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[ by Charles Cameron — this post is about comparisons — what you make of them, and what they make of you, death calculus, and Handel ]
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Scraped from my morning read, these two quotes — a tweeted headline from Breitbart and a gobbit of the Jerusalem Post — neatly illustrate a paradox I’ve been wrestling with, the way more profound souls wrestle with angels [link is to Rilke].

It’s the paradox of comparison.

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On the one hand, I can barely imagine what it would be like to build — with, say, enough funds for a latter-day Manhattan Project — a Department whose job it was to monitor all activities and ensure even-handedness in the allocation of resources.

So that not ever would a Presidential aide on vacation receive a security detail until each and every ambassador had an equivalent force of marines around them at any given moment, in embassy or out.

I mean, what about consuls, or CIA heads of station — are they ambassadorial enough? Members of the cabinet on vacation? Members of the National Security Council? How far do we need to go with our even-handedness? Is Benghazi different from London? Londonistan?

How would one possibly assure oneself that no “hand” of government, left, right, center, upper, lower, or oblique to all of the above, ever arranged things in a way that compared foolishly with the way some other “hand” of government had arranged something more or less similar?

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Let’s go to what my friend Bryan Alexander calls the death calculus. Since we’re interested in terrorism here, I’ll pull quotes from a couple of pieces that you can read in full if this topic interests you. Two paras from TomDispatch:

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society;5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

and:

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008; while the destruction of four Flight 253s from terrorism would not have equaled New York State’s 2008 traffic death toll of1,231, 341 of whom, or 51 more than those on Flight 253, were classified as “alcohol-impaired fatalities.”

Two paras from a Salon piece [copied here sans links and emphases]:

“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: “undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.” The March, 2011, Harper’s Index expressed the point this way: “Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29.” That’s the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans — even as they face massive wealth inequality — are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.

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My points?

On the one hand, that the world is far too complex to avoid disparities that can draw mockery down on the heads of those one might wish to mock.

And on the other, that comparisons also have an invaluable role to play in giving us a sense of the relative peaks and valleys of the terrain we live in — and may be literally or metaphorically mountaintop removal / valley fill coal mining in preparation for our children’s children…

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Here’s a “DoubleQuote” for you:

Or for the musically inclined:

Now there’s a fascinating comparison (between the mining and the music) that doesn’t tell you much. Or does it?

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Onwards to the issue of that sacred plateau in Jerusalem, featured as my second “reading for the day” at the top of this post.

It appears that you can be arrested for carrying a concealed knife on the Noble Sanctuary — or tallit or tefillin on Temple Mount — same place, different perspective.

That’s the sort of comparison that makes me catch my breath with wonder.

As the Famous Thinkers School might ask, giving you a pencil and a blank sheet of paper: can you draw this conclusion?

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The full text of Matthew 6.3 reads in the KJV:

But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:

Marangolo P and associates uses a significant variant of that verse in the title of a learned paper: Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand knoweth. The case of a patient with an infarct involving the callosal pathways.

Brain malfunctions (and brain surgeries) can provide windows of considerable interest on our human condition, as the writings of Oliver Sacks so eloquently demonstrate.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has taken criticism for Chicago’s skyrocketing homicide rate which stands this year at a shocking 19.4 per 100,000 residents. This is roughly triple the murder rate in New York City, is worse than in perennially crime-ridden Oakland and is within shouting distance of  war-torn Afghanistan and Mexico, which are fighting vicious insurgencies. Even for Chicago, the current level of street violence is unusually brazen.

Chicago has always taken an ambivalent attitude toward it’s enormous, 100,000 strong, network of rival street gangs. Traditionally, part of the social fabric of Chicago’s ethnically divided wards, Chicago’s street gangs were far better organized and more ruthlessly disciplined than street gangs elsewhere, which allowed them a limited entree into participation in local politics. The Chicago Outfit from Al Capone’s day on controlled the votes in the old 1st Ward, ran several near suburbs like Cicero and recruited especially brutal sociopaths from the Forty-Two gang; the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley in his youth had been a thug for the Hamburg Athletic Club, the Democratic Party’s election-time enforcers in the 11th Ward. In more recent decades, the Black P. Stone Nation/El Rukns were Federal grantees and a number of powerful street gangs today use the Black United Voters of Chicago as a front group and cut-out to make deals with local politicians and swing aldermanic races.

However disturbing the status quo may have been in Chicago, it is potentially changing for the worse. Much worse.

