelligence Agency, The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and INternational Order in the 1990’s: Geographic Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, RTT 95-`0039, October 1995), pp. 151-154.
28. New York Times, 16 October 1994, p. 3; Economist, 5 August 1995, p. 32.
29. United Nations Department for Economic and Social Information and Policy Analysis, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 1994 Revision (New York: United Nations, 1995), pp. 29, 51; Denis Dragounski, “Threshhold of Violence,” Freedom Review, 26 (March-April 1995), 11.
November 26, 2007 at 7:35 am
I read you’re links; they were quite interesting.
Since I’m a pest, I’m going to keep quibbling. The fact that “graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world,” is not the same as saying,”they (Islamic terrorists) also generally studied engineering in school rather than islam.”
A group can be over-represented within a population while still being a distinct minority within that population.
I believe one of the articles alludes to this, but I wonder how much this over-representation is driven by “rigid personality” and how much by recruiting needs. People who need bombs probably want to have a lot of engineers around. Plus, they probably don’t want to entrust such operations to idiots.
Still, there may well be something about the engineering mindset that lends itself to this type of cause. After all, the better you are at abstraction, the easier it is to justify killing a lot of people for an abstract goal.
It would be interesting to look at the foreign jihadis in Iraq and see what kinds of backgrounds they come from.
“Their preferred explanation lies in the combination of a particular mindset given to simplification, monistic understandings of the world and desire that existing social arrangements be preserved, with key environmental factors (most importantly, frustrated professional aspirations due to a lack of opportunities).”
It’s an intersting thesis, and the last factor reflects what I was discussing earlier, the diminshed sense of opportunities among people who expect their education to usher them into a position of power and respect.
I realize these are anecdotal, but just to make the point that we don’t want to totally ignore the losers in the jihadi quest, Richard Reid was no engineer. Nor were those morons in Florida who rambled on about blowing up the Sears Tower. Evidently, they were so stupid it’s not clear that they ever could have begun to put their “plan” into action. Nevertheless, this sort of person, under some competent guidance, makes acceptable cannon fodder.
In Turkey, it’s quite the fashion these days for nationalist and/or islamist groups to recruit disaffected teenagers to do their killing for them. It works pretty well.
November 26, 2007 at 9:26 am
I agree, blacksea. I’m skeptical of attempts by lefties to analyze people alien to them, like the “authoritarian personality”. I think the undeveloped nature of many muslim countries makes engineering a more attractive major and I think engineers are more useful to terrorist groups (they say that they are also overrepresented at high-levels, but it’s easier to reach the top if you can get your foot in the door and prove yourself). I think the situation in Iraq may be different, with lots of cannon fodder rather than handpicked-cells like the 9/11 hijackers. Also, do you have any links on the decline of opportunities for the educated in those countries?
November 26, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I didn’t have any articles saved, but a quick look at Google revealed the following:
See here, not a very interesting article, but it does address the topic. And here and here. And here.
I’m sure more can be discovered.