According to the logic of his various travel bans, surely he must, to "keep America safe!"
An Uzbek rented a pickup truck and used it to careen down a bicycle path in Manhattan, mowing down bicyclists, 8 of whom died. After about a mile of mayhem, he crashed into a school bus, whereupon a cop shot him and he was taken to hospital, where he is under guard. This vicious asshole lived in Paterson, New Jersey, and decided he needed to kill some people in New York. He will go unnamed by me as he is not worthy of that recognition. There's a good chance some or all of his victims opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, or Israeli oppression of Palestinians, two of the Islamofascists' grievances.
In addition to the deaths, there were a dozen injuries. Five of the dead were Argentine visitors, one was German or Belgian, depending on the media report, and two were Americans. So the ISIS-manqué did a mediocre job of killing Americans. The attacker has a wife and two young children, whose well-being is apparently of little or no concern to him, since he has effectively abandoned them and they will be objects of opprobrium if not worse, and without a breadwinner for the family. He also must be indifference to the crap his Muslim neighbors will now endure.
The politicians and police have branded the attack terrorism, because he presumably had a "political" motive. (The use of a vehicle to commit homicide is one of ISIS' suggested ways to harm people in its exhortations to launch attacks, and was used previously in Germany, France, and Britain. A note in Arabic in the truck hailed ISIS, proclaiming obviously falsely that it would live "forever. Nothing in the universe does that. The killer was an Uber driver with 1,400 trips under his belt. Uber has swung into action and banned him from now on. Good idea.)
[1] Whatever fear is generated by this "terrorism" is being generated by the incessant media drum-beating on it, with the same scant details reiterated over and over, and politicians stirring the pot with exaggerated, doleful statements. One of the worst is the Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has been positively maudlin. To hear him tell it, every New Yorker has just courageously endured an unspeakable ordeal yet remains unbowed and unbroken. (I'm not exaggerating, that is how he's talking.) In terms of the scale of tragedy, this is the same as a bad traffic accident! (And the Uzbek sure had a fearsome arsenal: a paint gun, a pellet gun, and some knives. Terrifying! Luckily a "hero" cop shot the guy. A cop so "
humble," related the police commissioner, that he feels he was just doing his job! Amazing!)
As for what Trump should do, if he follows his own "logic," just banning all Uzbeks from entering the U.S. won't be "tough" enough. This man is a permanent legal resident and entered the U.S. in March of 2010. So to be truly "safe," the U.S. must DEPORT all Uzbeks.
However, a Muslim from
any country could become a "terrorist." Shouldn't
all Muslims be banned? After all, "we don't know who these people are!" as Our President has repeatedly pointed out.
But the U.S. loves religion, so it doesn't want to "discriminate" against Muslims. Nor are U.S. Federal judges showing an inclination to disregard U.S. anti-religious-discrimination law. So it needs to ban
all people from countries where there are Muslims. That would be most nations on earth.
But I'm sure Trump, being a reasonable and sensible man, will instead call for some weak half-measure. Actually he'll probably just use this to argue for the necessity of his latest ban, which is irrelevant to this incident (he's never banned people from Uzbekistan entering the U.S., and as I said, the bicycle-butcher has been here since 2010) just as most of the gun control proposals are irrelevant after each headline-grabbing mass shooting. (Most shootings involve "legitimate" gun purchasers using legally-obtained weapons, so more background checks or background checks on gun show purchases or banning whatever are irrelevant. Banning buttstocks that increase the rate of fire, and large capacity ammo magazines, would probably lower the number of casualties in mass shootings, but would not eliminate them. But the U.S. Congress won't even do that, and the two-thirds of U.S. states controlled by the GOP have been removing restrictions on carrying guns in public, even allowing them on college campuses.)
Trump took absolutely no action and called for no new laws or regulations whatsoever after the recent Las Vegas gun massacre that killed 58 people at a concert and wounds and injuries to about 500. So far, in the aftermath of the NYC attack on bicyclists, he's responded by ordering intensification of scrutiny of
foreign visitors under his "extreme vetting" regime. I suppose now it's "
super-extreme vetting," "vetting like you've never seen before, believe me."
Totally irrelevant to this case, as the perpetrator was a legal resident of the U.S. since 2010. He's also calling for an end to the particular visa program under which the Uzbek got his green card to live in t he U.S. In other words, punish thousands of completely innocent people. That's a good response, Trump.
