RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have not posted anything lately, because Hurricane Irma was imminent and on my mind, and then I was without power and the Internet for days. Yes, I live somewhere in Florida, in a region of the state that was relentlessly baptized by an outer band of the storm, rich in rain and howling winds.

Now that I’m back in business, and able to catch up on the news, I see that a new hurricane is imminent, that is, the storm of censorship and the enforcement of politically correct thought, speech, and writing. It promises to wreck destruction not just on Florida, but on the whole of Western civilization. The storm has been collecting strength for decades as it approaches the mainland of Freedom of Speech.

When to date the origins of the storm? Let’s say in 1995, with the publication of a fussy, snarky book, addressed mostly to academics. I quote from the article I wrote about it, “The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism.”

A small, innocuous-looking book appeared in bookstores recently, published under the auspices of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), an organization which claims to be devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research. Its title is Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is little more than 100 pages long, weighs less than a pound, yet its contents are more potent than the Oklahoma City bomb. Its ingredients are politically correct jargon, multiculturalism, and the phenomenon of what may be called “grammatical egalitarianism.”

It is important to note at the start that the Association boasts a membership of 114 institutions, mostly university presses, but includes such diverse organizations as the National Academy Press, the National Gallery of Art, the Modern Language Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Its membership includes all major American and Canadian universities, plus Oxford University Press and presses in Tokyo, South America, and Scandinavia. This is an organization with significant cultural clout.

Guidelines promotes and encourages “grammatical egalitarianism,” which in practice serves to stifle the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research.

Presciently, Guidelines, in 1995, covered virtually every issue now at large in 2017, including feminism, “social justice,” and race. Feelings have replaced language as a mode of expression.

Guidelines includes the disclaimer, “there is no such thing as a truly bias-free language” and stresses that the advice it offers is only “that of white, North American (specifically U.S.), feminist publishing professionals.” The Task Force, which is composed of 21 university press editors (two of them men), recommends euphemistic proxies for all of the terms on its “hit list.” [Brackets mine]

This is true. There is no such thing as a truly bias-free language, but Marilyn Schwartz and her team resisted that truism anyway. A truly bias-free language would be no language at all, except for grunts, gesticulations, and facial expressions. But even those would not be free of bias. Looking through an atomic microscope, without a bias-loaded language, how would a scientist otherwise say that an atom’s valence of electrons is abnormal? How would one say that “this is a very good (or bad) painting”? How would one say, “I love you.”? I leave it to your biasedimagination. Because language is governed by values – that is, by “bias” – such as objective truth, it enables precise communication. Without bias, language, communication, and the formation of concepts would be impossible to men.

This is what President Trump said and repeated about Charlottesville:

“I think especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there. You have some pretty bad dudes on the other side, also, and essentially that’s what I said. Now, because of what’s happened since then with Antifa, you look at, you know, really, what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump might have a point.’ I said, ‘You have some very bad people on the other side, also,’ which is true.”

And given Antifa’s openly stated boast that violence and disruption are part of their agenda, the president is right.

Nonetheless, that statement evoked some self righteous hyperventilation:

Exhibit A:

https://pjmedia.com/video/trump-reiterates-charlottesville-moral-equivalency-argument/

Trump Reiterates His Charlottesville Moral Equivalency Argument By Nathan Lichtman

“In addition to the problems of yet again refusing to call out a genocidal bunch of racists, he used language about Antifa being “the other side.” So, basically, he’s admitting that the neo-Nazis are on his side. “The other side” implies that they are the ones counter to your side. This is certainly as close as he has come to admitting that the racist alt-righters are supporters of his, are in his base. They aren’t the other side to him, Antifa is.

IT IS BEYOND TIME for any true conservative, any true Republican, and really any true American, to condemn Trump’s moral equivalency nonsense. You can say Antifa is bad without drawing equivalence between them and people who want to wipe Jews and minorities off the face of the planet.”

Fall off your high horse Mr, Lichtman! The neo- Nazis are a despicable racist group with zero influence in America. The “other side” are foot soldiers in a war being waged against our national culture and institutions and police.

And, Mr. Lichtman, those that want to wipe Jews and other minorities off the face of the earth are the mullahs of Iran and their terrorist offshoots throughout the globe. rsk

The golden age lasted about ten years.