DEA BOSS: MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ARE SO DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN CHICAGO, WE HAVE TO OPERATE LIKE WE‘RE ’ON THE BORDER’ 

The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive interview. Inevitably, the increasing presence of cartels has also contributed to the Windy City’s skyrocketing violent crime rates, the DEA boss revealed.

“My opinion is, right now, a number of the Mexican cartels are probably the most organized, well-funded, vicious criminal organizations that we’ve ever seen,” said Riley.

Right now, at least three major Mexican cartels are fighting for control of billions of dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin in Chicago. That includes the ruthless Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa cartel, run by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, arguably the most wanted man in North America, and perhaps the entire world….

….“If I pitted the Italian organized crime groups against for instance, ‘Chapo’ Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel, it wouldn’t be a fight,” he told TheBlaze. “In my opinion, Chapo Guzman is the new Al Capone or Scarface to Chicago. His ability to corrupt, his ability to enforce his sanctions and to really do with an endless supply of revenue is in my opinion far greater than older Italian organized crime.”

….The drug trafficking organizations are based in Mexico but, he explained, they have operatives in various cities across the nation. In Chicago, local gangs are used by cartels as a means to get their products onto the streets without putting their operations at risk, all the while raking in massive profits from drug sales. Cartels move every drug you can think of, including cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamines.

Overall, police records indicate Chicago’s murder rate is up 31 percent from 2011. Further, Mayor Rahm Emanuel in August requested federal assistance to combat violence and drugs. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Aug. 31 that at least 82 people were injured or killed in shootings within a one week period, 10 in one night alone. Additionally, as of Aug. 23, there had been 351 shooting deaths so far in 2012….

Read the rest here.

The vast profit margin in illegal drug sales and the formidable manpower of Chicago street gangs have led the Mexican cartels to make a strategic choice to stay in the background, as hegemonic partners with local gangbanger street crews and not make the kind of flamboyantly ghoulish “narcocultas” attacks or DIY militarization typical of the Mexican criminal insurgency.  Sharing profits and letting locals run the major risks with law enforcement is a cartel strategy to avoid antagonizing the Federal government into treating their drug operations as ” international terrorism” with the draconian response that would imply, here, inside Mexico and further abroad. The same reason the cartels do not try to kill large numbers of American tourists or assassinate prominent Americans in Mexico, which they could easily do.

However, the cartels could shift from transnational organized crime activities to exporting narco-insurgency to America under a number of scenarios:

•  Cartel vs. Cartel – a cartel losing to rivals in Mexico breaks the informal rule against high profile attacks inside the US by striking it’s enemies here, inviting a cycle of severe retaliation and drawing in local allies – Mexican Mafia, MS-13 etc.
• Federal Squeeze – law enforcement gets really serious about systemically destroying a particular cartel, rooting out it’s illicit money stashed in the US banking system and legal investments and jailing everyone in sight under RICO and extraditing everyone else from Mexico. The narcos will employ “silver or lead” tactics to intimidate and co-opt local officials and whole communities and then escalate into symbolic terrorism.
• US Intervention – American assistance to the government of Mexico against the cartels tips the balance in Mexico’s civil war to what the cartels see as an existential threat ( i.e. drone targeted killings) and the narcos respond with furious attacks against American soft targets intending to create high body count events.

There is nothing magical about the US-Mexican border that prevents the ghastly violence in Mexico from occurring here – it is a rational calculation by cartel leaders that such behavior is not worth the risk of a stand-up fight with the US military and intelligence agencies – the cartels are only just holding their own against the lesser capabilities of the government of Mexico However, if cornered and desperate, the cartels are capable of rapidly escalating the violence in specific American communities to 2006 -2007 Iraq insurgency levels – in places like Chicago. It could happen faster than anyone believes possible.

The political effect of this will be a riptide – and none of it to the good.

[ by Charles Cameron — on the way not listening sometimes leads to trouble, the importance of ultimate concerns, and a remarkable remark by M. Morsi ]
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It’s happening again, this time in Pakistan.

Nicholas Kristof‘s NYR op-ed a day or two ago, Exploiting the Prophet, included one particularly interesting little quote that set me thinking – and my friend Bryan Alexander noted it too. Kristof was talking about how people in Muslim countries with little or no tradition of free speech sometimes “have an addled view of how the United States handles blasphemy” and commented, almost as an aside:

A Pakistani imam, Abdul Wahid Qasmi, once told me that President Bill Clinton burned to death scores of Americans for criticizing Jesus. If America can execute blasphemers, he said, why can’t Pakistan?

