WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ROGER FRANKLIN: TERRORISM IN LONDON

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

Overnight in London, another terror attack — this one, mercifully, foiled by an amateur bomb-builder’s incompetence, as his homemade device burned rather than exploded. Still, it was a close call, with many of those who fled the crowded commuter train at Parsons Green station seared by the gout of fire. The luckier ones, those merely shaken by whatever fulminating formula the still-unidentified terrorist packed into a builder’s plastic bucket, will now be able savour press accounts of their miraculous escapes without the inconvenience of silvadene ointment on scorched fingers and cheeks.

And that won’t be all they read, as the media and the politicians it quotes crank up the familiar and inevitable machinery of rationalisation, minimalisation and, ultimately, dismissal. Pretty soon the world will be treated to the insights of those who specialise in excusing the intolerable. Try not to look at your refrigerator in too harsh a light over the days to come. Despite what you will hear, your kitchen Kelvinator isn’t really a killer.

Click the image above to enlarge it and enjoy the prophecy. It is English blogger Edgar1981’s appraisal of the narrative even now unfolding. While Edgar’s timeline may well bring a smile, it is rather too close to the truth for comfort.

Ah, but comfort as once known is gone and been banished. If you deem that to be a rather too-sweeping statement, review your reaction should you happen to be standing in line outside a sports stadium this weekend, waiting to be wanded and bag-searched, before the bounce or kickoff that will begin more rounds of the AFL and NRL finals. Yes, those who escaped the Parsons Green attack were lucky, but only in isolation. None of us is lucky to be living now with fear and consequent inconvenience while those who promote and perpetrate murderous outrage have their excuses made for them.

Follow the link below to Edgar1981’s post, which includes a grimly humourous take on how the Blitz might today be reported by those with a talent for appeasement. It will strike a definite chord if you happen to represent a body of opinion that today would be condemned as the vile bigotry of Hitlerophobes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Rule of Law A response to Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

Two former top Obama-appointed prosecutors co-author a diatribe against Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions for returning the Justice Department to purportedly outdated, too “tough on crime” charging practices. Yawn. After eight years of Justice Department stewardship by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and after Obama’s record 1,715 commutations that systematically undermined federal sentencing laws, we know the skewed storyline.

The surprise is to find such an argument in the pages of National Review Online. But there it was on Tuesday: “On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Failed Policies of the Past,” by Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart, formerly the United States attorneys for, respectively, the Northern District of Alabama and the Southern District of Ohio. Ms. Vance is now lecturing on criminal-justice reform at the University of Alabama School of Law and doing legal commentary at MSNBC. Mr. Stewart has moved on to the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, fresh from what it describes as his “leadership role at DOJ in addressing inequities in the criminal justice system,” focusing on “alternatives to incarceration,” and “reducing racial disparities in the federal system.”

The authors lament that Sessions has reinstituted guidelines requiring prosecutors “to charge the most serious offenses and ask for the lengthiest prison sentences.” This, the authors insist, is a “one-size-fits-all policy” that “doesn’t work.” It marks a return to the supposedly “ineffective and damaging criminal-justice policies that were imposed in 2003,” upsetting the “bipartisan consensus” for “criminal-justice reform” that has supposedly seized “today’s America.”

This is so wrongheaded, it’s tough to decide where to begin.

In reality, what Sessions has done is return the Justice Department to the traditional guidance articulated nearly four decades ago by President Carter’s highly regarded attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti (and memorialized in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual). It instructs prosecutors to charge the most serious, readily provable offense under the circumstances. Doesn’t work? This directive, in effect with little variation until the Obama years, is one of several factors that contributed to historic decreases in crime. When bad guys are prosecuted and incarcerated, they are not preying on our communities.

The thrust of the policy Sessions has revived is respect for the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principle. It requires faithful execution of laws enacted by Congress.

A concrete example makes the point. Congress has prescribed a minimum ten-year sentence for the offense of distributing at least five kilograms of cocaine (see section 841(b)(1)(A)(ii) of the federal narcotics laws). Let’s say a prosecutor is presented with solid evidence that a defendant sold seven kilograms of cocaine. The crime is readily provable. Nevertheless, the prosecutor follows the Obama deviation from traditional Justice Department policy, charging a much less serious offense: a distribution that does not specify an amount of cocaine — as if we were talking about a one-vial street sale. The purpose of this sleight of hand is to evade the controlling statute’s ten-year sentence, inviting the judge to impose little or no jail time.

