Not familiar with the somewhat obscure word shibboleth? I will presently explain it. The term is an ancient Hebrew word that now refers to a method used to discover possible enemies or confederates (among the new arrivals at a border crossing, for example). In olden days, there were peoples that went to war with a neighboring co-lingual group/kingdom/empire/”nation”. And there were no photographs, no passports, no watch lists to help in identifying spies and confederates that might try to enter as espionage agents, saboteurs or intended assassins and the like. There arrived the device of asking the new arrival to simply say a specific word – originally the Hebrew term “shibboleth”. A phonetic element in the “shibboleth” uttered by that new arrival would supposedly reveal a difference in a particular person’s linguistic-geographic origins. (And not infrequently, failing the subjective nano-proof, the ill-omened arrival would be without ado immediately erased from existence.)
Modern xenophobes long for a word or device to identify their enemies and other targets of their enmity. And when these xenophobes are ignorant enough, they will identify the enemy by any crude, bigoted, ill-conceived and/or unreliable method they can conjure forth.
We in First World civilizations far outnumber those that can be categorized as extremists, militants and terrorists. We are vastly superior in wealth, and in military might too. But these facts, however important they are to an elementary geopolitical understanding, do not reliably yield the conclusion that terrorists cannot succeed at all.
Islamic terrorism cannot prevail against First World militaries on any conventional battlefield, it is true. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the enormous differences in military capabilities between the terrorists that comprise a pseudo-state like ISIS and the single national military that is the United States military. A million times more capable? A billion? Five hundred billion? Such a gross imbalance of active, militarily contending sides constitutes what political scientists and other academics who study international relations sometimes refer to as “asymmetrical warfare:” the tactic of the weaker of using sabotage and terrorism, etc. to fight an enemy rather than engagement on a conventional battlefield.
(Incidentally, ISIS terrorists and their ilk have oft-repeated the that they “love death” the way the rest of us who abide in civilization love life. But if the claim were not disingenuous they’d expeditiously obtain that which they say they “love” on a traditional battlefield. And this they decline to do.)
How can we account then for the apparently feckless efforts of Western countries, including the United States, in defeating the terrorists of ISIS from 2013 to 2016? Irrespective of various popular and media pundit expostulations, bemoanings, demurrals and the like, judicious American Commanders in Chief are careful in the use of military forces to affect toward a strategically desired end, especially in treacherous, calamity-inviting fora. There is the potential, when military force is used clumsily, to produce what has often been termed “collateral damage,” and relatedly what the political writer Chalmers Johnson famously called “blowback”. (1) And there is also the possibility that the United States will lose political prestige – whatever is available of that scant and improbable commodity – when and if images of dead schoolchildren killed by U.S. bombings appear on news stations such as Al Jazeera.
Americans on the whole are not very intelligent and not very well informed, and if they are also appreciably racist – and thus likely opposed to the presidency of Barack Obama – then it is an easier thing to decide that the president is not using the American military in an effective way. Some Americans even claim, in their extreme political biases and prejudice, that the president is insincere in his American patriotism, and that is why the terrorist pseudo-state continues to frustrate allied and American military efforts.
Suffice it here only to aver that if the terrorists are to achieve any significant victory against their expansive and wealthy enemies, it will not be on any sort of familiar contestation of militaries on a physical battlefield.
Nonetheless, terrorists can achieve significant successes. And the method of this succeeding should not be in doubt to any of us. They gain by the incremental nudging of the enemy (principally the wealthy and powerful and predominantly Christian nations of the West, and the conspicuous leader of the West, the United States) into engaging a wider war against the Islamic nations and peoples of the world. If their enemies (principally the democratic and putatively “Christian” nations of the Occident) can be made to tilt their aggressions toward the much larger Islamic religion, they, the terrorists, will have gained something (for them) wonderful and infinitely encouraging; if the terrorists of ISIS – or a later manifestation of extremism, as they are numerous: the Saudi Ikhwan, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Egyptian Brotherhood, the Afghan Taliban, al-Shabaab, Ansar al-Islam, Boko Haram, Islamic Jihad Union, ISIL, and more – merely succeed in enticing their enemy to engage them more fully in a clumsy and indiscriminate political manner rather than merely militarily, they will have what they dearly covet.
And how might such a boon to terrorism occur? It may be manifest in major nations of the West democratically electing a candidate that offers to detain, identify, target, investigate, outlaw, reject, vilify, persecute or forbid the immigration and/or visitation of all real or “possible terrorists” or putative Muslims.
Enter the American 2016 presidential election. A major candidate for the presidency of the United States, the nominee of a major political party, and one of essentially only two candidates remaining in the contest for the presidency (in late June 2016) has promised to prohibit Muslim travel to the United States, if he were to be actually elected president. “[I am] calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” he blathered.
Are Americans really prepared to tilt upon the slipperiest of slopes and attempt the ridiculously impossible? Are Americans really intending to target a world religion with over one billion adherents?
How about the shibboleth? Are we to impishly identify Muslims by asking each to say a word? If so, let’s try perspicacity, as repeatedly hearing it may incline the Department of Homeland Security propitiously.
Shall the genuine Muslims (not looking for genuine terrorists, mind you!) be identified by their names? Shall they be identified by their passports? By their style of dress? By their haircuts? By their beards? By their self-alleged political allegiances?
Did anyone notice that we took our eyes off the bulls-eye, off terrorists and onto an ethnicity?
