Opinion: The Missing Weapon in
the War on Terror
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(April 20) -- "Honest
to God, it was never my intention to help those idiots for what they do in the
name of Islam."
So said New York imam Ahmad Afzali at his sentencing hearing in a New York
federal court on Friday.
Afzali, a respected imam, was about to be sentenced for lying to FBI agents
during their investigation of a terror plot. He was not and is not thought to be
a terror sympathizer. Court filings paint the picture of a peace-loving
community leader. And Afzali's experience with encouraging congregants not to
buy into the message of radical Islam has also taught him the smart way to
discuss domestic terrorists. He just calls them idiots.
American politicians and prosecutors should learn this lesson.
Across the world on that same morning a Financial
Times column by Jamie Bartlett and Richard Reeves called for a new kind of
attack on the social misfits who consider strapping bombs to their chests --
ridicule. As any trial lawyer knows, a vicious attack lends its target a
certain substantiality. Nothing, though, makes one cringe like the thin dagger
of ridicule. (Ask anyone under 40 who grew up in the former Soviet Union, and
they will tell you that the Soviet system raised a generation of atheists not
by attacking Christianity, but by ridiculing it so much that schoolchildren associated
it with gullibility -- even stupidity. This stuff works.)
Unfortunately, the American justice system has a knack for turning these
domestic terrorists into international men of mystery.
Our national rhetoric, such as the adolescent assignment of playing card values
to "famous terrorists" back in 2001, has cultivated the view of
al-Qaida "operatives" not as clownish buffoons but as shadowy,
clandestine geniuses. The lionization of homegrown al-Qaida sympathizers like
the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who deserved pity as much
as anything, does little more than create heroes from fools.
As Bartlett and Reeves warn, this sort of elevating of al-Qaida wannabes
actually allures unhappy, young Muslim men and falsely casts Osama bin Laden as
the next Che Guevara. But we Americans know exactly the right word to describe
the sort of American (or resident alien) who would buy into al-Qaida's message
(or consider committing an act of violence because of the health care bill).
The word is not spy, operative or patriot. The word is loser.
Domestic terrorists are no more substantial than Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski
or a teenage school shooter, and the "al-Qaida" label shouldn't
automatically transform someone from a loser into a sublimely mysterious
"terrorist."
Most young people are unhappy and insecure at one time or another. Rebellion
and danger can be cool, even for adults. But foolishness is never cool.
Embarrassment is never cool.
And so for those in a position to advocate to disgruntled young people, be it
Muslims, tea partiers or otherwise, how about a message more like this: Those
who consider violence to make political points are not mysterious operatives.
They are not substantial enough to earn our fear or the platform of one of our fancy
show trials. Creepy is about the best they get.
Imam Afzali has it right. Terror wannabes are not Che Guevara or Samuel Adams.
They should be regarded as mere idiots.
Christopher Leibig is a partner at the criminal defense law firm of Zwerling, Leibig & Moseley in
Arlington, Va., and a published author who just finished his second book,
"Montanamo," a current affairs
thriller based on the true story of a small town in Montana that sought a
lucrative federal contract to house Guantanamo Bay prisoners in its languishing
prison.
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