Once again, forgetful

You made me look at Clueless, you bad man.

While we’re on the list of regions with serious terrorism problems, let’s talk about South America. When I got engaged, a coworker of mine from Colombia congratulated me and casually mentioned that she’d been engaged but that her fiance had been killed by terrorists. I’ve been aware of terrorism in Colombia for years, but the way she mentioned the event, sort of in passing, as if it weren’t that abnormal, chilled me.

Not that terrorism in South America is new. When I was a baby, my father was in a meeting in Buenos Aires (IIRC) that was taken hostage by terrorists. He was released in a day or so–he wasn’t the target and I’m sure in my own mind that his employers paid for his release–but it’s a story I always think of when I hear that only Muslims are terrorists.

SDB reminds me of a number of ubergeeks and ubergeek wannabes I know. That’s probably why I don’t care much for his writing. 😉

Terrorism in South America gets the kind of press coverage that’s more damaging to American awareness of it than not. No coverage at all of the daily violence, and then occasional saturation coverage of something that touches American lives, like the incident where the Baptist missionaries were shot down by the terrorism interdiction flight. The saturation coverage leaves Americans, who are unaware of the daily violence, thinking “what’s wrong with those people?” before moving on to the next sound bite.

You may be right that SDB was amiss not to mention any of the terrorist organizations you cited in making his point about Arab-Muslim extremism. However, looking over the terrorist groups you listed – and at the risk of appearing trollsome (forgive me, Ginger) – I wonder to what extent you’d support direct American involvement in fighting any of them (since you brought the American attitude into it).

Let’s look at your list:

Shining Path; a Maoist group
Aum Shinrikyo; a leftist Japanese anti-Semitic doomsday cult
FARC; the military wing of the Columbian Communist Party
Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA); a leftist separatist group in Spain
Kurdistan Worker’s Party; a leftist separatist group in Turkey
Tamil Tigers; a leftist separatist group in Sri Lanka
17 November; a Marxist-Leninist group in Greece

(There almost seems to be a theme here. Not Muslim, but. . .)

You wrote: Every time someone condemns another country for not being committed to the war on terror, they ought to consider the American attitudes towards terror before and after 9/11.

Maybe I’m missing it, but I don’t see America’s hypocrisy towards its own terrorists like ELF or the odd Timothy McVeigh (militia groups are weird but hardly comparable to Hamas or any similar threats). If all you meant to say is that America didn’t care enough about the terrorism Israel, Columbia, and many others were experiencing BEFORE 9/11, well, then I agree. We were living in a dream world.

However, it’s only fair to also point out that other countries rarely concern themselves with our troubles unless it begins to effects them (and then LOOK OUT!). Being self-centered is hardly an American trait.

So when American missionaries are shot down (due to our own misguided involvement down there) that should be big news.

In SDB’s defense, it seems to me that most of his detractors (and most of his fans) misinterpret his authorial voice. The `utterly certain sounding’ tone he takes is anything but:

Actually, what I’ve been doing is participating in a mass brainstorming session. I’ve been trying to contribute ideas and concepts to the political marketplace of ideas, in hopes that others will read them and point out the problems, perhaps make their own proposals, and continue to think. The consequences of writing something which is proven wrong are negligible, but the potential benefit which may come from posting it could conceivably be quite great, and by the nature of brainstorming you can never know when you begin what you’ll end up with, except that you’ll recognize it.

(From http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/ItsOKtobewrong.shtml)

He makes it fairly clear in this entry and several others that he expects to be challenged, and indeed wants to be. He doesn’t transmit a lot of signals along the lines of `well, I could be wrong here, but what if…’, and I think that that puts a lot of people off. My impression, based on the essay above, is that he simply takes such disclaimers for granted.

So the lesson we learn from terrorism abroad is that terrorists in the Middle East are right-wing theocrats, and terrorists in other parts of the world are left-wing. Sort of like ELF terrorists being on the left in the US and Timothy McVeigh being on the right. Or … there’s a broad spectrum of ideologies that drive terrorism. Fascinating discovery.

I dunno, I guess I feel like the fact that American news coverage plays to Short Attention Span Theater is a bad thing. Maybe if anybody were paying attention to what the War On Drugs was actually doing to our foreign policy, we’d reconsider our course of action in South America.

Nah, that’d just be giving into the liberals. Can’t have that.

As for SDB’s masterful prose stylings, my inner editor always wants to cut his posts to 1/4 to 1/3 the size when I don’t think they should be outright deleted. SSDB is a meme that resonates with me in a snarkily funny way.

And I don’t see how his thinking has evolved, since regardless of his professions of open-mindedness, he’s saying essentially the same things on this topic now he said when I quit reading him regularly more than a year ago. The nicest thing one can say is that he doesn’t seem to have gone further down the road paved with good intentions like other sites with a strong Middle-Eastern focus have done.

i think the world is ending