Yes, the Sniper Was a Terrorist [* @ Liberals* It's the Islamists stupid]

Yes, the Sniper Was a Terrorist by David Tell, for the Editors 11/04/2002, Volume 008, Issue 08

AN INTERESTING THING happened in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia last Thursday, as the nation woke up to the news that two people thought to be responsible for the Washington area's recent wave of sniper murders had finally been arrested.

Out "there," beyond the Beltway, print reporters scrambled to find out anything and everything they could about the suspects, 41-year-old John Allen Muhammad and 17-year-old John Lee Malvo. And, meantime, cable talk-show bookers--to whom the wait for fully established fact is a perpetual, intolerable annoyance--treated the world to yet another round of "retired FBI profilers" and other such witch doctors, the better to explain what might have motivated the murders. Guesswork question number one, apparently: Was it terrorism, or something more "mundane"?

Here at home, though, along the zigzaggy line from Ashland, Virginia, to Bowie, Maryland, where we're still scrubbing gore from our shopping center sidewalks--and still praying for two half-eviscerated victims who remain hospitalized in critical condition, one of them a 13-year-old boy--the major concern lies, interestingly, elsewhere. Nearest the crime scenes, it turns out, few of us, least of all those criminal justice system authorities who've lived the sniper horror most immediately and intensely these past three weeks, give a rat's patootie why the shooters shot. The only relief we feel is that they aren't shooting anymore. And the only question we're asking ourselves is: What's the fastest, best guaranteed process by which to execute these two bastards?

Last Friday's Washington Post reported this issue with bracing candor, and in appropriately expansive detail: a 25-paragraph story, "Chances of Death Penalty Could Decide Trial Venue," spread across all six columns of an inside page. "Prosecutors from Maryland, Virginia and the federal government were maneuvering yesterday for the first chance to try the sniper shootings case," Post correspondents Craig Timberg and Katherine Shaver explained, "with a high-level debate centering on which venue has the best chance of carrying out the death penalty."

The use of a firearm during commission of a federal crime--like a $10 million extortion plot--is itself a capital offense under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, so John Ashcroft's Justice Department is considering whether to exercise supervening authority over any trial. Prosecutors in Virginia, where the sniper attacks killed three and wounded two others, want the case for themselves, however, and they are arguing for jurisdiction by explicit appeal to the Commonwealth's reputation for unforgiving juries--and its resulting "experience" with the death penalty: Virginia has executed 86 prisoners since 1976, more, per capita, than any other state in the country. Maryland, the Post notes by contrast, has shown a "historic reluctance to carry out executions"; there've been only three of them over the past 26 years, none since 1998, and an across-the-board moratorium on the death penalty, imposed by outgoing governor Parris Glendening, is technically still in place. Nevertheless, Maryland elected officials of both parties adamantly insist that they want to--and can, and will--put John Allen Muhammad to death. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic nominee in next week's gubernatorial election, calls lethal injection for the alleged sniper an absolute "no brainer."

This seems to us an altogether unsurprising, but nevertheless significant, phenomenon--and not simply, or even primarily, for what it might suggest about capital punishment, a vastly complicated issue on which various editors of this magazine have widely divergent views. We are struck, instead, by the extent to which responsible adult Americans generally, when suddenly confronted close at hand with a horrifying campaign of systematic violence conducted against random civilians, instinctively reject all those luxuries of dispassionate intellectual analysis that we habitually indulge in when other people are doing the dying--someplace far, far away.