That is not prosecutorial discretion. It is the prosecutor substituting his own judgment for Congress’s regarding the gravity of the offense. In effect, the prosecutor is decreeing law, not enforcing what is on the books — notwithstanding the wont of prosecutors to admonish that courts must honor Congress’s laws as written.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate change temperature data problems By Dale Leuck

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

Reasons exist to have serious investigations of the whole of climate change (aka global warming) science.

Global warming inevitably rests on current temperatures setting records in geologic time, or at least since early human civilization. And this is where the 1998 Nature article by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcom Hughes depicting what has become known as the iconic “hockey stick” graph becomes critical. The “hockey stick” showed modern temperatures far hotter than in the year 1400.

The hockey stick graph was adopted into the third assessment report (2001) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and contradicted a chart that had appeared only eleven years before in an earlier IPCC assessment report. The hockey stick eliminated what had traditionally been considered the hottest era, the Medieval Warm Period.

As reasonably accurate thermometers were not developed until well into the 19th century, one would wonder how earlier temperatures were measured. The answer is the use of proxy data – namely, ice cores, tree rings, bee pollen, ocean and lake sediment. But a reasonable person would have to wonder by what standards these items are interpreted.

This leaves only modern thermometer data sets, the primary one being that of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP), “an estimate of global surface temperature change … using current data files from NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].” The entire 137-year monthly data set, from 1880 through June 2017, in degrees Celsius anomalies (deviations from the corresponding 1951-1980 means), updated monthly, is available in spreadsheet and text forms.

But the land and seas surface data from which the above is derived suffers serious flaws as far as indicating “global” warming. First of all, it is not, as implied, indicative of global surface temperatures. The NOAA website contains in the upper-left-hand corner a small and easily overlooked but important map denoting the location of land-based temperature measurement stations around the world and years of coverage, reproduced below. Not surprisingly, data for more than about 110 years exist only for the United States; Japan; southeastern Australia; and some areas in Europe, Asia, and India. Nearly all of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Asia contain only a few decades of weather data, from widely dispersed stations.

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Getting It Wrong on Russia and RT By Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

The company that manages the Russian news outlet R.T. (Russia Today) announced this week that it had received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice requiring it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The Russian news outlet Sputnik International may be next.

FARA was passed in 1938 to require entities or individuals who represent foreign governments to disclose their relationships, activities, and finances. Registration would not stop R.T. from broadcasting in the U.S. or censor its programs – it is a paperwork requirement – but it would formally label R.T. an arm of the Russian government rather than an independent media source. This, in essence, would tell Americans that news from R.T. should be considered suspect.

As a practical matter, all news – particularly from government-sponsored sources – should be considered skeptically. That includes the British-owned BBC and U.S. government-funded PBS. Trevor Burus wrote of PBS earlier this year in the Daily Beast:

A 1969 memo outlined the administration’s goals: creating a new “public” media network to compete with more independent sources such as NET. That network could be controlled because the White House would ‘have a hand in picking the head of such a major new organization if it were funded by the Corporation [CPB].’ That major new organization became PBS.

Many other foreign news services are strongly government-influenced even if the government does not hold an ownership share. Does Le Monde reflect the views of the French government? Does The London Times have a British viewpoint? Russia and China have a number of news agencies that have operated for years under the guidance of their respective Communist parties; The People’s Daily, Pravda, and Izvestia were never told to register.

But, you say, there was a report in January from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that singled out R.T. as “a state-run propaganda machine,” part of Russia’s attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

This is the heart of the issue – the American government is still trying to blame Russia for the outcome of our election. The Russians were not found to have altered voting machines, cast illegal ballots, or destroyed legitimate ballots, so the DNI was reduced to saying the American public was duped by R.T. programming. Pretty good for an outlet almost no one is watching. R.T. didn’t even make the ratings in a 2015 Nielsen survey of the top 94 cable channels in America. According to the Economist, among its top 15 YouTube hits presently are earthquakes, grisly accidents, and Vladimir Putin singing “Blueberry Hill.”

There are important principles at stake here for the American audience, for bilateral relations, and for journalism.