As a measure of how irrelevant this is, ISIS hasn't even claimed responsibility for the attack! Apparently they find it disappointing. ISIS is quick to take credit for any mayhem it plausibly can, whether it was their operation or not.
The local media are reporting that the culprit is "bragging" and "unrepentant" and "unapologetic" from his hospital bed. They were expecting an apology?
One thing this shows, which no media notes because it conflicts with their desire for threat inflation (which is also a prime motivation of politicians and secret policemen) is this shows how WEAK ISIS is. ISIS DID NOT mount this attack. It did not infiltrate operatives into the U.S. It has no sleeper cells in the U.S. (I'm sure with ISIS being squeezed out of its territorial conquests, it would have activated them if it did.) It did not even
train this jackass. He's being described as a "lone wolf" attacker by people like New York State Governor Andrew "Son of Maximum Unction" Cuomo. What kind of powerful organization is
that? [On the afternoon of Nov. 1, a day after the attack, news broke that the FBI was interested in a second man in the attack. Also the attacker was identified in a previous terrorism investigation but wasn't the "subject" of that investigation. I wonder if they planted tiny cameras in his home, like they do to non-violent dissidents.]
As for the Attack Of The Uzbek, the FBI has seized charge of the New York investigation. The BBC announced that the FBI will be reaching out to other agencies, including abroad, to learn about this man's movements and contacts. BBC, the British government's global propaganda arm, said
for sure this would be a multi-agency investigation. They forgot to mention the most
important sources of data about people and their connections: the NSA and its junior partners in the "Five Eye" countries, which includes GCHQ in the UK. The FBI has free access to the NSA's stupendous database of the world's Internet, telephonic, wire, and other traffic, including records from license plate readers and surveillance cameras. Using facial recognition software, they can search for places the man has been in the past.
The FBI will search the government's database of airline travel (they know everywhere you've flown- they have that automatically, oh, and all your financial and medical records too) and arrest records in the U.S. and abroad. Cooperating foreign police and secret police agencies will cough up whatever is in their files on the man. (Unless it would reflect badly on them. Like if he was once an informer, or worse, for one of them.) By 11 AM the next day the New York City Police (NYPD) informed the press at a "news conference" that they knew the killer exited the George Washington Bridge at 2:43 PM when their license plate capture system recorded his vehicle, and a surveillance camera outside the Holland Tunnel recorded the beginning of the attack.
Does living in an omniscient police state stop "terrorism"? Does it make people safer? It certainly doesn't make victims of state political persecution safer. Already the BBC's Uzbek correspondent has reported that the secret police there are expected to use this opportunity to increase the already severe repression in that nation.
The "terrorists" give the secret police of every nation just what they want: an excuse to tighten their chokehold on the lives of the citizens. In Kenya, the regime of the "democratic" dictator Uhuru Kenyatta, who just got himself "reelected" "president" unopposed, runs death squads under the tutelage of the U.S., Britain, and Israel, that murder hundreds of people a year. This is known as "counter-terrorism." Watch the excellent Al-Jazeera documentary exposing this ongoing campaign of extreme criminality by four states, which has been totally blacked out by the establishment media of the culprit countries. Which means
those media are accomplices to state terrorism and murder and by rights should be held criminally culpable. [2] Al-Jazeera is run by the government of Qatar, which is currently under blockade by Saudi Arabia, its Persian Gulf lackeys, Egypt, with the U.S. piling on. The main demands of the Saudi -led assault on Qatar, publicly endorsed by Donald "Pussy-Grabber" Trump, are three: adopt the same hostile posture towards iran as these states have; stop "supporting terrorism"- no explanation of what they're referring to; and
shut down Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera isn't hated by only the Saudis. Al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. since 2001, for reporting things the U.S. doesn't want reported. The U.S. has responded with verbal attacks, branding it "terrorist propaganda," and with physical attacks, bombing Al-Jazeera offices at least four times, kidnapping its staff, one of whom was imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay torture center for years, where the U.S. tried to force him to agree to be a U.S. spy inside Al-Jazeera, and launching cyberattacks on it. Tony Blair, the loathsome, self-righteous, oleaginous former British prime minister who conspired with Bush the Younger in the invasion of Iraq, had to talk Bush out of bombing Al-Jazeera's main headquaters inside Qatar! Where the U.S. has military bases! Talk about being drunk on power. I guess Bush found a substitute for alcohol and cocaine.