Sure, from the refrigerated, plywood studios of the "CNN Center in Atlanta," 550 safe miles to the south, it is as nothing to fill air time with casual speculation about "why," last Tuesday in Aspen Hill, Maryland, John Allen Muhammad might have felt it necessary to disembowel 35-year-old bus driver Conrad Johnson with a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle. Just as it was much too easy, much too soon after September 11, 2001, for far too many otherwise intelligent Americans to start pulling their oh-so-serious-and-responsible chins over Very Important Questions about the "sources" of anti-American rage in the Islamic Middle East. But if you live within driving distance of Conrad Johnson's widow and two orphaned boys, if the yellow police tape still floats in the wind at your Washington-area neighborhood strip mall, and if, for that matter, the body of your husband or daughter has been reduced to so much microscopic Trade Center dust in Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill--well, then you do not care, you cannot care, what "motivated" the assassin. And none of the rest of us should waste much time caring about it, either. Especially if the assassin remains at large.

Once more, then: Is "terrorism" the proper name for such a crime? So as to distinguish it from wholly "senseless" murders? And, too, from those more familiar and "ordinary" murders of passion and greed that have plagued the world since time began? In some essential respect, we think, the question is frivolous--grotesque, even. Because the only genuinely humane, immediate response to atrocities like the Washington sniper attacks and Mohamed Atta's airline hijackings--and the necessary formal response of an organized civil society--is collective fury. Along with a controlled but ferocious determination to incapacitate and crush the perpetrators as quickly as possible. Deep-think analysis can and must wait.

In any case, of course it's "terrorism." A man takes aim at the torso of an unsuspecting stranger, a target who has walked into his telescopic sight by purest circumstance, and coolly pulls the trigger. Then he packs up, walks away, and does it again and again and again, until he is caught. What else can we call this but "terrorism," whether or not there pretends to be some "political" cause at its root? The act itself, not whatever deranged and vicious pseudo-logic might reside in the actor's head, determines its character. And the character of terrorism, in turn, determines--sharply delimits--what effective means we have available to protect ourselves from it. Killing the terrorist is one such means, and instinct tells us there aren't very many others. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is surely onto something when she calls this conclusion a "no brainer."

And yet: How commonly and cavalierly we retreat deep inside our brains, and convene our seminars, and issue our solemn State Department démarches, and demand superhuman, practically self-lacerating restraint from non-American victims of . . . perfectly equivalent barbarity. In the United States, John Allen Muhammad is a show-stopper, transfixing in his evil, a nationwide obsession precisely because his crimes are so unusual. But there are parts of the world where such crimes are routine. Israel, most obviously, is beset by innumerable men like Muhammad; suicide bombings make for more spectacular television, so that is all we ever see, but random Israeli civilians, hundreds of them over the years, are gunned down by Palestinian snipers like clockwork. On yet another continent, even as this sentence is written, Chechen "rebels" are holding hundreds of ordinary Russians captive in a Moscow theater, have already murdered at least one of them, and are threatening to blow the place up on top of all the rest unless Vladimir Putin's government surrenders to a series of "nationalist" demands.

This stuff, and just because it marches under a counterfeit flag of legitimate politics, many of us prefer to fancy a "cycle of violence." And many of us are pleased to condemn it, and whatever muscular reaction its victims can muster in self-defense, as if both were unnatural and both a sin. But they are not the same animal, and it is cruel and stupid to say they are. A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist, no matter what purports to be his motivation. For the moment, having met John Allen Muhammad, Washington, D.C., seems to appreciate this point. One hopes the lesson sticks. It has global application.

John Allen Muhammad: Hating
America

When a Ukrainian immigrant murdered Ennis Cosby,
the son of Bill and Camille Cosby, Mrs. Cosby blamed
America. She wrote, "I believe America taught our
son's killer to hate African-Americans." Reeling from
the pain of her loss, Cosby's lashing-out deserves
understanding and empathy, but this does not make
what she wrote any less wrong. The shooter killed
Ennis. That's why prosecutors charged him, convicted
him and threw him in jail.

Cosby's piece suggests that white racism toward
blacks thwarts black American progress. Nonsense.
Polls show white acceptance of blacks at an all-time
high. In 1958, for example, only 35 percent of
Americans would vote for a black person for
president. As of 1997, the figure rose to 93 percent.

