RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.

“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling,” Miss Decter told the Boomers. “While you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices.”

Meager devices came to mind last week while reading the “Statement of Solidarity” from Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University. Solidarity with whom, or what? Well, Paris, but that was just for starters. Ms. Cantor also made a point of mentioning lives lost to terrorist attacks this year in Beirut and Kenya, and children “lost at sea seeking freedom,” and “lives lost that so mattered in Ferguson and Baltimore and on,” and “students facing racial harassment on campuses from Missouri to Ithaca and on.”

As we learn more about the Islamic State-backed terror attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, and about other threats like the one that caused Brussels to go on highest alert over the weekend, it has become increasingly clear: America and its allies have failed to gather and process the intelligence necessary to protect their citizens.

It is unsurprising that Americans are worried about the threat at home. Islamic State, or ISIS, has long sought to conduct attacks in the U.S. by recruiting Americans to its cause through various social media outlets, from Twitter to YouTube. In the past week alone, ISIS has claimed that it has operatives in the U.S. ready to take action, including specifically against New York City and Washington, D.C.

Some of this is undoubtedly classic terrorist rhetoric, but the Paris attacks show that ISIS has both the capacity and the desire to inflict mass casualties on Western countries. Al Qaeda is hardly out of the picture; its allies in Mali claimed responsibility for the bloody rampage Friday in Bamako at a Radisson hotel favored by Western visitors, leaving 27 dead.

It is entirely understandable that there is great consternation about the obvious national security issues created by admitting aliens who claim to be refugees from Syria into the United States. The vetting process of such aliens is fatally flawed because our officials do not have access to databases or other sources of reliable information to ascertain the true identities and backgrounds of these foreign nationals.

Consequently, a growing list of governors and other elected officials, from both parties, are calling for suspending the administration’s plans to re-settle Syrian refugees in the United States, until and unless the fatal flaws within the vetting process are remedied.

On November 19, 2015 the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, chaired by Congressman Trey Gowdy, conducted a hearing on the topic, “The Syrian Refugee Crisis and Its Impact on the Security of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”

The toll of Islamist carnage keeps growing: 130 killed and 352 injured in Paris; 229 mostly Russian airline passengers killed in the skies over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; 19 dead in Bamako, Mali, at the Radisson Blu, a hotel favored by Westerners. Germany has confirmed that plots to kill hundreds more were disrupted in the nick of time. France has extended its state of emergency for three months. Over the weekend, Brussels was virtually locked down as police hunted for suspects linked to the Paris attacks, who may be preparing another operation in Belgium, home of the European Union. Such assaults throughout the Middle East, Africa, and now Europe prompt an all-too-familiar question: Can militant Islamist terrorists strike the United States again?

Before French president François Hollande had even addressed his traumatized nation, President Obama was downplaying the terror threat. At a conference in Asia, he characterized what he called the “sickening” assault in Paris as a “setback.” His strategy for containing ISIS was working, he insisted. Echoing the theme, FBI director James B. Comey said that he knew of no “credible threat of a Paris type attack here.” In New York, NYPD commissioner William Bratton stressed that there was no reason to be afraid, dismissing a new ISIS video warning that New York was its next target as old footage and, hence, old news. Still, Bratton urged New Yorkers to be “vigilant” and embrace his department’s counterterrorism credo, “If you see something, say something.”

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is at all chagrined to find himself the target of public criticism from nearly every direction, he shows little sign of it.

He has alarmed free-speech advocates by his intention to sue companies for speaking out on climate issues. He has earned the wrath of his fellow state attorneys general for torpedoing agreements they’ve carefully crafted. He is alienating the young and tech savvy by harassing digital innovators like Uber and Airbnb. He is even trying to outlaw fantasy-football prizes, which I doubt will endear him to many Jets and Giants fans.

There is no better example of his excesses, poor judgment and headlong pursuit of a political agenda than the vendetta he is still pursuing against Hank Greenberg, the former chief of insurance giant AIG. The case, now more than 10 years old, hinges on the accusation—made by Eliot Spitzer, Mr. Schneiderman’s disgraceful predecessor—that Mr. Greenberg in 2000 fraudulently arranged for AIG to purchase an obscure financial instrument called “finite reinsurance.”

In the afternoon of Nov. 13, when news of the horrific Paris attacks began to reach the U.S. and the fear and chaos there began to sink in, many Americans asked one important question: Could a similar attack by jihadists linked to Islamic State occur in a major American city? The answer is yes.

To understand why, it is vital to deconstruct the Paris attack and the factors that enabled it and then see if they can be mapped onto an American urban environment. During my tenure as director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department, this is what we did after any major attack around the world to stay ahead of ever-evolving terrorist threats.

While more operational details of the Paris attack will be uncovered, four necessary ingredients have already emerged: First, European citizens willing to kill themselves and their countrymen. Second, material for the attack, including assault weapons and hydrogen peroxide for suicide bombs. Third, the technical and paramilitary skills to make improvised explosive devices and operate assault weapons. And fourth, a “permissive environment” in which the national and local security and intelligence agencies were not able to detect the plot in advance.

The president vowed to “destroy” ISIS: “a bunch of killers with good social media.”

President Obama stressed at a press conference today in Malaysia that “the United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.”

He also hit at critics — namely, the Politico headline “Obama’s Asian Distraction?” — who have suggested that his focus on the Asia pivot came at a bad time with new ISIS and al-Qaeda attacks.

“This region is not a distraction from the world’s central challenges, like terrorism. The Asia Pacific is absolutely critical to promoting security, prosperity and human dignity around the world,” he said. “That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my foreign policy to deepening America’s engagement with this region.”

Obama said the American victims over the past several days — Nohemi Gonzalez in Paris and Anita Datar in Mali — “remind me of my daughters, or my mother, who, on the one hand, had their whole life ahead of them, and on the other hand, had devoted their lives to helping other people.”

Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.

“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.”

“Diversity” The noun was rebranded in the 1980s, and does not mean what it by nature should — “a range” or “multiplicity.” No one furthers the goals of “diversity” by ensuring plenty of conservatives, liberals, radicals and reactionaries on campus, or welcoming lots of Christian fundamentalists as well as atheists and Muslims. The word instead is a euphemism for non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, and non-liberal. It is a relative and entirely political noun. The University of Missouri football team can both be 52% African-American and proof of diversity, even if African-Americans make up less than 12% of the population — in a way that all white and elderly Democratic primary candidates are honorifically diverse by virtue of their homogeneous left-wing politics.

Three other observations: First, racial and ethnic diversity, without assimilation and integration into one culture, and when identity becomes essential rather than incidental to a nation (i.e. a salad bowl society rather than the melting pot), leads to Armageddon, whether in Austria-Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq.

In an alleged hate crime, a Jewish passenger was attacked by a Muslim driver of a yellow New York taxi on Saturday night. The driver was held for questioning by police.
In an interview on Sunday with Israel National News, victim Moshe Indig told reporters about the attack. “I took a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn Saturday night at 8 PM. I asked the driver to make a phone call. He refused but then relented and put the call on the speaker. When he saw that I was speaking Hebrew, he said: ‘I hate the people and the language you are speaking. If I had known that you were a Jew, I would not have given you the call.’”