I challenged him, and he plucked an Urdu-language book off his shelf, thumbed through it, and began reading triumphantly about the 1993 raid on David Koresh’s cult in Waco, Tex.

That’s absurd, preposterous. Perfectly understandable. And dangerous.

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Here’s a description of how Americans listened to al-Qaida, drawn from Benjamin and Simon’s book, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 159:

So much of what was heard from al-Qaeda after the attacks sounded to Americans like gibberish that many chords of the apocalypse were missed.

According, that is, to two senior members of President Clinton‘s National Security Council charged with counterterrorism, jihadist “chords of the apocalypse” were missed because they sounded like “gibberish”.

When I read that, I couldn’t help but recall the label given by FBI field agents to attempts by David Koresh to engage them in a discussion of the Book of Revelation, which for him was a roadmap of the very events he was living through — the FBI’s siege of Mount Carmel in Waco, TX.

Here’s a quote from the abstract of Robert Agne and Karen Tracy‘s analysis, ‘Bible Babble’: Naming the Interactional Trouble at Waco, published in Discourse Studies (v 3 # 3, 269-294):

A frustrating yet persistent aspect for the FBI negotiators was the Davidians’ talk about the Bible and their religious beliefs, what agents dismissively described as ‘Bible babble’.

So:

Does it matter if one group of people persists in misunderstanding the religious positions of another in high-tension disputes?

In the case of Waco, it may indeed have contributed to the tragic outcome.

In this study, we analyze several exchanges between Koresh and one of the FBI agents. The analysis shows how the FBI’s identifying their problem as ‘Bible babble’ contributed to the negotiation failure.

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There are other parallels that can be drawn between the Branch Davidians and their worldview, and al-Qaida and theirs — parallels that may have significance wherever there is a clash in which the “irrational” religious discourse of an (often apocalyptically inclined) “other” is easily brushed off by our own “more rational” mindset.

According to conflict resolution scholar Jayne Seminaire Docherty, writing in Learning Lessons from Waco (p. 99):

During the Waco negotiations, the Mount Carmel residents invited the FBI negotiators to choose God’s law over man’s law.

Compare al-Qaida, as seen in two excerpts from Michael Scheuer‘s Al-Qaeda’s Completed Warning Cycle – Ready to attack? published by the Jamestown Foundation in Terrorism Focus (v 2 #5, 2005):

After 9/11, bin Laden received sharp criticisms from Islamist scholars that dealt with the al-Qaeda chief’s failure to satisfy several religious requirements pertinent to waging war. The critique focused on three items: (1) insufficient warning; (2) failure to offer Americans a chance to convert to Islam; and (3) inadequate religious authorization to kill so many people. Bin Laden accepted these criticisms and in mid-2002 began a series of speeches and actions to remedy the shortcomings and satisfy his Islamist critics before again attacking in the United States.

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Parallel to the warnings, bin Laden on two occasions since 2002 asked Americans to convert to Islam as the means of terminating the war al-Qaeda is waging against the United States. “We call you to Islam,” bin Laden said on both occasions, addressing himself to President Bush – as the leader of the American people – and asking him to lead his countrymen to Islam. He also offered to serve as guide and teacher for the American people, urging them to “follow the right path” to Islam. “I am an honest adviser to you.” bin Laden concluded, “I urge you to seek the joy of life and the after life…. I urge you to become Muslims….” (Al-Jazeera 6 Oct 02; Waaqiah.com, 26 Oct 02)

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The Davidian invitation to the FBI interlocutors to talk Revelation — like the AQ invitation to President Bush and all America to convert to Islam — may seem a foredoomed invitation, but it’s one that at the very least situates one side of the conflict in the territory of “ultimate concerns”. Thus Docherty continues:

The negotiators resisted these invitations as situationally inappropriate conversion efforts. The Branch Davidians, they said, were disrupting the “real” negotiations with their proselytizing. However, for the Mount Carmel residents, proselytizing was the truly important business at hand. With the Second Coming looming on the horizon, all else was trivial by comparison, even the task of peacefully resolving the barricade standoff.

What is ultimate and what is, strictly by comparison, trivial?

One of the most significant answers to that question was given by Muhammad Morsi when he said recently:

To God, the attack on a person to Allah is bigger an attack on the Kaaba.

I still have a post or two in me concerning the ugly video clip and the far uglier riots it triggered, and in one of them I’d like to explore that remarkable remark of Morsi’s — deploring the killing of Ambassador Stevens — and supporting texts from the Qur’an, hadith and the writings of the late Egyptian cleric Sheikh Ghazali.