In November of 1989, the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened. Soon after, the people themselves took to it with sledgehammers, and people who did not know that they could cry from joy learned to. The Wall was a product of that original Antifa, the self-proclaimed anti-fascists of the East German police state, who called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the “antifascist rampart.” They told the subjects of their totalitarian rule that the Wall was built to protect socialism from the evils without, but of course it was designed to stem migration out of East Germany, where people with direct experience of life under socialism went to great lengths to remove themselves and their families from that workers’ paradise.

By 1991, the demolition of the Wall was complete — and so was the demolition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was dissolved in November of that year. On the radio, pop stars sang about strolling through Gorky Park and “watching the world wake up from History.” The capital H was implicit, denoting History in the Hegelian sense, the force against which National Review proposed to stand athwart yelling “Stop,” the History of “dialectical and historical materialism,” the process which Francis Fukuyama would declare concluded, with liberal democracy having emerged as the unchallenged victor in History’s great contest.

The United States declared victory and then turned its attention to domestic matters. That happens in the wake of every great conflict in which the United States is involved: The people grow weary of it, even in victory, and someone, usually a presidential candidate, comes along and demands: “Why are we spending all that money in Berlin (Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus) when we could be using it to fix potholes in Sheboygan?” Barack Obama would later talk about “nation-building at home,” but he hardly invented that sort of thing, and in 1992 it was Bill Clinton making the case for investing the so-called peace dividend in a larger welfare state at home. President Clinton put his wife, a middling lawyer, in charge of reforming the nation’s health-care system, and the project failed, but not before establishing the Clintons as a kind of ersatz royal house cum crime syndicate.

(The “penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics,” as I called them, a line I would thank Roger Stone to stop plagiarizing.)

It was a heck of a party. The economy had gone from stagflation and gas lines in the Carter years to booming in the Reagan era, and that continued through the Clinton presidency, turbocharged by the emergence of the Internet and the high-tech economy associated with it. My last year in college, 1996, may have been the best year in American history to have been entering the work force with a halfway respectable bachelor’s degree and a little bit of technological knowhow. But things were pretty good all over: My own personal Austin Economic Indicator — the help-wanted sign at the Taco Bell across from the University of Texas campus — was advertising $10 an hour plus a $1,000 longevity bonus after 90 days, and they couldn’t hire people. My experience at my college newspaper and knowledge of desktop-publishing software was enough to take me around the world as a newspaper editor, but I was something of a slacker: The real go-getters weren’t going to work for anybody but starting their own companies and doing their own thing. The startup ethic wasn’t limited to software bosses like Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen: Robert Rodriguez didn’t sit around waiting for Miramax to make his movie — he took $7,000 to Mexico and made El Mariachi himself. There was a sense not that anybody could do anything, but that the possibilities had become much larger than they once were. The combination of technology, freedom, entrepreneurship, and ready investment capital amplified the individual, and made him if not quite the equal of a Fortune 500 corporation then at least a potential rival to it.

Here are some excerpts from then President George Bush’s speech to the United Nations on November 10, 2001: After paragraphs of blah, blah, blah about the hijacking of a peaceful religion.. the president offered a challenge, but managed to include processing peace between Israel and terrorists. That is the only commitment that has been implemented…forcing Israel to reconcile with and appease terrorists who openly share the agenda of Al-Qaueda. All other promises have been cynically abrogated….rsk

“The conspiracies of terror are being answered by an expanding global coalition. Not every nation will be a part of every action against the enemy, but every nation in our coalition has duties.

“These duties can be demanding, as we in America are learning. We have already made adjustments in our laws and in our daily lives. We’re taking new measures to investigate terror and to protect against threats. The leaders of all nations must now carefully consider their responsibilities and their future.

“Terrorist groups like al Qaeda depend upon the aid or indifference of governments. They need the support of a financial infrastructure and safe havens to train and plan and hide.

“Some nations want to play their part in the fight against terror but tell us they lack the means to enforce their laws and control their borders. We stand ready to help.

“Some governments still turn a blind eye to the terrorists, hoping the threat will pass them by. They are mistaken.

“And some governments, while pledging to uphold the principles of the U.N., have cast their lot with the terrorists. They support them and harbor them, and they will find that their welcomed guests are parasites that will weaken them and eventually consume them.

“For every regime that sponsors terror, there is a price to be paid, and it will be paid. The allies of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice. The Taliban are now learning this lesson. That regime and the terrorists who support it are now virtually indistinguishable.