So no surprise that the Saudis are demanding Al-Jazeera be killed. It reports real news from all over the Arab and Muslim worlds, much of which the totalitarian, hyper-repressive Saudi regime finds threatening. (Just about anything human is threatening to them.)
Oh, by the way, Kenya is "an ally in the fight against terrorism." That is to say, it invaded Somalia to help out the U.S., which prompted Al-Shabab, the Somali Islamofascist organization, to counterattack inside Kenya, against "soft targets" like the shopping mall and university attacks. Notice the pathological symbiosis between Islamofascist fanatics and state terrorists. Each creates the conditions for the perpetuation of the other. Repression breeds resistance, which leads people with no other options except surrender and acceptance of random state murders and other forms of oppression, or joining up with the only armed opposition available to them, the Islamofascists. The continued existence of armed terrorist groups gives the regimes excuses to increase political repression and murder pesky dissidents and political opponents, along with "potential" or "likely" or "identified" "terrorists." That latter category, in the case of Kenya, is supplied by U.S. and UK "intelligence," and those named are duly "eliminated" by one of several Kenyan government death squads.
As Dick Cheney said, "we have to go to the dark side," or in the words of CIA goons like Cofer Black, they've "taken the gloves off." Which is to say, governments are flat-out murdering people they don't like. In Kenya, this has happened in cases after the government has taken people to court, where they were acquitted. On such thin "evidence" the government then proceeds to murder the victims, because in their minds, suspicion is certainty. Not suspicion of actual crimes either, but of
possible future crimes.Now, there's nothing to stop the Kenyan government from setting up internment camps for people with "radical views." Those are the so-called "terrorists" that Western "intelligence agencies" and the Kenyan regime have "identified."
Between the totalitarian Islamofascist rebels on the one hand, and the repressive "democracies" and make-believe democracies like Kenya trying to crush them (and eliminate dissent in the process) on the other, a normal human being must say:
a pox on both their houses.1] A fellow Uzbek described the 29-year-old killer to the BBC as a malcontented loner. Apparently ISIS propaganda provided him with an explanation for his unhappiness, and ideas for discharging his rage on random strangers. The attack occured around 3 PM on Tuesday October 31. If this pathetic, malevolent jerk had waited a few hours, he could have attacked the annual Halloween parade just north of where he attacked. It's claimed a million people were there. He could have disrupted fun for a million people. Or in a few days this Sunday there's the annual New York Marathon, a major event that such an attack could potentially wreck. Yet the city mayor, Clinton machine politician Bill deBlasio, has been carrying on as if it's 9/11 all over again. (De Blasio insisted on hogging the mic at a "news conference" the next morning with the Governor, the city police and fire commissioners, the boss of the New York City FBI field office, and other government poohbahs.) So in terms of disrupting life in the city, this nasty fool was inept. Most of the disruption has come from the reaction of "the authorities."
The BBC calls the Uzbek truck attack "the main news" today, thus continuing the Western media's bad practice of inflating the significance of violent acts by people who self-align with ISIS, encouraging more attacks, and adding to ISIS' stature. Not only is it disproportional to the significance of these events, it makes the "terrorism problem" WORSE. And of course the U.S. media is waving the attack like a bloody flag. The "coverage" of what this one unhappy asshole did is nonstop, repetitive, and way overdone.
Here's some perspective: every year, about 250 pedestrians are killed in New York City by motor vehicles, plus about 50 bicyclists. So this is 8 more. It makes no difference to the victims whether it was accidental or deliberate or what the motive of the driver might have been. Dead is dead. Tens of thousands of people a year die in traffic in the U.S. The same goes for "terrorist" knife attacks. Many thousands of people a year get stabbed. Why is an "ordinary" knife attack yawn-inducing, but a "terrorist" one an occasion for near-hysteria? No good reason. The
bad reasons are political: To induce the population to submit to police state measures and acquiesce in endless wars abroad. Those wars, by the way, are the motivation for the "homeland" attacks using trucks and knives and occasionally guns. That doesn't necessarily mean ending the military role against Islamofascism is the correct course of action. It means that it is disingenuous and dishonest to pretend the attacks are acts of inexplicable madness. (The Uzbek has already been labeled a "madman" by NYC radio station WCBS. His motives are comprehensible.
To understand is not to condone.)
2] "
Al Jazeera Investigates - Inside Kenya's Death Squads," on YouTube.com.
