Would-be subway bomber gets 30 years

I don’t like entrapment. Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 24 year-old Pakistani immigrant, was sentenced to 30 years in prison this week for plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station at 34th street in New York City in 2004. The catch is that Siraj didn’t actually do anything. A government informant talked Siraj into the plot and told him there was a group behind him. The full extent of Siraj’s actual activities was to scout the subway station. That’s it. He never acquired explosives. Apparently he never took any steps toward actually organizing a terrorist attack. When a government informant is pushing and encouraging the defendant to commit the illegal act, and the defendant only thinks about the act and doesn’t even get to the point of making physical preparations for the act (such as acquiring weapons), to put him in prison for 30 years seems excessive.

Such draconian measures and punishments are the inevitable result of our allowing a huge Muslim population to live in this country. Instead of keeping—and kicking—the Muslims out of America (we can’t do that, that would be racist), we leave them among us and so are forced to turn ourselves into a police state in order to protect ourselves from them.

If after 9/11 we started screening all Muslim residents and immigrants with jihadist and anti-West beliefs and making them leave the U.S., Siraj would now be free and back in Pakistan where he couldn’t do us any harm,—and where he wouldn’t be constantly tempted to do us harm by the fact of living among us infidels in the greatest infidel country—rather than facing half a lifetime in a U.S. prison, at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Liberalism/“conservatism,” insisting that everyone can get along and that it’s evil to think otherwise, because we’re all the same and everyone must be equally free, creates insoluble social conflict that leads to a great loss of freedom. We live today in an America in which every time you enter a public building you have to pass through a security shield, forced to the indignity of emptying out your pockets and passing through an X-ray machine. Even when visiting a private office building you have to acquire a card enabling you to use the elevator. This security shield, which has so transformed the texture of American life, exists for one reason: to prevent Muslim terrorism. As long as Muslims live among us in significant numbers, we must live and function in these unnatural circumstances, FOREVER.

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Paul Nachman writes:

I think what you’ve written below is an overstatement:

“Even when visiting a private office building you have to acquire a card enabling you to use the elevator. This security shield, which has so transformed the texture of American life, exists for one reason: to prevent Muslim terrorism.”

When I worked at Honeywell’s Corporate Technology Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, 1979—1980, we each wore a photo-ID badge. This was not a place that required military security clearances (for the most part), but there was this company security in place. The place was locked, and you couldn’t just waltz in from off the street. So this was before Muslims were a concern in the West. (The Teheran embassy takeover occurred while I was working there, and I’m quite confident the badges had been in use for some time.)

The outrageous kabuki dance at airports today is largely driven by Muslims, but you’ll remember that airport security measures originated because of plane hijackings, largely to Cuba, sometime in the 1960s.

(Regarding access of Joe Schmoe from off the street, it’s interesting that some parts of Los Alamos National Lab in the summer of 1990 were that way. Actually, it astonished me, because I’d been at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia Labs, too, and they’re both fenced and hyper-security conscious. Some facilities of Los Alamos did have substantial security …)

LA replies:

But of course there’s been building security in office buildings for a long time but it’s more thorough now. For example, for me to visit a friend at his midtown office, he has to call down to security, tell them I’m coming, I’m placed on a list, and when I arrive at the lobby desk they give me a card, I have to slip that card into a machine (a read-machine like when you make a credit card purchase) inside the elevator. If I don’t, the elevators will not respond to my command to stop at that floor.

A few weeks ago, I forgot to get the card. I had to ride up to the 30th floor or whatever, then go back to the lobby to get the card, before I could go up to his floor.

Not just visitors, but every person working in that building must take out his card and slip it through the scanning device in the elevator every time he uses the elevator.

Mr. Nachman writes back:

I wouldn’t make the statement as strongly as you did. There are other concerns. As our society has become increasingly dysfunctional on its own (you’re aware of Peter Woods’s new book on anger?), there have been quite a number of incidents of people “going postal” that don’t have anything to do with Muslims. I expect this is partial motive for the card systems you describe.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 12, 2007 11:44 AM | Send