The Missoulian comes unhinged

August 16, 2006 in Media, Missoula, Terrorism

How could I have missed the recent Missoulian editorials on the UK terror plot and the missing MSU Egyptian students?

Talk about out of touch and fear mongering! Since when did the Missoulian hire RedState bloggers to pen their editorials? Does this mean I’ll get a chance to write one, in the name of balance?

Let’s start with Monday’s diatribe against terror. “Foiled Plot Underscores Relentless Threat.” (Emphasis mine.)

…We’re now engaged in a much different war in which triumph is hard to envision, much less achieve, and what passes for a battlefield success is merely disrupting enemy efforts to blow some of us to smithereens.

[snip]

As grateful and relieved as we are that [UK] officials averted the attacks, there’s little comfort to be had. In fact, this case is a sobering reminder of the relentless nature of the war Islamic extremists are waging against the United States and much of the non-Islamic world.

We’re targets of a movement of indeterminate size – not individuals or groups, not whole countries, but entire subpopulations of multiple countries. Fanatical in their desire to inflict harm, this is a shadowy subculture that isn’t content to be left alone, as most people are, or to defend their own security perceptions, or even to advance their own political, economic or geographic interests. Their goal is to attack and kill and destroy people who merely live and think differently. The enemy combatants’ suicidal willingness to die in the process of inflicting harm makes them especially difficult to deter.

This is not an enemy of our choosing. They were gunning for us long before the Iraq war, long before 9/11….The nature of our enemy’s animosity is foreign to most of us, which makes it hard to grasp the severity of the threat. Many Americans continue to view the war on terror as a partisan political gimmick; many look inward for the cause of Islamic terrorism, as if it might be our fault. Airliners targeted in this latest plot might have been filled with liberal-minded peaceniks; there were plenty of them in the Twin Towers. This enemy doesn’t care. It’s lashing out at difference, not hostility.

Maybe there are U.S. policies that make things worse. Maybe there are policies that could make things better. But anyone who thinks that the United States can somehow appease this enemy or retreat from the battlefield isn’t paying attention. There’s no cut-and-run option in this war.

Must…not…rip…out…hair…

Didn’t I just mention that only the radical fringes of the US population subscribes to the Bush neocon vision of the world? Missoula: meet your daily newspaper.

The threat of terror is, of course, real. But the threat of living in fear of terror is greater. Why a Montana newspaper feels it necessary to terrify its readership when the odds of a terrorist attack in the area is non-existent beats me. Why the paper seems to link efforts to reduce terror with Iraq is also beyond me: Iraq is, if anything, a hindrance to stopping Islamic terrorists.

We also see a classic straw man argument here: describing how “liberal peaceniks” view radical Islamic terror groups as a domestic “political gimmick” or who blame the U.S. first and foremost for the existence of terror. It’s lazy argumenation and dead wrong. Certainly terrorism is being used as a political gimmick. Certainly our foreign policy and commercial presence in the Middle East has helped make us a target. But terror is terror and should be ruthlessly stomped out.

The paper is right in one place: the “nature of our enemy’s animosity is foreign to most of us,” which goes a long way in explaining the paper’s own egregious and wildly inaccurate claim that Islamic terrorists have no political agenda, but instead want “to destroy people who merely live and think differently,” like a pack of Freddy Kruger Muslims. Such thinking is hopelessly naive and shows absolutely no familiarity with the Middle East, terror organizations, or human nature.

Which brings us to today’s piece of fear-mongering trash, “Egyptian students highlight security gap.” (Again, emphasis mine.)

In the midst of the manhunt, Homeland Security officials repeatedly offered comforting assurances that the students posed no “credible or imminent threat.” What does that even mean? How in the world would they know? The notion that people not previously linked to terrorist organizations or activity pose some lesser danger is, itself, dangerous. There is widespread speculation that the students hoped to find jobs and take advantage of America’s economic opportunity, but there was and is no way to establish that with certainty.The speed and ease with which the Egyptian students scattered is noteworthy. They were taken into custody, mostly in pairs, in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota.

The amount of time between the students’ failure to arrive in Bozeman and MSU’s notification of authorities, the time it took the FBI to issue an alert, and the time it took to round up the fugitives is instructive. Had these been terrorists, each interval of time would have been more than sufficient to wreak havoc.

And so on. A hastily tacked-on ending provides a panacea to charges of racism against the editorial:

Please don’t mistake what we’re saying. We’re not saying these students had any nefarious intent. We certainly don’t believe in branding all Middle Eastern visitors to the United States as security risks.

First, the Missoulian’s claims that the 9/11 terrorists weren’t known to be security risks is untrue. They were known to be risks and associated with terrorists by some agencies and not by others, like Immigration. The Dept of Homeland Security was created to facilitate communication between the agencies, and in theory one might actually trust their judgment. In any case it is fair to say that the DoHS and the Bush administration have rarely passed up an opportunity to engage in fear-mongering and bump up terror alerts when it comes to terrorist rumors; that they didn’t in this case seems to indicate the students weren’t a threat.

Second, that the Missoulian concludes immediately that Egyptian students running amok on spring-break-like excursions are a threat to security reveals their prejudice, not necessarily gaps national security. After all, this is a newspaper that earlier described the Middle East as a land where “entire subpopulations” are part of a “fanatical” and “shadowy subculture,” language common to the worst racists and anti-Semites. (Update: Perhaps I’m a little harsh here in my claims of racism. But…the languge is weird, innit?)

My question is, why is this the newspaper that represents Montana’s most liberal of cities? Don’t we deserve better than some fear-mongering, near-racist, fringe-radical agenda?