The necessity of surveillance, and how to make it unnecessary

There were so many strong articles on the Web yesterday about Islam and related subjects, it’s as though the Christmas holiday (Happy Christmas, everyone), re-energized us Westerners for the renewed civilizational conflict in which we, to our astonishment and disbelief, find ourselves, very likely for the rest of our lives and possibly for generations to come. It is a renewal of the thousand-year-long conflict between Islam and the West—which was a battle for expansion on Islam’s part, a battle for survival on Christendom’s part, with devastating losses for Christendom in the Near East, North Africa, Spain, Asia Minor, and the Balkans—that raged from the 7th to the 17th century, followed by a three century pause brought on by Islam’s defeat, during which time Edward Gibbon could smugly write, in the concluding passage of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that there was no imaginable prospect of any barbarian people ever again threatening Europe. Little did Gibbon anticipate that the skeptical irreligious spirit he helped cultivate in Europe would eventually so drain it of its spiritual substance and historical identity that within 170 years of his death, Europe would willingly initiate a mass influx of Muslims and African blacks into the home of Western man.

At FrontPage Magazine alone there were four noteworthy articles yesterday, three of which I’ve already discussed: Monsignor Walter Brandmüller speech on Islam and Christianity, Sharon Lapkin’s article, “Western Muslims’ Racist Rape Spree,” David Hornik’s article on “Israel’s Malaise,” and Daniel Pipes’s piece on why Western news is having so little effect on Muslims. The reason is that, unlike people under Communism who hungered for truthful information from non-Communist sources, Muslims want their news only from Islamic sources, which are, of course, replete with the most primitive lies (just check out the Arab newspaper articles translated at MEMRI), and so they willingly remain within their Closed Circle. The Muslims’ lack of desire for objective or at least non-Islamically controlled knowledge about the world is yet another refutation of Pipes’s ever-receding hope of calling into being that fantastical entity of which he dreams, “moderate Islam”—though there is still no sign that he is acknowledging that. Well, maybe there’s a little sign. He only uses the word “Islamist” once in the article, and in an ambiguous sense: “But Muslims generally and Islamists specifically do not lack for reliable information…” Sounds like that barrier is breaking down!

Another strong article yesterday was Serge Trifkovic’s “The False Dilemma of Domestic Surveillance” at the Chronicles website. This is a good dissection of the left’s appalling attacks on President Bush for his supposed “spying on Americans.” As Trifkovic shows, liberal organs such as the New York Times deliberately kept their readers in the dark about the fact that this purported attack on Americans’ liberties consisted of surveilling the e-mail and phone calls of possible terror suspects, namely Muslims who were in communication with parties in Afghanistan and similar locales, and whose phone numbers and e-mail addresses (as Powerline said last week) had in many cases been recovered from captured Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. The reason there were no search warrants was that there was not specific enough information on any of the individuals to show probable cause that they were involved in terrorist activities. For example, if you’re a U.S. Muslim from Pakistan, and you’ve had numerous phone conversations with an Al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, that may not be enough by itself to get a search warrant, but, if you’re concerned about the safety of the American people, it definitely warrants a search. And (as Robert Turner also argues today in the subscriber-only edition of the Wall Street Journal) the president has always had the power to engage in intelligence gathering operations free of normal political scrutiny. This is even more the case when it’s not just a matter of Cold War-type spying, but of preventing a possible dirty-bomb attack on an American city.

Then, making a point similar to something I said here here last week, Trifkovic tells us how we can make such surveillance programs, and the accompanying political anxieties and quarrels, unnecessary:

The legal and constitutional dilemma, such as whether it should spy on “Americans” at home or not and whether a court warrant is needed or not, is worthy of debate in principle. It is both false and unnecessary under the circumstances. If and when all persons engaged in Islamic activism are excluded from America, there will be no need for any such domestic surveillance. We don’t need any legislation to protect CAIR’s clients’ privacy, we need the law that will treat any naturalized citizen’s or resident alien’s known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook as [making him] excludable—on political, rather than “religious” grounds.

All Americans—real Americans, that is, and not those who falsely take the oath but preach jihad and Sharia—will be spared the worry about Mr. Bush listening in to their phone conversations if Islamic activism is treated as grounds for the loss of acquired U.S. citizenship and deportation. The citizenship of any naturalized American who preaches jihad, inequality of “infidels” and women, the establishment of the Shari’a law, etc., should be revoked and that person promptly deported to the country of origin.

It is to be hoped that such measures would lead to a swift reduction in the number of mosques and Islamic centers in the United States. The remnant would have to be registered with the Attorney General and subjected to legal limitations and security supervision that applies to cults prone to violence and “hate groups.”

The beauty of this approach, as I have said many times, is that in order to reduce drastically the current U.S. Muslim population, we do not have to deport them all. If we start by deporting all non-citizens and all naturalized citizens who adhere to political Islam, and then clamp down hard on the Muslims who remain in the U.S., many of them will depart on their own. America, instead of being the paradigmatic Medina that beckoned to the Muslims, will be the paradigmatic Mecca from which the Muslims fled.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2005 12:19 PM | Send