“Together, they promote terror abroad and impose a reign of terror on the Afghan people. Women are executed in Kabul’s soccer stadium. They can be beaten for wearing socks that are too thin. Men are jailed for missing prayer meetings.

“The United States, supported by many nations, is bringing justice to the terrorists in Afghanistan. We’re making progress against military targets, and that is our objective. Unlike the enemy, we seek to minimize — not maximize — the loss of innocent life. I’m proud of the honorable conduct of the American military.

“The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers. Years of Taliban misrule have brought nothing but misery and starvation. Even before this current crisis, 4 million Afghans depended on food from the United States and other nations, and millions of Afghans were refugees from Taliban oppression.

“I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: The Taliban’s days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close. And when that regime is gone, the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, ‘Good riddance.’

“In this war of terror, each of us must answer for what we have done or what we have left undone. After tragedy, there is a time for sympathy and condolence. And my country has been very grateful for both. The memorials and vigils around the world will not be forgotten, but the time for sympathy has now passed. The time for action has now arrived.

“The most basic obligations in this new conflict have already been defined by the United Nations. On September 28, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1373. Its requirements are clear. Every United Nations member has a responsibility to crack down on terrorist financing. We must pass all necessary laws in our own countries to allow the confiscation of terrorist assets.

“We must apply those laws to every financial institution in every nation. We have a responsibility to share intelligence and coordinate the efforts of law enforcement. If you know something, tell us. If we know something, we’ll tell you. And when we find the terrorists, we must work together to bring them to justice.

“We have a responsibility to deny any sanctuary, safe haven or transit to terrorists. Every known terrorist camp must be shut down, its operators apprehended and evidence of their arrest presented to the United Nations. We have a responsibility to deny weapons to terrorists and to actively prevent private citizens from providing them.

“These obligations are urgent, and they are binding on every nation with a place in this chamber. Many governments are taking these obligations seriously, and my country appreciates it.

“Yet, even beyond Resolution 1373, more is required and more is expected of our coalition against terror.

We’re asking for a comprehensive commitment to this fight. We must unite in opposing all terrorists, not just some of them.

“In this world, there are good causes and bad causes, and we may disagree on where that line is drawn. Yet, there is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequences.

“We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. To inflame ethnic hatred is to advance the cause of terror.

“The war against terror must not serve as an excuse to persecute ethnic and religious minorities in any country. Innocent people must be allowed to live their own lives, by their own customs, under their own religion.

“Following September 11, these pledges are even more important. In our struggle against hateful groups that exploit poverty and despair, we must offer an alternative of opportunity and hope.

“The American government also stands by its commitment to a just peace in the Middle East. We are working toward the day when two states — Israel and Palestine — live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders as called for by the Security Council resolutions.

“We will do all in our power to bring both parties back into negotiations. But peace will only come when all have sworn off forever incitement, violence and terror.

“And finally, this struggle is a defining moment for the United Nations itself. And the world needs its principled leadership. It undermines the credibility of this great institution, for example, when the Commission on Human Rights offers seats to the world’s most persistent violators of human rights. The United Nations depends above all on its moral authority and that authority must be preserved.

“The steps I’ve described will not be easy. For all nations, they will require effort. For some nations, they will require great courage. Yet, the cost of inaction is far greater. The only alternative to victory is a nightmare world, where every city is a potential killing field.

“As I’ve told the American people, freedom and fear are at war. We face enemies that hate not our policies but our existence, the tolerance of openness and creative culture that defines us. But the outcome of this conflict is certain. There is a current in history, and it runs toward freedom.

“We are confident, too, that history has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose. We know that evil is real, but good will prevail against it. This is the teaching of many faiths.

“And in that assurance, we gain strength for a long journey. It is our task, the task of this generation, to provide the response to aggression and terror. We have no other choice, because there is no other peace.

“We did not ask for this mission, yet there is honor in history’s call. We have a chance to write the story or our times, a story of courage defeating cruelty and light overcoming darkness. This calling is worthy of any life and worthy of every nation.

“So let us go forward, confident, determined and unafraid.

“Thank you very much.”

AN EXCERPT OF A LONGER PIECE ON ROBERT E. LEEhttps://amgreatness.com/2017/09/06/robert-e-lee-saladin-south/

What does any of this have to do with current events? Three words: Robert Edward Lee.