[ by Charles Cameron –on the whereabouts of the jihadist thinker, and the importance of careful reading ]
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For those interested in the question of whether Abu Musab al-Suri has been released by the Syrians, where he is and how he’s doing, this tweet today from Mr. Orangetracker is probably the state of the art:

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I sat up and took notice of this tweet today, both because I think al-Suri’s whereabouts is and should be a matter of considerable concern and interest — and also because it reminded me of a conversation a day or two back, which began (or at least, those parts that I can see from my own feed began) with a comment from Will McCants on the recently posted Institute for the Study of War report, Jihad in Syria, and led Jane’s analyst Charles Lister to comment that the report “Also concretely claims Al-Suri was released in Feb; that wasn’t confirmed, right?”

The exchange continues:

McCants: i haven’t seen anything credible. but Aaron tracks the story more closely
Aaron Zelin: Credible sources at the forums said al-Suri was released then, but no word on him since.
Raff Pantucci: I wonder if he was ever actually freed tho. maybe a scare story from Syrian intelligence?

I hadn’t particularly noticed the conversation up to this point, but here is where I noticed a tweet from Zelin to Pantucci:

Raff Pantucci is another student of these matters whom I follow. As the discussion continues, he agrees with Zelin’s assessment:

Pantucci: that would make sense. he certainly wouldn’t be on their side if they let him loose at home!
Yassin Musharbash: the thing is that we simply cannot know what kind of state – physically, psychologically and ideologically – he is in
Zelin: Agreed.

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As a matter of fact, the report did indeed state [p. 15] that Abu Musab al-Suri has been released:

In early February 2012, the Syrian government released Mustafa bin Abdel Qadir Sitt Mariam Nassar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri. Al-Suri is an important jihadist ideologue and a top al-Qaeda operative, with experience fighting against the Assad regime during the 1979—1982 Islamic Uprising. As the alleged mastermind of the July 2005 London Bombings, Al-Suri had been in Syrian custody since he was allegedly transported there by the CIA six years ago.

But here’s where it gets interesting. In connection with these sentences, the report carries this footnote [# 29]:

“Syria’s Assad releases alleged al-Qaida mastermind of 2005 London bombings,” Haaretz, February 5, 2012.

Significantly IMO, that footnote omits the first word of the Haaretz headline, which reads:

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“Report claims Syrian President released” is simply not the same as “Syrian President released”.

On such tiny details are the webs and fogs of misunderstanding often based.

As you probably already know, the US Embassy in Cairo Egypt was stormed today by Islamists supposedly angry about a video on Youtube supposedly made or endorsed by anti-Muslim Quran-burner and bigot Rev. Terry Jones. The embassy, deliberately left without sufficient protection by the Egyptian government of Islamist President  Mohamed Morsi, was overrun, Islamists tore down the US flag and hoisted the black flag of al Qaida while a senior Muslim Brotherhood official has called on the US to “apologize”. All on the anniversary of 9/11.

The US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked by an Islamist militia with RPGs and small arms, sacked and burned, killing at least one American.

The Obama administration has gambled heavily upon a Mideast policy of engagement verging into appeasement and sponsorship of Sunni Islamist groups’ political and even revolutionary aspirations in the hopes of  co-opting “moderate” or “pragmatic” Islamists into a durable partnership with the United States. The new regime of American-educated Mohammed Morsi, represents the cornerstone of this policy, alongside the Libyan Revolution that toppled Gaddafi. This initiative has been delicately balanced, Nixon-style, with a very tough campaign of unapologetic targeted drone strikes on hard-core al Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

If you have a sense of deja vu, you are harkening back to 1979, when another Democratic administration and an arrogantly uninformed group of senior State Department officials severely misread another, that time Shia, Islamist revolution. We lost several embassies then as well and endured a national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis.

But give the Carter administration, it’s due: when the embassy in Teheran was seized or the one in Islamabad burned by military-sponsored Islamist mobs, no State Department official at the time responded with quite this level of truckling moral cowardice and incompetence:

@Mbaha2

@USEmbassyCairo you say all humans are equal but the truth is you hate Muslims and describe us as terrorists when u are the real terrorists

@USEmbassyCairo

@mbaha2 No, that’s not true. We consistently stand up for Muslims around the world and talk abt how Islam is a wonderful religion

Perhaps the time for anxiously politically correct FSOs describing Islam as “a wonderful religion” to an online Salafist hater could wait a few days, at least until Egypt restored the American embassy to it’s sovereign status with an apology and the body of the slain American diplomat is returned to their family from Libya for a decent burial?