1. Registration is a two-way street. The U.S. is likely to find its media outlets in Russia ostracized and excluded, maybe even barred entirely. Since the Russian government has a heavier hand with journalists than our own government does, it is not in our interest to let this happen.

2. There are countries presently systematically destroying their own free press. Turkey, a NATO member, comes to mind. If journalists operate under duress and threat of imprisonment at home – as do the Turkish media – why should they be considered independent operators in the U.S.? The Justice Department would have a credible case for warning Americans about Turkish media as propaganda by journalists intimidated by their own government.

POLITICS Comments turned off

A Former Democrat Rises in Trump Country Missouri’s governor talks about his journey to the right, his fights with the unions, and his experience as a Navy SEAL. By Matthew Hennessey

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

A few years ago, Eric Greitens was a Democrat—not that you’d know it from his first eight months as the hard-charging Republican governor of Missouri. A Rhodes scholar and former Navy SEAL, Mr. Greitens has pursued an unexpectedly muscular conservative agenda, enacting free-market reforms and gleefully going toe-to-toe with unions. While the GOP in Washington seems bent on squandering its legislative and executive power, Mr. Greitens, 43, illustrates how Republicans in many states are intent on making the most of theirs.

A day after taking office in January, Mr. Greitens signed an executive order to freeze pending state regulations. It also required agencies to review rules already on the books to ensure not only that they are “essential to the health, safety, or welfare of Missouri residents” but that they pass a cost-benefit test. In July he assented to a law overriding St. Louis’s $10-an-hour minimum wage. “This increase in the minimum wage might read pretty on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice,” he said at the time. “Government imposes an arbitrary wage, and small businesses either have to cut people’s hours or let them go.”

Mr. Greitens’s most contentious actions have challenged union power. His Democratic predecessor, Gov. Jay Nixon, repeatedly vetoed right-to-work legislation, under which workers can’t be forced to join a union as a condition of employment. Mr. Greitens signed a right-to-work bill within a month of his inauguration.

During a 75-minute interview at the governor’s mansion, Mr. Greitens explains that his inspiration came from another Midwestern state. “I read Mitch Daniels’s book, ‘Keeping the Republic,’ several times” before running for office, he says. The former Indiana governor’s 2011 paean to fiscal discipline and personal responsibility provided an example, as did the right-to-work law Mr. Daniels signed in 2012. “Look at the data,” Mr. Greitens says. “Indiana became a right-to-work state, and today Indiana has more private-sector union members than before . . . because it was good for the economy.”

Not surprisingly, the unions don’t share that view. They formed a group called We Are Missouri, which last month turned in more than 300,000 signatures—only about 100,000 were required—to force a referendum on right to work. If Missouri’s secretary of state certifies the names, right to work will go before voters in 2018—and the law will remain on hold until then. The tactic has succeeded before: In 2011 a referendum campaign styled We Are Ohio defeated Gov. John Kasich’s collective-bargaining reforms for public employees.

Mr. Greitens launched another salvo at the unions in May. He signed a law banning so-called project labor agreements, which require that all workers hired under a given government contract be paid union wages. In a move calculated for confrontation, Mr. Greitens invited Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker —whose 2011 collective-bargaining reforms stuck, unlike Mr. Kasich’s—to attend a bill-signing ceremony in a St. Louis suburb. The unions and their Democratic allies got the message. “Eric Greitens is rubbing salt in the wounds of working families by celebrating another attack on their paychecks,” said Missouri’s Democratic chairman, Stephen Webber.Mr. Greitens is unruffled by the criticism. “I think that you’ve got to take action that actually helps people,” he says. “We know that we’re always going to get criticized and we recognize that there are certain liberal media institutions in the state of Missouri that will always see whatever we do in the worst possible light.” But the economic data, he insists, tell a different story: “Since I’ve been in office, Missouri has been outpacing the nation in job growth. Missouri has moved up nine places in the ranking of best states to do business. We’ve got more jobs in Missouri than ever before.” CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s repudiation of the Chelsea Manning fellowship offer is a rebuke to the campus mindset Thomas Lifson

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

A fascinating drama played out yesterday at Harvard, as campus-based politically correct thinking slammed into reality, and the grown-ups had to set the boundaries back to common sense. All very publicly.

