Lessons from Boston

Reflecting before the capture of the second suspect in the Boston bombing, Victor Davis Hanson focuses his aim on how we as a country should go about dealing with domestic terrorism.  Since I am a big on using the right words in politics, I think this is some good advice:

I don’t think the therapeutic and euphemistic approach (the effort to change the language to win adherents by fantasies such as “workplace violence”/“overseas contingency operations”/ “man-caused disasters”) works. Avoidance of the word terrorism, especially in the context of Islam, or worry over the loss of the diversity in the military after the Hasan killing, is not the right way to drive home to would-be killers the image of a society collectively vigilant and unforgiving of terrorism. 

These Orwellian terms came from the easy caricaturing of the Bush-Cheney-era anti-terrorism protocols, an indulgence that became popular as Iraq heated up, 9/11 fears lessened, and politics returned with a vengeance. But those measures were in response to real threats about which we were initially both confused and unprepared, and soon had forgotten. The irony of the Patriot Act measures was that they largely worked and therefore gave some the luxury to insist that the measures were unnecessary all along.

The focus on diversity (in the sense that race, ethnicity, and gender somehow defines a person as a moral being) and the like really misses the forest for the trees and puts something on a pedestal that is only an accident of birth.

Some more advice on what should be done regarding immigration policy:

If we are intent on accepting persecuted “refugees” from religious-based conflict in the Islamic world — whether Chechens to Boston or Somalis to Minnesota — then it is probably not a wise idea to grant, without close scrutiny, those without citizenship periodic visas to return to their supposedly dangerous countries of origin. If their homeland was so perilous to begin with, why would a resident alien risk going back to a place whose danger was the primary reason for his original request for asylum in the U.S.? Assembling anti-personnel IEDs is not the sort of skill that one acquires without first-hand mentoring — it cannot not simply be learned by downloading plans from the Internet, at least not without a lot of personal risk.

And the ultimate irony of our immigration policies in light of what just transpired in Boston:

Finally, why is it so easy to enter the United States and so hard to be deported from it, especially after being arrested or violating its laws?