Immunosuppressant

The New York terror attack on Halloween had its 15-minutes in the spotlight and then dropped from the news. After all, "lone wolf" attacks perpetrated by Muslim extremists are now "the new normal." And the new normal in NYC was perpetrated by an "extremist" who social/political commentator Peggy Noonan has characterized as "an idiot." Collectively, these Islamist "idiots" are dismissed as "insane" people who just happen to be Muslim, who have no direct tie to Islamist terror groups, and who could be controlled if only we banned the sales of guns. Of course, in the latest attack, we would have had to ban the rental of trucks, but never mind.

Angelo Codevilla notes that major terror attacks like 9/11 require a state sponsor (think: Iran as one example). The requirements for fake documents, massive funding, money transfer, logistics, communication, secrecy, and the like are simply too complex for non-state actors. There's no doubt that state sponsors avoid direct involvement. They use Islamist groups as their cat's paw, as the recent release of the bin Laden papers indicates. By bringing all of the clandestine tools available to mask their sponsorship in a maze of complexity, cut-outs, deniability, and confusion, a country like Iran can conduct war at arms' length. Codevilla writes:

The Muslim world’s states and terrorists have always lived symbiotically. Because mobilizing for full-scale war exposes these states’ congenital internal fragility, they have always fought through proxy groups. Hence, willful ignorance has been required for the American ruling class to maintain the fiction that terrorist groups are independent. That fiction has served our ruling class’s ideological predilections and has provided terrorists the sine qua non for their operations. That is why the Bin Laden papers’ discussion of al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran (about which more in another article) is such a valuable reminder of reality.

Where did these Islamist “idiots” come from? Islam did not produce them until, beginning in the 1950s and turbocharged since the 1978 Iranian Revolution, the Muslim world’s regimes began fostering denunciations of Westerners in general and, lately, of Americans as the embodiment of evil. As Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi sect founded mosques in the West, it helped radicalize the Muslims who were migrating there. The Euro-American ruling class, for its part, has facilitated the migration, provided the migrants with welfare, and have done its best to shield these Islamist “idiots” from Western society’s immunological rejection.

Hence, by acting as an immunosuppressant, our ruling class has enabled the terrorists to infect Western societies with a sense of helplessness that may prove more lethal than shocks such as 9/11.

The elites of the West keep telling us to be vigilant, to see something and say something, to avoid Islamophobia, to reject any ban on immigration from countries with large groups of Islamists, to accept terror as a criminal action rather than an act of war.

Maybe it's time to reject the immunosuppressant, to look deeper and try to understand the connection between state sponsors of terror and the small acts of war that they support with ever-increasing frequency.