The invitation by the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics to Chelsea Manning to become a visiting fellow has been withdrawn in the wake of a firestorm. What mattered to Harvard more than blogger backlash was the resignation of Mike Morrell from a fellowship at the University’s Belfer Center and CIA Director Mile Pompeo’s cancellation of a planned talk and visit. Morrell’s Statement (embedded below in a tweet) below set off alarm bells that Harvard as a whole was placing its relationship to the Intelligence and Military sectors of the federal government in peril. He states that cannot be part of an institution that honors a felon and leaker of classified information. He reminds Harvard that senior military leaders have stated that Manning’s leaks put the lives of our soldiers at risk.

But here is what got the attention of the real powers at Harvard:

Please know that I am fully aware that Belfer and the IOP are separate institutions within the Kennedy School. And that most likely Belfer had nothing to do with the invitation of Ms. Manning to be a fellow at IOP. But as an institution, The Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, and attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well. I have an obligation to my conscience – and I believe to the country – to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.

It is critical that Morrell specifies that he doesn’t blame the Belfer Center. This is what tells other parts of Harvard that they could share in the taint, and possibly lose valuable associations with members of the defense and intelligence communities, past, present, and maybe future. Manning’s continuing presence on campus could well become a circus, pressuring others to reckon with the principle that Manning’s honor of becoming part of the Harvard community encourages others to leak national security information.

Morrell cc’s to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the head of the Belfer Center, who also must ponder honoring a person who endangered the lives of soldiers.

Morrell does not mention other schools than the Kennedy School, but he is generalizing responsibility from the specific unit of the IOP to the School as a whole. One more step like that, and Harvard as a whole comes under threat. If Manning becomes an ongoing circus, that could happen.

The real powers at Harvard are The Harvard Corporation and The Board of Overseers. They hire and fire presidents, and they control the money. They think in terms of institutional relationships and the long-term health and status of the oldest and wealthiest university in the country, of which they are the custodians. Anything that threatens that must go.

That must be what explains this late-night statement from Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf. To my eyes, the good dean seems a bit worried about his job, as he engages in self-criticism after weaseling around that “fellow” is a pretty generic term that mistakenly he thought did not imply honor. (Which obscures the fact that the visiting fellow program to which Manning was invited is a pretty big deal, and places very specific teaching obligations on the fellows.)

But I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations. In particular, I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire. This balance is not always easy to determine, and reasonable people can disagree about where to strike the balance for specific people. Any determination should start with the presumption that more speech is better than less. In retrospect, though, I think my assessment of that balance for Chelsea Manning was wrong. Therefore, we are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow—and the perceived honor that it implies to some people—while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum. I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation. This decision now is not intended as a compromise between competing interest groups but as the correct way for the Kennedy School to emphasize its longstanding approach to visiting speakers while recognizing that the title of Visiting Fellow implies a certain recognition.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

What’s the Point of a Liberal Education? Don’t Ask the Ivy League Few top colleges explain their purpose to students. They want to talk gender and inequality instead. By Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

American colleges and universities should be bastions of self-knowledge and self-criticism, simply because they exist to teach people how to think. But in recent years America’s campuses seem to have abandoned this tradition. Worse, the meager course offerings on the topic of liberal education tend to reinforce misunderstandings about its character and content.

I reviewed the course listings at five top private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale; six high-ranking public research universities: UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia; and five distinguished liberal arts colleges: Amherst, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams.

Few of the liberal arts and sciences faculty at these schools offer courses that explore the origins, structure, substance and aims of the education that they supposedly deliver. Instead they provide a smattering of classes on hot-button topics in higher education such as multiculturalism, inequality, gender and immigration. This is no trivial oversight, as the quality of American freedom depends on the quality of Americans’ education about freedom.

A tiny number of elective classes on the curriculum’s periphery—taught for the most part by part-time professors—approach the heart of the matter. Harvard presents a few freshman seminars on the history of the university and issues in higher education. One called “What Is College and What Is It For?” addresses “what constitutes a liberal arts education.” Michigan offers a first-year seminar that considers a university education’s purpose. In Stanford’s freshman program “Thinking Matters,” students examine the relation between the university’s pursuit of knowledge and its pursuit of justice.

