20060505
    The World Watch Review focuses on news items that have occurred and what their effect is and will continue to be. The effort of this post is to keep important items in the forefront even after they have passed from the 24-hour news cycle. This week: ‘Immigration Apathy’ and ‘Moussaoui Might Just Have It Right’.
Immigration Apathy
    Well, May 1st came and went. Hundreds of thousands protested, among them being many, many people who entered the US illegally. The new sources feverishly covered the event. And nothing really happened.
    It would have been far more fulfilling if there had been some noticeable effect on the stock market, if thousands of USCIS agents had swarmed the protests, or if the US Congress or one of the states had reacted in some perceivable and useful way.
    Instead, nothing really happened. Those who watch the news had a new subject to keep them interested for the day. A lot of Hispanic kids got a free day off of school. A few businesses were short handed enough that they closed, but some of them reported that they took the time to do maintenance and things that would not have been possible otherwise.
    So what was the point? Perhaps the point was that representatives of the 13+ million illegal immigrants who are already in the US were able to organize and execute a nationwide protest that had no real, immediate consequence. The point is that most legal Americans seem to care so little about the problems of illegal immigration and border control that their answers to the question come straight out of the last pole the might have seen on TV.
    The problem facing the US is large, complex, and not easily solved, especially by the means of conventional wisdom. Yet, it is a problem that must be solved for the good of both the US and the population of illegal immigrants, most of whom have come here just seeking a better life.
    If there is anything that the protests on May 1st proved, it proved that everyone is a long way from that solution, but it also proved that the illegal population is a large, well organized, and apparently untouchable force, and that the legal population does not care enough to usefully respond. Ultimately, with such a precedent being set, what solution will likely be the one that comes about in the end, the legal or the illegal one?
Moussaoui Might Just Have It Right
“America, you lost. I won,” Moussaoui said, clapping his hands as he was led out of the courtroom after the verdict was read.
    It turns out that Zacarias Moussaoui might just have predicted the future. The federal jury charged with determining whether he should be executed for his self confessed role in terrorist activities in the United States, including a potential role on the events surrounding 9-11, decided that he should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
    Do not misunderstand. That Moussaoui was not sentenced to be executed is not so much the issue is that the man is cognizant of the fact that America is losing the War on Terror because it does no understand the enemy it is fighting. There are many who stand aghast at such statements, but the reality is clear for everyone to see, if they choose.
    The truth rests in the fact that while US fights a War on Terror, the terrorists, who are universally Islamic fundamentalists, are fighting us as Jihadists in the Islamic War Against the Infidel. While we look for cells of bomb wielding radicals, Moussaoui and those of his ilk realize that masses of angry, often educated, Muslim men in dozens of predominantly Muslim countries are being steeped in the angry rhetoric of global Jihad. Eventually, this mass of anger will explode.
    What Moussaoui understood as he jubilantly said “America, you lost. I won,†is that if he had been an American in the custody of al-Qaeda or Hamas or the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, he would already be dead because he was an enemy. Instead, he finds himself in America, where liberty and democracy and the due process of law cloud our awareness of the fight that awaits us in the mosques and madrasas of most of the Muslim world.
    Such a statement is not to speak against the liberty, democracy, and due process that we all hold dear, rather it is to point out that such ideals are not to be afforded to our enemies when we find ourselves in a state of declared war, whether this nation declared the war or not. Indeed, the price of such ideals is eternal vigilance, and vigilance is knowing when justice is appropriate and when justice must be supplanted by violence.
    The US finds itself faced with a long hard road in the next decades as the tide of Islamic fundamentalism rises and our willingness to fight it remains to be seen. As long as we continue to treat terrorism as a police matter and ignore the factors that created the terrorism in the first place, we continue to lose this war. At what point does the liberty, democracy, and due process we afford to our enemies become the noose we hang ourselves by?
DLH
