Whatever the truth about the government’s latest claims that we may be under imminent threat of an attack by Islamic terrorists, the state-sponsored alarm rings false.
If, in fact, there is a serious, credible and specific threat, there’s no excuse not to stop it. That’s the government’s highest proper function (which it hasn’t performed in decades). If the supposed threat is unspecified – the State Department, which failed to anticipate, define and respond to the 9/11 attack on our consulate in Libya last year, declines to discuss details of the alleged threat – yet somehow may be reasonably believed to constitute a serious threat, there’s more evidence (besides Benghazi and Boston) that the Obama administration’s unchecked, mass monitoring of U.S. communications does not protect us from harm. The government’s mass scare campaign, which purports to warn but in fact does nothing but advertise what we do not know, merely serves the aims of our enemies.
How does sounding unspecified alarms and uprooting our entire embassy network, closing down embassies for days on end, notifying state and local police – but not the public – of purported details of some sort of vague, unspecified Islamic terrorist threat to the “homeland” protect Americans at home and abroad? Either the details are too vague to spread or they’re too specific not to spread and in either case they telegraph to the enemy, whom we refuse to name, confront and defeat, that we are more willing to destroy our freedom than we are to destroy our enemy. I suspect that is exactly the point of the government’s exercise: to further weaken our resolve to clearly identify the jihadist enemy and kill them before they kill us and to lull Americans into a false sense of security (via the TSA, the Homeland Security bureaucracy, the NSA, etc.) and insidiously drift the American people into silently accepting and dutifully obeying dubious commands in a state of fear, pain and confusion. Just like the government did in Boston, putting the city on lockdown, refusing to name the enemy – Moslems at war with the West – costing American lives, accomplishing nothing (one jihadist bomber was allowed to be killed by his comrade while another was discovered by an American released from curfew) and resulting in asinine, Big Brother boosterism such as “Boston Strong” which is the opposite of the truth (Boston has never been more weak; read my critique here).
I can’t predict whether there will be another major Islamic terrorist attack let alone where, when and under which dictatorship’s orders. But I can say with certainty that the United States of America has done nothing serious to stop it, everything serious to encourage it and that the actions of our government, which may already (or might as well) be infiltrated by jihadists, merit the highest levels of doubt, derision and alarm. The fact of the timing alone – coming as millions of Americans grow dubious of government spying on us – ought to make every American suspicious of the state.