General Lee may fairly be considered the Saladin of the South: a noble adversary honored even by those who fought him. And, just as any Christian who refuses to honor what is honorable in Saladin may fairly be said to hate Muslims, any Social Justice Warrior who today refuses to so honor Robert E. Lee may fairly be said to hate Southerners. The Lee statues that dot the American landscape are not symbols of hatred; they are objects of it.

Yet. back in the day, or I should say, in the night they drove old Dixie down, hatred was not the spirit that prevailed. Ulysses S. Grant would write in his memoirs that upon receiving Lee’s surrender, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” And Grant silenced his army’s guns, which had begun firing a salute in exultation on the event, saying, “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”

The feeling in the victorious North came to be, “You fought a good fight, Reb.” Not that the Rebellion’s cause was good, but that the valor, prowess, and self-sacrifice of the rebels themselves was worthy of admiration. Such remained the prevailing sentiment in all of America, all the way through to my childhood, which coincided with the Civil War’s centennial. And if you stop to think about it, doing honor to the South does honor to the North as well. What glory is there, after all, in vanquishing a contemptible foe?

When the U.S. Army decided to turn Lee’s home in Arlington, Virginia, into a cemetery for Union war dead, the idea may have been conceived spitefully. But the move became a tribute to Lee in spite of itself. There stands Lee’s mansion, surrounded by Union graves like so many scalps around a tepee. It’s a testament not only to the courage and dedication of those who fought to preserve the Union, but also to the fearsome price that must be paid by anyone who thinks to conquer Americans, even when the conqueror is American himself.

So, do any of today’s Antifa thugs view today’s Lee-lovers as fellow Americans? Would any Social Justice Warrior today say, as Grant did, “The rebels are our countrymen again?” The question answers itself.

Consider another example, one especially appropriate in light of those other Live Action Role Players, the ones who marched around in Charlottesville with torches, as if they were extras in “Triumph of the Will.” Antifa is good at beating up people in the street, as good at it as any stormtrooper ever was. But beating real Nazis takes something more, something Winston Churchill had and Antifa doesn’t.

In all this world, Adolf Hitler had no deadlier enemy than that great British war leader. Had Churchill not become prime minister in 1940, Britain might well have made peace with Nazi Germany. Hitler then would have been free to achieve his dream of conquering Eurasia from Calais to Vladivostok. And when America’s turn came to go toe-to-toe with him, then even with every Lee-loving Southerner pitching in to whip the Axis, we might not have prevailed against such a behemoth. Had Churchill not lived, we all might be speaking German today.

Here’s what Churchill said about Hitler: “Nothing is more certain than that every trace of Hitler’s footsteps, every stain of his infected and corroding fingers will be sponged and purged and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the earth.”

I am slowly cleaning out my personal library. Of course, each volume must be scrupulously examined, marginal notes savored, and finally the book itself must be dusted and either put back among the shelves or given away.

One of the gems is a 1986 book titled Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams: Words to Describe Life’s Indescribable People by David Grambs. Its pages fill a need that I have long had for describing certain individuals in America today. While profanity has its own personal satisfaction, a more literate epithet is equally forceful and this book has quite a few colorful terms.

The cover had a picture with the word canoodler or amorous caresser and Joe Biden instantly came to mind with his “nuzzling, hugging, squeezing or making sure the bodily contours are still there, as opposed to more urgent exploration.”

Then there is Bill Maher, a genuine âme de boue or someone “with a ‘soul of mud,’ whose thoughts and imagination, if not in the gutter, not higher than the curb” — in short, “a mundane, nasty, cosmically dirty mind” as he accused the President of the United States of incest. And, of course, who could forget the grotesque Kathy Griffin?

Jonathan Gruber and Susan Rice, exquisitely exemplify what being an ananias or “liar” is — prevarication on steroids, shall we say?
Hillary Clinton is a pseudologist — a “skillful or systematic liar, able to pile lie upon lie without batting an eye” — actually a “marathon ananias since she not only falsifies but embellishes and makes it all believable.”

How interesting that “charming sociopaths and playboy husbands are often pseudologists, also known as mythomaniacs.”

In addition, Hillary Clinton is both a cachinnator with her “loud laughter, whose deafening bray is usually inappropriate” as well as a fleerer who “emits howls of laughter chiefly to proclaim an avowed sense of humor or an aroused sense of superiority.”