Not one political science department at the 16 top schools I reviewed offers a course on liberal education. Isolated offerings concerning the topic are taught in Williams’s philosophy and English departments, as well as in Education Studies at Yale and American Studies at Stanford. Meantime, Princeton, Wellesley and the Universities of North Carolina and Virginia teach their own history.

Overall, the pickings for courses on liberal education are slim. And they tend to reinforce the politicization that afflicts higher education by focusing on the extent to which education advances social justice.

Don’t expect to find much guidance on liberal education in the mission statements of leading American colleges and universities. They contain inflated language about diversity, inclusion and building a better world through social transformation. Missing are instructive pronouncements about what constitutes an educated person or on the virtues of mind and character that underlie reasoned inquiry, the advance of understanding, and the pursuit of truth. Instruction on the ideas, norms and procedures that constitute communities of free men and women devoted to research and study are also scarce to nonexistent.

Hope should not be pinned on colleges and universities to reform themselves. Perhaps a university president or provost who prioritizes recovering liberal education will emerge, but progressive ideology remains deeply entrenched in administrations and faculty. Tenured professors want to reproduce their sensibilities in their successors, and huge endowments insulate the best universities from market forces that could align their programs with the promise of liberal education.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Price of Free Speech at Berkeley Security for Ben Shapiro’s speech cost more than $600,000.

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

The University of California at Berkeley’s new chancellor, Carol Christ, has done a democratic service by defending free speech on campus. But who would have thought that protecting speech would be so expensive in the place where the Free Speech Movement began in the 1960s?

The former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro spoke unimpeded Thursday night on campus, but the university had to spend $600,000 to provide adequate security. The university relied on officers from all 10 campuses in the University of California system. Before the speech, Berkeley’s City Council rescinded a ban on the police use of pepper spray for the first time in two decades. Berkeley largely kept the peace, though nine protesters were arrested, including four who allegedly carried banned weapons and one suspected of battering a cop.

The security costs will grow later this month, when the university hosts Free Speech Week. The arriviste Milo Yiannopolous claimed in a news release that the lineup will include Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, Pamela Gellar and other controversial speakers he hand-picked. Already, more than 200 faculty are calling for a boycott, claiming the event imperils students’ “physical and mental safety.”

We wish Berkeley’s students were hearing from conservatives who seek to persuade more than merely provoke like the Milo Gang. The Berkeley Patriots, the student group behind Free Speech Week, have yet to provide Ms. Christ with signed speaker contracts or the basic information campus police requested, though the deadline is fast approaching. The success of Mr. Shapiro’s speech showed Ms. Christ’s good faith, and the Berkeley Patriots need to show some mutual respect.

Ms. Christ has said she sees the cost of security as a worthwhile investment, though she laments that $600,000 per event is “certainly not sustainable.” Berkeley has an operating deficit, and we wonder if students who are unwilling to entertain contrarian arguments realize they may be raising their own tuition. Or perhaps they’re attending on federal student loans they never plan to repay.

How far we’ve come in 50 years when the New Left began the Free Speech Movement to fight the establishment. Now the not-so-new left wants to use violence to shut down free speech no matter the cost. Ms. Christ deserves thanks for standing up to the thugs.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Alternate Nostril Breathing of Lady Macbeth : George Neumayr

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

Hillary plays the victim in her campaign memoir, then rips the peasants for not treating her like a man.

Hillary’s campaign memoir, What Happened, is as awful as expected, serving as yet another cracked window on her phoniness. She remains the baby-boomer feminist fraud, still pouting over alleged sexism even as she hurls herself upon various fainting couches.

She writes about her defeat with the emotional intensity of a parent who lost a child — a chilling and neurotic proof of her clawing, bottomless and now forever thwarted political ambition.

She is a failed Lady Macbeth, but a Lady Macbeth who wants us to feel sorry for her, what with her chardonnay-chugging and alternate nostril breathing after the election. She writes: “If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing, it’s worth a try.… It may sound silly, but it works for me. It wasn’t all yoga and breathing: I also drank my share of chardonnay.”

But in the course of acknowledging her post-election emotional tailspin, she gets in a curious dig at her husband and friends. She wants us to know that she is not as screwed up as they are. “I remember when Bill lost his reelection as Governor of Arkansas. He was so distraught at the outcome that I had to go to the hotel where the election night party was held to speak to his supporters on his behalf,” she writes. “For a good while afterward, he was so depressed that he practically couldn’t get off the ground. That’s not me. I keep going.”

