Unqualified Offerings

Jesse Walker writes about the impact that “leaderless resistance” isn’t having against the West:

This is a fine thing to fear if there are a lot of willing assassins out there, and I could see it stoking anxieties in Amsterdam or Jerusalem—but in America? A few sporadic crimes, none of them inspiring a wave of copycats; a campaign whose body count over several years could be dwarfed by just one night of gang warfare; a would-be soldier who’s willing to slay one man then turn himself in—this isn’t a sequel to 9/11, it’s a short-lived spinoff that never made it past the pilot. These attacks are so rare, they if anything highlight how unwilling American Muslims are to kill for Allah. If this country were swimming with volunteer fifth-columnists, we would have seen a lot more mayhem by now.

There’s an important lesson here regarding the Bedwetter Right’s mania for “profiling” and its insistence that Western governments and media organs shout “Muslims Muslims Muslims!” every time alleged jihadis get arrested.

Leaving aside quaint notions like individual rights for a minute, there are three sub-populations of “Muslims Muslims Muslims!” that matter in the prevention and mitigation of anti-western terror attacks:

1) Muslims sufficiently motivated to kill non-Muslims for reasons of politics or simple bigotry;

2) All the other Muslims living in the West;

3) Muslims sufficiently motivated to inform on the first group when they come into contact with its members.

In the United States and Canada since the atrocities of September 11, 2001, we’ve learned that the first group is very, very small, the second group constitutes nearly all Muslims, and the third group is sufficiently large to prevent the first group from achieving much.

Any effective antiterror policy needs to concern itself first and foremost with maintaining those ratios. When Antwaan Random-El starts to think that Abu Mujahid down at the mosque is planning something violent, you want his reaction to be the third item on a list of

“You go, Abu!”

“Not my problem.”

“This is weirding me out, man. Hello, is this McGruff the Crime Dog?”

That’s a political issue. Profiling will tend to skew the ratios in precisely the wrong direction. Treat the general population of Muslims marginally more like terrorists and the marginal Muslim will come to identify marginally more with terrorists than with his non-Muslim fellows. You push a few more people into Group One, the motivated-to-kill. But the bigger danger is that you push people out of Group Three, the motivated-to-inform. Remember all that “pack, not a herd” stuff? It’s stupid to drive people out of the pack – especially the people best positioned to be the pack’s eyes and ears.

The motivated-to-kill are going to be cagey about their plans. They’ll let few people in on them ahead of time. The co-religionists most likely to get an idea of what they’re up to are going to be the ones the would-be killers least distrust. We need the killers to be wrong in their estimation of these folks. So don’t borrow trouble.