Then there are the present-day snowflakes who, as misomusists or misosophists, “can’t stand learning, which chiefly includes school, studying, lectures, books and instructive people,” preferring to wrap themselves in safe spaces. Instead they seem to collapse “in tears at the slightest hint of adverse criticism, mockery or teasing” — genuine catagelophobes.

Far too many of the media fall into the category of “ipsedixitists or opiners who make dogmatic statements that are anything but proven facts, or whose assertions are borrowed from so-called authorities.” Grambs calls them “parrots with an ego problem.”

Basically they are misologists or “thick-skulled individuals who hate any rational discussion or honest argument about an issue” and “who mightily resist becoming enlightened.” Thus, if one attempts to “bounce ideas off a misologist, the ideas just clatter to the floor.”

Crowds who are agitprops or “vociferous, propagandistic agitators or sloganeers, particularly people with Marxist or leftist sympathies such as a rabid aspheterist (communist)” now occupy far too many college campuses. “Guerilla theater, bullhorns and revolutionary graffiti describe these people” as explained in this article titled “March for Science: Leftwing Agitprop Creates #FakeScience to Advance Liberal Agenda.”

Too often, groups such as Antifa are bashi-bazouk or “dangerously out-of-control, undisciplined individuals who know no law.” Then there is George Soros who, as an “unusually evil manipulator,” would be known as a Svengali or “cunningly exploitive” individual.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF MIDEAST OUTPOST-http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/once-again-ruth-king.html

After the Holocaust, “Never Again” emerged as the rallying cry of international Jewry determined to prevent recurrence of the murderous anti-Semitism that had slaughtered one of every three Jews in the world. Israel became the incarnation of Jewish renewal and its existence a guarantee of “never again.”

For a few decades, European nations were shamed by their complicity in the roundup of Jews. But, as writer Conor Cruise O’Brien noted “anti-Semitism is a light sleeper” and what may have started as ignorant criticism of Israel has morphed into international hatred of Jews. By 2017 anti-Semitism and anti-Israel harassment had become a pandemic. Evil, when committed against Jews, especially in Israel, has become banal. Jewish settlers in their beds, babies in cribs, toddlers in diners, soldiers at bus stops, shoppers in a kosher deli in France, are deemed not quite as innocent as other victims of terror. As far back as 1980, when terrorists placed a bomb in the Rue Copernic synagogue in France that injured ten and killed four passersby, Raymond Barre, then Prime Minister of France, lamented “They aimed for Jews but they killed two innocent French citizens.”

Today in the most perverse irony Jews are compared to Nazis.

Where did those comparisons originate?

Why in Israel itself where the late unlamented Yeshayahu Leibowitz coined the term” Judeo-Nazis” to describe fellow Israelis. Who praised the scoundrel? The Israeli elite bestowed honors upon him, including the government’s highest award, the Israel Prize. (When this caused a public furor, Leibowitz withdrew from taking the prize but never withdrew his slander of the Jewish state.) That didn’t stop Israel’s rag Haaretz, when a year later he slipped his mortal coil, lauding him for his “profound moral seriousness and the great relevance of his thought today.“ Herzliya’s Mayor eulogized him as “one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation” and named a street after him. Even in Jerusalem a street now bears his name.

Who is mining the bedrock of anti-Semitism in the West? Those unspeakable Jews who undermine, libel, defame Israel and give legitimacy to the avalanche of hatred that is spreading like wildfire.

Jewish-American voters were a powerhouse of political activism on behalf of Israel. Now their short attention span has guided them to policies inimical to Jewish survival. “Never again!” is still their motto but the focus has changed dramatically.

Never again will women be denied the right to end pregnancy even at late stage. Never again will the “settled science” of climate change be disputed. Never again will anyone claim that capitalism and Judeo-Christian principles are superior. Never again will any immigrants be denied entry into America. Never again will any religion be slandered, with the exception of Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians. Never again will any conservative legislators be supported. Never again will any conservative opinions be heard with respect. Never again will anyone vote for a Republican.

Writer Linda Goudsmit sums it up well:

“The liberal Jewish community has lost its way. Liberalism has replaced religion as the community’s organizing principle. The Jewishness of Judaism has been replaced with the secular anti-Semitic anti-American tenets of the radical left-wing liberal Democratic Party in America. It is completely counter-intuitive for Jews to support a platform that is clearly anti-Semitic — but the inconsistencies and hypocrisy do not seem to get in their way. How is that possible? Because the liberal Jewish community has surrendered its rational critical thinking abilities and embraced the feel-good emotional sloganism of the New Democrat Party. “

The Mueller investigation is sputtering along and Antifa are thugs and the monument debate does have decent people on both sides, so the never Trumpers have seized on a new “outrage”….namely the pardon of former Sheriff Joseph Arpaio.

