You know, if I were a terrorist, nothing would make me happier than to see Americans making inflammatory statements like (paraphrasing), “if we don’t do what the Republicans say, we’ll all be speaking Arabic someday.”

Terrorism is, by definition, carrying out violence with the aim of spreading fear and paranoia. Someone needs to buy Rand Simberg a copy of the latest Atlantic Monthly. James Fallows’ cover story is, for my money, the single most important article written since September 11.

The gist of Fallows’ thesis is that the terrorists will never conquer the west, and they know that. Public consciousness of the threat, and the absence of a sanctuary in Afghanistan have neutered al-Qaeda. They’re now a loose-knit group of desperados acting on their own accord. Fallows argues — convincingly, I think — that while these vagabond cells can certainly still do some minor damage, their real aim at this point is to provoke our overreaction. The best they can hope for is to disrupt our way of life, and instill fear and panic — like making us think that we’re one liberal Supreme Court justice away from every warblogger’s favorite new vocabulary word, dhimmitude.

America is never going to be run by Islamic fundamentalists. We’re never going to be involuntarily speaking Arabic. The worst-case scenario is that we let a few acts of terrorism fundamentally alter our way of life, we cower in fear, and we hand over the very freedom and give up the very open society people like Simberg say the terrorists hate us for.

In that way, statements’ like Simberg’s do far more to advance the mission of Isamic terrorists than anything some doofus like Ward Churchill could utter.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 1:53 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.