War on Terror Rides Again
Published by marco on
Just one day after writing the article, Terror Kabuki, the cartoon to the right show up, almost as if on cue. The question mark is the coward’s shield, protecting the cartoonist from actually putting the statement in print that he doesn’t think the Times Square bomber was acting alone. That, in fact, he sees it as just another skirmish in the battle against Islam itself—as evidenced by the crescent moon and star.
That’s quite a stretch, though, isn’t it? The guy they arrested is the bomber? He’s just a schmuck American whose life got real shitty real fast. And, if he did it and the story checks out—which is highly unlikely, given the track record for these things, but suppose for the nonce that it is—he’s just the kind of introverted idiot & asshole to take it out on the big, bad world—and then fail miserably.
The unfolding story of the alleged bomber—of the man that has been arrested anyway—sounds much more like that of Joseph Stack than Mohammed Atta. The story is that the alleged bomber was married, had a kid and—up until less than a year ago—owned his own home in New Jersey. Then, everything went South at one, he got moody and distant, went to visit family in Pakistan, acted all weird and left his wife when he returned (or was thrown out, it’s not clear).[1]
That really sounds like the story of a guy who just snapped, who went round the bend because his life went down the toilet. Now he’s being connected to the Taliban, who supposedly trained him to make bombs.[2] But he was a financial analyst while living here; he was married to an American. He claimed to love shopping, looked like a typical NJ guido—hair products and all—and wasn’t really any sort of Muslim until the end of 2009.[3]
He sounds far more like the poor abducted chemist from the the movie, Rendition, actually. We can only hope that Shahzad’s story doesn’t follow El-Ibrahimi’s (or the real-life Arar’s) too closely.[4] If Shahzad is guilty, then let him cool his heels; recent history shows, however, that an arrest means very little. Though the media touts each arrest as a victory over the terrorists, they are just playing their role in the theater. The government always wants to make an arrest within a few days—so the American people don’t have to live with the fear of a killer on the loose. But that’s part of the story as well: the American people would likely forget about the whole thing if no arrest was made, forgetting to be afraid like they’re suppose to be. And that’s what the government is afraid of.