Just for the record:

In 1979, Jimmy Carter released three Puerto Rican terrorists who shot at members of Congress.

In 1999 an adviser to President Clinton proposed pardons of imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorists. The pardons would be “fairly easy to accomplish and will have a positive impact among strategic communities in the U.S. (read, voters),” wrote Mayra Martinez-Fernandez, an adviser to the White House Working Group for Puerto Rico, according Debra Burlingame in The Wall Street Journal. Get that? Voters. Clinton, to be sure, issued the pardons.

In January of this year outgoing President Obama issued 200 commutations of sentences, including that of Oscar López Rivera, a member of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group who was released on May 7th 2017. The Daily News summarized FALN’s “accomplishments:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/oscar-lopez-rivera-not-deserve-president-obama-pardon-article-1.2947628

“In 1974, the FALN began planting booby-trap bombs around New York. While most of these early explosions caused only property damage, the group’s clear intention was to kill and maim. In December 1974, an NYPD officer responding to a report of a dead body in an abandoned building on 110th St. was seriously injured by an FALN incendiary device.
In January 1975, a 10-pound dynamite bomb killed four people and injured dozens at Fraunces Tavern. The powerful blast was felt blocks away. In an eerie foreshadowing of 9/11, dust-covered victims staggered through downtown streets. The FALN quickly took responsibility for the deadly deed.
When a Chicago apartment serving as the FALN’s bomb-making factory was raided in November 1976, authorities learned the names of the group’s leadership. López Rivera and several associates became fugitives.
On Aug. 3, 1977, the FALN struck again in a coordinated attack in Midtown. An alert office worker at 342 Madison Ave., near 43rd St., noticed a suspicious package and evacuated the building. No one was hurt in the subsequent blast.
Workers at the Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd St. weren’t so lucky. An FALN bomb planted there killed 26-year-old Charles Steinberg. The building’s ground-floor windows blew out and several New Yorkers were critically injured by a shower of glass.”

Policing is not Enough http://henryjacksonsociety.org/

Part of the problem of dealing with the range of security challenges which our societies face today is that any concerted focus is kept on them for such a startlingly short space of time.

It is only a week since the attack in Barcelona and already the story has slipped from the news schedules in most of Europe. It has already disappeared in the background noise of life in modern Europe’s cities. But the details which have come out make a number of things very clear.

First is the clear fact that a far worse terrorist atrocity was only narrowly averted. It is only because one explosion went off early, alerted the authorities to a threat and that the truck attacker then also appears to have gone off early, that far worse devastation was averted. It would seem that the cell which was planning these attacks intended to create explosions at major landmarks in Barcelona, causing a level of architectural and infrastructure devastation – in addition to the human devastation – of a kind not seen for many years.

Secondly it seems clear that a local imam was involved in the cell. For the Spanish authorities this presents one of the most embarrassing as well as challenging facets of this investigation and its consequences. It seems that Abdelbaki Essati, the shadowy imam who was connected to last week’s cell was also associated with the cell who blew up the Madrid trains in 2004. Nevertheless he was able to appear in the town of Ripoll a couple of years ago and seems to have set about setting up a cell. His actions were straight out of the al-Qaeda playbook, and he appears to have used well known tactics of selections and grooming to put together the cell which plotted devastation against Spain last week.

All of this raises profound questions for Spain and all other Western democracies. Some experts are saying that the ease with which Essati moved even when he should have been on the radar of law enforcement agencies speaks to a lack of communication between Spanish law enforcement and judiciary and the regional (Catalan) branches of the same. In reality such claims only aspire to answer a tiny part of the problem. What would the authorities have done had they been more joined up? And what could they have done?

Spain, like the rest of Europe, is currently in a period of attempting to police this problem. But across the continent there is a growing sense that the policing approach – with its minimalist interventions – is not up to the job. Or rather that it is itself being let down by the unwillingness to address the problems raised at a much higher as well as wider governmental and societal level. If the Spanish authorities interpret the results of last week as presenting only a problem of intra-security cooperation then they risk failing to learn yet another lesson in this long war for the West.