So let's apply the Cosby blame game to the apparent
Beltway sniper lead triggerman – John Allen
Muhammad. What about John Allen Muhammad's
apparent mindset of anti-Americanism and religious
intolerance? Muhammad, 41, fit the sniper profile of a
loser. Two failed marriages, child custody battles, one
wife obtained a permanent protective order against
him, a possible brief imprisonment for a traffic
violation, two courts-martial and possibly – though
unconfirmed – a dishonorable discharge from the
military as well as more than one failed business.

But add this to the mix: He belonged to Louis
Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, an angry, virulent strain
of Islam. According to the Seattle Times, Muhammad
openly expressed sympathy for the terrorists who
committed the Sept. 11 atrocities. He passed out
pro-Islamic literature and spoke openly about his
desire to commit violent acts in and against America.

The Nation of Islam's Farrakhan called Judaism a
"gutter religion," referred to Adolf Hitler as a great
man, and in a book called, "The Secret Relationship of
Blacks and Jews," Farrakhan exaggerates the role of
Jews in slavery, while minimizing the substantial role of
Arab slavers. Farrakhan met with Libya's Moammar
Gadhafi, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Iran's
Mohammad Khatami – nations on America's official list
of states that sponsor terrorism. Farrakhan
condemned Los Angeles-area Korean storeowners as
"bloodsuckers."

When Malcolm X defected from the Nation of Islam,
Farrakhan wrote, "The die is set and Malcolm shall not
escape. Such a man is worthy of death." Over 30 years
later, Farrakhan apologized to Malcolm X's daughter,
admitting that his words "helped create the
atmosphere" that led to Malcolm's assassination.

But decades later, Farrakhan issued another
Fatwa-like condemnation of black Washington Post
reporter Milton Coleman, who reported Rev. Jesse
Jackson's use of "Hymie" and "Hymie Town." About
Coleman, Farrakhan said, "We're going to make an
example of Milton Coleman. I'm going to try to get
every church in Washington, D.C., to put him out
whenever he hits the door and tell him he's not
wanted. If he brings his wife, she can come in if she
leaves him. But if she won't leave him, then you can go
to hell with your husband. If he is a traitor and you
love to sleep in the bed with a traitor of your people
then the same punishment that's due that no-good
filthy traitor you'll get it yourself as his wife. One day
soon we will punish you with death."

Hargeet Singh, a friend of Muhammad's, said, "In his
mind, even black people were no good if they stood
with whites or Christians." Authorities now connect
Muhammad with the shooting that took place at the
only synagogue in Tacoma, Wash.

Did Muhammad convert to Islam out of a sincere,
spiritual conversion and awakening? Or, did he
convert, as some do, to say, "Screw you," to America,
the West and to non-Muslims, thus providing a
scapegoat for his failed life?

According to some estimates, blacks comprise nearly
half of America's estimated 5 million to 8 million
Muslims (although others put the figure much lower).
Of that number, according to Sulayman Nyang, with
the African Studies department at Howard University,
nearly one of 10 Muslims converted in prison. Ziauddin
Sardar, described by Time magazine as a "British
scholar of Islam," says, "Islam is a sort of natural
religion for underdogs." Seized al-Qaida documents
suggest American prisons as a source for recruitment
of potential terrorists. For most prison inmates, Islam
provides structure, a motive, clean life and spiritual
salvation. But for some, it serves as a ticket to explain
away a failed life, while providing a justification for
hatred of non-Muslims, of America, and of Western
culture and civilization.

Black "blame America" anger does a number on the
black psyche. A Los Angeles Times poll asked blacks
earning $50,000 or more a year if everyone has the
power to succeed. They answered more pessimistically
than did lower-income whites!

Aristotle once said, "Anyone can become angry – that
is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the
right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose,
and in the right way – that is not easy."

Larry Elder, controversial radio talk-show host from Los
Angeles, is the author of the libertarian blockbuster "The
Ten Things You Can't Say in America." Get your
autographed copy now in WorldNetDaily's online store!

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