Did Americans notice when the radical candidate subtly changed the wording of his xenophobic rhetoric? He changed the target of this aloofness to “people from countries” with a significant history of terrorism. His opponent, representing the Democratic Party seems to have bypassed the change in his wording. It is not the less evident for this failure, however. He originally stated, at least as early as February 2016, that the prohibition was of “Muslims”; there was no qualification. (see the “complete shutdown” quote above.) But in mid-June, after a horrific gun attack by an American terrorist in Orlando Florida, his statement originally targeting “Muslims” changed, with no discernable notice taken of journalists nationwide. He began to speak of prohibiting “people from certain countries” being denied entry into the United States. And such people were supposed to be from “countries with a significant history of Islamic terrorism.”
Well, we can’t really guess what people passively believe. This “history” of terrorism has to pertain to terrorist atrocities, not mere suppositional beliefs. So, with a radical as their president, are Americans to prohibit Muslim travel to the United States from countries that have a marked recent history of terrorist atrocities?
Apparently the answer is, Yes.
Might this prohibition also include nationals from a country that has lost thousands of people in multiple terrorist attacks in the last twenty years?
Again, the answer is an unequivocal “Yes”. However, irony of ironies, is the United States not such a country? In the twenty-first century, thousands of lives have been taken by self-described Islamic terrorists in the fifty states of the United States. Shall persons from the United States hence be prohibited from venturing into the United States? Once Americans start to play the asinine game of targeting a vast religion instead of targeting wanton terrorism, affording the terrorists their one long-shot at a real victory, ironies and absurdities such as this one will proliferate. And we have to include England, France, and Belgium among the countries that have a significant “history” of terrorist activity because of the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London, the November 2015 attacks in Paris, and the Brussels Belgium bombings of March 2016. Thus, there is the apparent need or want of these misguided Americans to stop tourist visitation and immigration from Western nations too.
Do the American political aspirant and his political supporters realize that this effort to keep all Muslims or people from “Muslim countries” will not and cannot produce the security they wish were available to them? It is very possible that they don’t. This sort of political agenda is not intellectual, and it does not consider matters in any realistic and farsighted way. In order to make one reactionary idea agree with another all sorts of mental gymnastics are necessary. The reactionary believes that “immigrants” are to blame for much of what is supposedly “wrong” with the United States and its political difficulties in the contemporary world. (And racism participates in this mentality too.) There is the simple fact that the United States has allowed millions of people to immigrate from several dozens of countries throughout the entire world, and these immigrants include many scholars and scientists and leaders and businesspersons of various sorts. And this list of these persons is too vast to even begin: count everybody but Geronimo among these! Contemporary political scientists and demographers have frequently pointed out that the United States not only is in its present position of political and economic preeminence because of its longstanding liberal immigration policies, but also that the future of the United States looks relatively bright because millions of new working-age immigrants arrive every decade, which, through taxation of various sorts, supplies the federal and state government revenues necessary to the healthy continuation of the multi-trillion dollar government, as well as the continued growth of overall GDP (Gross Domestic Product, formerly Gross National Product).
All this and more are completely overlooked by reactionaries in their hidebound efforts to supply rationales for what they already believe. There are scapegoats to be identified, and they aren’t going to allow any argument by academics, no matter how lucid and indisputable, to derail their recusant political stance. The ability of the people to selectively ignore specific political facts is extraordinary; this must be among their very most masterful abilities.
The 2016 presidential candidate was surely told by his advisors that the “no Muslims” policy would have no way of being effectively implemented, as Muslims are only people of a certain putative religious heritage or belief, and there is no feasible way of determining such things with any reliability at all. Such a shibboleth does not exist, hence the change in the wording of the crudely xenophobic prohibition.
The Orlando Florida terrorist incident of June 12, 2016 itself certainly helped the presidential campaign of the more reactionary candidate. The next several months between now (late June) and the election in November will tell just how many ready terrorists, native and foreign, there are in the United States; this is their long-awaited opportunity to get a most agreeable candidate (ironically, in his ardent non-accommodations) elected. The reactionary candidate wants his American audience to “think” and respond simplistically. In this he has obviously been obliged. He wants them to think that his overtly militant opposition to the Islamic terrorists will avail the (romantic) strength and determination necessary to the full vanquishing of the enemy. Americans with childishly simplistic political interpretations fancy that this cannot be what the enemy wants. But what these Americans allow is for the fight against the terrorists to morph into a war against Islam. As for the radical terrorists: they want to believe that the West is engaged in an anti-Muslim crusade and they are only loyal, courageous and virtuous defenders of the “one true God,” and this election is the prime opportunity to get that victory accomplished by getting the reactionary to actually become the American president.
And this means that terrorist attacks, being a very powerful instrument of influencing political opinion, will almost certainly increase in the months immediately preceding the 2016 election. Doubtless the American military and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the FBI, CIA and NSA, already know this! From the terrorists’ perspective, this Republican candidate for the American presidency is the very most promising candidate they – the terrorists – are likely to ever encounter.
We in the First World have relied heavily on the terrorists’ stupidity – on their gormless, inelegant and ineffectual efforts to explode their shoes or underwear. But they are not so lacking in opportunism; they will try to influence this election with as many and as shocking and destructive attacks as they can muster.
I don’t recommend fearing anything in the shape of an anthropoid. I do not do the terrorists’ work for them!
I just vote for the other, saner, less radical and less reactionary candidate.
(1) See the Chalmers Johnson nonfiction book Blowback.