By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Post from February 8, 2017 which was unpublished for some reason.
The Weekly Standard had an interesting article about the problem of two unreliable narratives -- those of the media and those of President Donald Trump.
Of course, on either side is a demand to see these debates in binary terms of true/false, like the geek culture that bends its mind to machines of 0/1 and true/false in code.
I don't find those terms very meaningful because in my view, there is the overarching problem of the inability of the human mind to know absolute truth. The recognition of that inability, which is a core belief of religions and philosophies actually leads to freedom and tolerance of a variety of expression in the liberal mind, or should.
But there are those who believe the human mind is infallible and can know "truths" about "science" like "climate change". I can know truths about climate change, too, when the waters of the East River come up past the second floor of my apartment building and I am evacuated, then return to live in the dark and cold with rats for two weeks. Yet this "truth" I have apprehended has not carried over to establishing a "truth" about the various policies that are devised to combat this problem, some expensive, like planting water-absorbent flora and shoring up shores, other less expensive, like building sea walls. (And that's what a lot of claim of the left is about: not a denial of climate change but a refusal to follow a socialist versus capitalist solution).
The competing narratives of "true" and "false" this past week revolved around three memes:
o the Bowling Green massacre
o the "zero deaths" from terrorist attacks since 911
o Trump didn't include countries in the list to ban where "he had business".
Now there's a new week and another meme to be added:
o the absence of comments from Trump on his Twitter feed about a terrorist attack on a certain day
That the commentator himself didn't have any tweets on that day about a terrorist attack, either, is never researched or noticed. That in general he speaks about terrorism only in the most biased way isn't noticed either. We're to be seized with paroxysms of indignation that on a particular day, Trump was tweeting frivolous things instead of concern about terrorism.
Each one of these enthusiastically promoted memes was false in its way if for no other reason that they were a product of the culture of gleeful "gotchas" that so permeates our lives, notably promoted by Jon Stewart on his Comedy Central "news channel".
To my mind, Scott Shane's piece in The New York Times is exactly what elicits cries of "fake news" on the right -- and in my view at least a questionable bias and willingness to bend facts to fit narratives.
He and Huffpo and Washpo and others all made the same meme-ist point:
"There are zero deaths from terrorist attacks from people from those countries."
But...as Reason magazine explains (and Cato, which funds Reason, was the study Shane and others selectively referenced) point out that 24 Americans have been injured in a spat of attacks by people from some of those countries -- Somali, Yemen for example.
Why don't they count? Why can't we report this in deciding this public policy matter?
The "zero deaths" meme is creepy, because it implies that if a terrorist attacks and fails, or attacks and only maims some people as the one in NJ and NY recently, even seriously, "it doesn't count".
But of course it counts and its appalling not to report that. In the Chelsea attack, 31 people were injured. On that day, local news covered it, in the case of more liberal outlets, rushing to point out that there were "no international groups" attached to it, and that included "our local newspaper" the New York Times and our senator Chuck Schumer who said on September 25 there was "no proof" of an international/terrorist group angle. But an awareness of this attack and similar ones, a matching of it to patterns never occurs. It drops down the memory hole.
Most creepy is the 538 style of literalism on this answering Trump's claim that "the press didn't report the attacks" (they didn't) with claim "But the local news did" -- as if that's enough, and as if this exonerates the problem of national news not reporting it *this week, amidst their enthusiasm with their memes about "zero deaths" and "Bowling Green massacre."
Sorry, but in a week of NATIONAL liberal news coverage we never got wrap-ups of what LOCAL had published before -- and THAT MATTERS.
The "Bowling Green Massacre" is to my mind one of those concoctions such as Jon Stewart was famous for -- there are even creepy t-shirts saying "I survived the Bowling Green massacre."
Yes, Conway was mistaken. There's even a theory that she is nefariously and deliberately mistaken because she's said it more than once. I actually don't believe that, and in any event can't accept the same media that ridiculed her mistake as a source on this matter.
Because lost in this gleeful gotcha is some awareness that if two Iraqis bent on terrorism don't attack *us* in America, and only escape to say, Europe, to work for Al Qaeda and kill people there, are we to be content that some people will have t-shirts that say "I survived the Istanbul Airport massacre" or "I survived the Brussels Airport massacre" -- when not everyone was so lucky?
What's especially awful in my view here is the myopia that goes with taking delight in somebody being wrong about a massacre, but not caring the slightest that the people involved might go and commit one elsewhere, at home or abroad. We had an "Orlando massacre," after all, committed by a US citizen with heritage in Afghanistan who showed all the signs of being inspired by and devoted to ISIS. So while there isn't any "Bowling Green" massacre, there sure as hell is an "Orlando massacre". Yes, this perpetrator, like the one in Chelsea was a citizen of the US but with Afghan heritage. Shouldn't Trump have included Afghanistan in the list? But there isn't a good-faith examination of that issue, merely repetition of the mind-numbing meme that "zero deaths" occurred by people from the 7 countries.
