America’s Suicide Bombers

Photo by Peter Baker

So, it’s happened again. Some guy with a grudge of some kind has stormed a building full of students on a college campus and has let loose on a rampage before turning his own gun on himself. A couple months ago, it was a kid at the mall, followed up by that guy at the two Colorado Christian college campuses. Last year, it was that guy at Virginia Tech. Before that it was a high school thing. Before that, it was mostly restaurants and workplace front offices. Lone madmen, with enough firepower to get the job done, slipping effortlessly through whatever the hell it is that we’ve been putting together as protection against exactly this sort of thing, as if the deeply funded, ultra-sophisticated anti-terror industry has only been a holographic projection. Impressive to look at, but no more real than anything else we’ve been led to believe in since the attacks of 9/11.

If the massive Department of Homeland Security can’t prevent this sort of thing, then why are we supposed to believe that it can stop anything else?

Okay, so the next terrorist attacker might not be an Arab with a fake passport, and ties to training camps in Tora Bora, but when the bullets start flying, who gives a damn whether they’re coming from Al Qaeda, or if the lead is coming from a good old American hometown kid from just down the street? Maybe it makes a difference for some people, but if it does, then they need to take a good look at what drives their thinking, and why it is that they fear anything in life that scares them.

The truth is that all of these attacks were as random and as preventable as any terrorist attacks would ever be if there actually were terrorist attacks in our cities. They call these random madman attacks unpreventable, and they’re right about that. They are unpreventable. Terrorist attacks are unpreventable as well. Just as unpreventable.

Well, that’s not entirely true. In fact, terrorism is a fairly preventable occurrence, if a society is willing to do what it takes to prevent it.

Okay, quick question:

When was the last time that Switzerland, that Mecca of the Great Satan of Western Capitalism, was attacked by Islamic Extremist terrorists?

I’ll even let you use Google to find your answer.

Okay…you can stop searching. You won’t find any references to terrorist attacks on Swiss banks or tourists in Zurich, or anything of that nature on the Internet – or anywhere else. Now, if Switzerland is the home of global capitalism, and this whole Global Jihadist Movement is aimed at the hedonistic excesses of the Satanic West, and the whole hedonism thing centers around the worship of wealth, capitalism, and financial imperialism – as has been stated many times in the various Jihadist manifestos littering the Internet, then why has Zurich been spared the icy hand of the global movement to liberate God’s people from the evils of western domination – or something to that effect?

Anyone else seeing a problem with the storyline that we’ve been treated to for the last 7 years or so?

If Switzerland funds the Great Satan, then why aren’t the terrorists attacking the source of the funding? The reason is because they aren’t really after the Great Satan of Western decadence. They’re after the Great Satan of Exxon, and Mobil, and Sunoco, and all those other companies who have seized their oil wells, installed their own handpicked totalitarian regimes, and enslaved the general population into lives of despair and hopelessness. In fact, most people on earth would love to have a little of what the Jihadist propaganda calls “western decadence”, even if only on the side, and without the wife knowing about it. Seriously, so you really think these guys are anything other than guys? Take away their war against corporate imperialism, and they’re just guys.

Of course, it’s easier to get us to pay to have our army defend these huge companies against their own personal enemies if we can be led to believe that these guys are mindless zombies coughed up from the bowels of an Islamic hell, unleashed to suck our souls and turn us all into mindless zombies as well. Of course, it takes a hell of a shock to turn our minds off long enough to get us trapped in a generational war with these enemies of the big oil conglomerates, but luckily for these businesses, that shock came along at just the right time to serve their needs.

Okay, so the attacks of September 11, 2001 did occur, and there’s no denying that. They were horrifying, and terrifyingly spectacular, and that’s beyond controversy as well. They were also unlike any terror attack previous, and any terror attack since. The domestic lone-nut massacres in the public areas of our country, since then, are hard proof that the subsequent terror reprieve has not been due to our ability to thwart another spectacular attack like those of September 11th. Hell, the Virginia Tech rampager even stopped off between killings to make a video and mail the damn thing to NBC before going back in for the real body count. The truth is that a terrorist with a bomb, or a gun, has free reign in our society, regardless of what the Bush Administration talking points say otherwise.

So, what makes any of us think that our Dept. of Homeland Security provides any kind of protection against real terrorism in this homeland we have here? Is it because they tell us that they do? Maybe because of the hundreds of billions of dollars that we give them in hopes that they will be that protection? Maybe because we’ve dumped our entire national defense into a desert thousands of miles away from here, and have tuned them into traffic cops for the bullets and bombs of someone else’s civil war? As if the whole damn place will uproot and row across the Atlantic to the shores of Virginia Beach if we back off slowly and let them finish the whole disaster off for themselves.

Hey! America! Wake up! Some nut with a gun just killed 5 people at another university! Some nut who isn’t even a trained terrorist with training and financial backing from some guys in a cave in Pakistan!

Yeah, that’s right. Just some guy who weaned himself off his psych meds, started acting crazy – as noticed by the folks who knew him – was allowed to get his hands on two pistols and a shotgun, made it onto a campus with same, and into a lecture hall, and was even allowed backstage with his arsenal, before unloading on the audience.

So, you’re scared of babbling Islamic madmen with suitcase nukes, dirty bombs, impossibly elaborate liquid explosive concoctions on trans-Atlantic flights, crop dusting Anthrax bi-planes, and whatever else we seem to be paying these CIA payrolled Stephen King/Tom Clancy wannabes to dream up, because of…why?

My point is that if Mamound, and his band of freedom hating Jihadists, really wanted to kill you, they’d be killing you right now. They’d be bombing cafes. They’d be kidnapping your kids and shooting you on the street. If Khalid and his brothers-in-holy-alliance-against-the-infidels actually wanted you dead, you’d already be dead. This is the most open society on the planet, and none of that has changed since the attacks of Sept 11th. None of that is going to change either. At least, not on the street, where terrorism lives and breathes in every society where it exists.

The anti-terrorism “experts” sit in meetings, and plan for huge multi-stage attacks, while terrorism erupts on street corners, on buses, on trains, in market places, and everywhere other than where these geniuses are looking. The truth is that Sept 11th was a complete and utter anomaly in the world of global terrorism. In fact, it carries none of the true fingerprints of what we’ve come to know over the years as a typical terror attack. It was complex, vulnerable to breakdown from many points of implementation, and way too dependent on the activities of too many uninvolved individuals for it to even be seen as associated with what has been the earmarks of a genuine terror attack. And yet, this is the kind of threat that we’ve been focused on since 9/11, while simple bare bones terrorism has flourished across the globe.

Getting a gun, making a bomb, walking onto a bus, walking into a school auditorium – all of these activities are extremely easy to accomplish in our society. These are the kinds of activities that can easily send a population like ours into hysterics, if employed by a reasonably intelligent terror organization. And yet, we don’t see this kind of activity in our midst. Well, other than what the crazy folks are pulling off every now and then with impunity and relative ease.

So, what’s up with this War on Terror? That generational effort that will have us pouring hundreds of billions of treasury dollars into the bank accounts of multi-national corporations for the next 100 years.

What’re we actually getting for the money we’ve spent so far, and the money we’re set to spend for the rest of all of our lives?

If the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 2008 is any indication, all we’re doing is helping some stockholder send his kid to the next university to get hit by a good old fashion, made-in-America suicide bomber. Other than that, we’re just getting screwed.