About her friends, she writes that they “advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists.… But that wasn’t for me. Never has been.”

See, she is still the strong one! It is true that Bill did moon about after his defeat in 1980. He would hang out in grocery stores, following people to their cars as he explained why they should give him another shot. But it is not clear why Hillary thinks that is more pathetic than her frantic closet-cleaning, taking to her bed on election night (while her crying supporters sat stupidly at the Javits Center waiting for her to appear), or any of the other attempts at “self-care” that she reports in the book.

Hillary, when not insisting upon her own claimed superiority, sounds less like Lady Macbeth than Madame Bovary. Hillary, Bovary-like, cops to a frenzied attempt to find pleasure and meaning in the void of her denied dream, in everything from movies, plays, and evening soaps to sentimental books to even religion. “I prayed a lot,” she writes. “I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes.”

They should, especially after she likens her defeat to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. She ludicrously quotes a Methodist minister who told her, “You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming!”

The book is full of inadvertent humor. She pats herself on the back for the generosity that she showed the “4,400 members of my campaign staff” in the midst of her grief, such as when she re-gifted 1,200 red roses to them that a woman’s advocacy group had delivered to her Chappaqua mansion. It sounded less like a gift than more closet-cleaning.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Terror in London . . . Again Jihad in the West has reached a new stage. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 16th, 2017

The latest reporting indicates that 22 people were injured, but fortunately none killed, in this morning’s terrorist bombing in the London subway transit system.

An improvised explosive device detonated at the Parsons Green Tube station in West London shortly after 8 a.m. British time. According to Sky News, at least one witness reports seeing “a white builder’s bucket” and a “foiled carrier bag.” The bucket is said to have had “wires hanging from it and a strong smell of chemicals . . . a chemical smell more than a burning smell.”

It is the fifth terrorist attack this year in the United Kingdom.

Police are hunting for at least one suspect, who has not been identified. President Trump, who has been briefed, took to Twitter to rail about another attack “by a loser terrorist.” He added a comment that suggests British authorities were aware of the suspect(s) before the strike: “These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” It would be a mistake to read too much into that, though, at this premature stage. At the moment, we don’t know who did this, although strong suspicions of jihadism are certainly justified.

On that score, there are two points to consider.

First, it has been the fear of American and European counterterrorism officials that the routing of ISIS in Syria and Iraq would heighten the terrorist threat in Europe. Jihadists fleeing from their “caliphate” have been dispersing, and many are making their way back to the Western countries from whence they came. The problem, of course, is that these are quite motivated fighters who have received military training. Our own experience in the U.S. — much of it featured in evidence we presented in the terror trials of the Nineties — shows there is a great deal of prestige, in fundamentalist Islamic circles, attached to any Muslim who has fought in what the Blind Sheikh used to call “the fields of jihad”: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Syria, Iraq, and so on. So, these jihadists are not just competent when it comes to conducting attacks; they are also very effective inciters, recruiters, and fundraisers.

The second point combines frighteningly with the first. Jihad in the West has reached a new stage. For many years, terrorists aspired to major operations — spectacular strikes that required know-how, discipline, and coordination. We were able to say with confidence that if we focused on training — not just ideological fervor but whether the would-be militant had been to a jihadist camp — we would have a reasonably good handle on who posed a threat. This is why, for example, we amended immigration law after the 9/11 attacks to preclude from entry into the U.S. any alien suspected of receiving jihadist training.

Again, it’s too early to draw conclusions about today’s attack. But based on other recent attacks, we can say that it doesn’t require any training to, say, plow a car into a crowd of people.

Terrorist organizations like ISIS have encouraged sharia-supremacist Muslims to attack in place — i.e., where they live in the West — rather than come to Syria. We are thus seeing more of these ad hoc strikes that require little or no expertise to pull off. In the Nineties, we used to be ironically relieved that the jihadists always wanted to go for the big bang; 9/11-type attacks are horrific, but they are extremely tough to pull off, and there are usually opportunities (as there were with 9/11) to disrupt them. That’s why they so rarely succeed. We worried that someday it would dawn on these monsters that there is a great deal of low-hanging fruit out there (virtually indefensible targets, like subways and crowded streets) that would be easy to attack, almost no preparation or coordination required.