Then there's the meme which I find particularly atrocious that Trump "didn't include countries where he had business".
Er, leave aside the fact that Trump didn't appear to have business in Afghanistan, imagine that, there was ZERO awareness even by people like Ian Bremmer who enthusiastically pumped the "business" meme although he should know better that the countries from which terrorists come -- Turkey, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia for example -- are all large recipients of US military aid. Some are in the top ten, even. They are "allies" up to a point in that we give them this aid and then hope that bribes them, I guess. Pakistan isn't a place where Trump does business but it wasn't put on the list, either -- that suggests you have to be a little bit more intelligent about this matter.
If a country is an "ally" or gets huge amounts of military aid, putting them on a ban list would not be prudent. US diplomats work hard to have some kind of alliance with these despots all of whom help spawn the terrorism from which they themselves suffer.
I think this executive order was wrong and that we already had heavy vetting of people coming from these countries. Obviously people who already came from those countries and already here could be tomorrow's perpetrators. People who originated in those countries and somehow obtained citizenship elsewhere could also come in to this country to commit terrorism.
Indeed the "country" approach in fighting terrorism that spans regions and isn't isolated to countries isn't really the most effective.
When Trump says there is "fake news" and even liberals who should know better say there is "fake news" about terrorism this week, and that "it is in fact reported," they aren't grasping that Scott Shane and a score of other liberals simply didn't report those terrorist attacks NOW, when the topic is in front of people. Shane made absolutely no reference to the fact -- which he could have drawn from the same Cato Institute he used to get his "zero deaths" meme -- that people did get hurt and there were terrorist attacks, just not deaths.
It's pretty chilling and cold-blooded to decide a matter only based on deaths. The proposition to debate is whether a threshold of 23 people injured in a few terrorist attacks is too low to warrant opening up entry to people from that country. Say that then, and don't sugar coat it with "no deaths" and "no massacre in Bowling Green".
The first article I've ever seen in the New York Times, or really anywhere I can think of, that explains that social media pages and applications mean that the "lone wolf" theory no longer applies is this one.
That is, author, Rukmini Callimachi, an authority on terrorism (later reassigned by the NYT after a highly-publicized interview of hers with an alleged terrorist turned out to be fake) who was often the voice of reason on Twitter had a headline (or her editors' have a headline) "debunking" the notion of "lone wolves," although she doesn't quite say that in her piece.
Even so, she illustrates with much detail how terrorists use Telegram and Tails (Edward Snowdens' app of choice) and other programs to recruit, train and deploy operatives in terrorist groups, and evade detection and plot bombings. All awful stuff. And heaven forfend that it lead to any monitoring by governments of these apps or even banning of them if they refuse to cooperate with police.
What shines through for me is the call -- go and kill people with knives or drive cars into them if you can't assemble a bomb. This was the message I happened to first hear on an ISIS propaganda video in Russian featuring jihadists from the Russian North Caucasus. They explained that the message from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, their leader was to go and kill infidels with knives or axes if they were too poor or too unskilled to make a bomb. Indeed, this message has been disseminated everywhere in multiple languages and accounts for the rash of attacks around the world with just this MO: driving cars into crowds, stabbing multiple people at malls, sometimes with devastating effect.
To persist in calling these people "lone wolves" is folly when they are foot soldiers in a mass movement, a war on the West. It is a war. And it's not only okay to call it that; it's necessary in order to stop having illusions about it.
There are a lot of reasons why the liberal mind without the toe steel grasps at these memes and shies away from the realizing of patterns and the conclusion that because of the Internet, it is no longer possible to ascribe attacks to "lone wolves" in quite so large numbers.
Part of it is the binary thinking and literalism that afflicts so much Internet discourse, but it's also unwillingness to tell the facts which will lead to unpleasant conclusions that may involve suppressing civil liberties, at least in their fears.
The reality is, the president does have a lot of discretion under the law to block people from entering the US -- a privilege, not a right. There isn't even any global mandate, like the regional Helsinki Accords, affirming the "free flow of information and people". Many would like this liberal good to be a fact everywhere, but because of uncivil society it cannot be. The "free flow of information and people" as an international accord works best among parties that affirm all the civil rights and liberties that go with that.
When Trump says that "the press didn't cover" his list of terrorist attacks, the politically-correct and literalist will object to it because of their general contentiousness against Trump -- understood -- but then they set themselves up to perpetuate the cycle.
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