To Terror No Sanction

I made a resolution this past Thanksgiving. Having just published yet another article on terrorism, I decided that I didn’t want to come back to that baleful topic during the coming holiday season. I’ve wrestled professionally with the subject of terrorism for virtually my entire adult life, first as an academic researcher, then, for more than three decades, as a hands-on security professional engaged in protecting our most sensitive national security targets from terrorist attack. It remains a focus in both my fiction and in my articles for The American Spectator.

Still, taking a break seemed very much worthwhile as I tried to get into the spirit of the Christmas season. I avoided commenting on the assassination of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even though it reminded me of Germany’s notorious Baader-Meinhof gang and the assassinations of Siegfried Buback, Jurgen Ponto, and Hanns-Martin Schleyer, events in 1977 that decisively influenced my involvement with terrorism.

I passed the December 21st anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing without comment, even though the event remains highly personal to me. And I held back from commenting when someone drove a car into the Christmas street market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing five and injuring hundreds.

But now the holiday season has ended, and, with the horrific news from New Orleans, I can hold back no longer.

As of this writing, at least 15 people are confirmed dead, with dozens injured after a man drove a pickup truck into a crowd celebrating the new year on Bourbon Street. When the truck finally stopped, the man then began firing into the crowd and at police, wounding at least two officers before being shot and killed. We also read that multiple explosive devices were found at the scene, and that the driver showed evidence of jihadi affiliations. Perhaps significantly, the truck was rented from the same company that provided the Tesla cyber truck that exploded outside the Trump resort in Las Vegas.

I won’t even begin to try and deconstruct all these details — this remains, after all, what the TV news creatures call a “developing story.” Instead, I want to make a simple and very blunt observation. It is now time — it is way past time — that we stop “normalizing” terrorism. It’s time that we quit parsing events such as these as “terrorist” or “not terrorist.” It’s time that we quit splitting hairs over motivation, time that we quit dismissing such events as the work of “crazies” whenever we can’t find an obvious political motive or an identifiable nexus to a recognized terrorist group.

It’s telling — and deeply disturbing — that it took widespread public derision to move the FBI to label the New Orleans attack as an act of terrorism.

This evident lack of seriousness flows from a widespread unwillingness to take terrorism seriously, and, above all, from a reflexive tendency to make excuses for terrorist acts. I understand that we can’t simply subsume every act of criminal violence under the umbrella term “terrorist.” I recognize that all manner of violence, including mass killings, can sometimes only be attributed to individual insanity, to psychopathic pathology, and that some criminals kill simply in furtherance of a purely criminal agenda. But for too long now we’ve allowed ourselves to get caught up in the game of “justifiable motivation,” even as we may dismiss it as “sick or twisted.” (READ MORE from James H. McGee: State-Sponsored Biological Terrorism and Multi-Dimensional Warfare)

We don’t know this morning what drove the perpetrator of the New Orleans horror, although it appears likely that regardless of any group affiliation, his purpose was jihad against America. Weeks after the event, German authorities are still struggling to make sense of the Magdeburg attacker’s motivations, although they might achieve clarity more quickly if they didn’t spend so much time trying to make sure that any conclusions they draw are politically correct.

While we wait for the usual suspects to offer “context” or offer up “root causes” to explain the New Orleans massacre, we have a very recent example of how this gets played. We saw the game of “justifiable motivation” on full display with the assassination of Brian Thompson, as thousands ranted online at the iniquities of our healthcare system, or at capitalism, or even at well-compensated white male executives, asserting, in effect, that somehow made Thompson’s assassination “understandable,” and by implication, justifiable, even from those who piously insisted otherwise.

There are, of course, useful reasons for analyzing the psychopathology of violence. There are things to be learned from the study of even such twisted minds as Ted Bundy or Geoffrey Dahmer. Such analysis, however, is profoundly different from what often is offered by way of “trying to understand.” Too often, and even with the best of good intentions, this becomes a means of “normalizing” something that deserves no such thing. To the extent that a partisan political motive can be identified, the rush to normalize often becomes a stampede.

Way back in 1987, in Police, a then-obscure law enforcement journal, I reflected on a decade of studying terrorism and chose to define it in three simple words: “violence as communication.” Looking back from the perspective of nearly four decades, I still find this definition persuasive, above all because it cuts through a lot of the academic gobbledygook that has arisen about the topic.

At that time, I suggested that we needed to devote less attention to the motivations of terrorists, noting how, going back to the 19th Century origins of what we now understand as terrorism, the motivations had proven endlessly fungible, a zigzag pattern from the Russian anarchists through Bolshevik revolutionaries, to IRA gunmen, the PLO, and today’s jihadis. When Norway’s Anders Breivik massacred over seventy people his motives differed utterly and completely different from the Charlie Hebdo or Bataclan terrorists in France, but structurally the acts were very much the same.

So what, then, must we do to change all this? At the end of my 1987 article I wrote that “instead of considering our current need for security as transitory … we would be better served by cultivating the attitudes and aptitudes of security as an essential foundation of our civilization.” I continue to stand by that proposition, even in the face of such pious pronouncements as “we can’t let terrorists determine how we live our lives.” No, we can’t — but too often, “living our lives” means sticking our heads in the sand. Scant hours after the New Orleans attack, the progressives over at The Atlantic had already trotted out this nonsense yet again.

Of course, we can’t let “the terrorist” take over our lives, but this is the silliest of strawman arguments. We can get on with our lives while taking terrorism seriously and incorporating serious security measures into the way we go about living. I recently came back from France, where deployable anti-vehicle bollards had been built into every street leading into the historic old quarter of Metz, a modest city. The bollards were controlled by a key pad, allowing them to remain securely in place except when authorized access — by a city bus or trash truck for example — was required. This is clearly not hard, and likely less expensive than all manner of frivolous municipal expenses.

More fundamentally, however, we might, once and for all, stop making excuses for terrorism. The most egregious of these comes in the form of “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Once and for all, and no matter where one’s sympathies might lie, there is no justification, ever, for murdering a businessman because you don’t like his business, or a politician because you don’t like his politics — or a group of people because you don’t like who they are, or what attributes they embody. No supposed “victimhood” justifies the pogrom of October 7, no oppression justifies mowing down New Year’s revelers just to elevate oneself. (READ MORE: Security Breach From Pearl Harbor to Butler PA)

Above all, no cause, no matter how noble, justifies attacking the very structure of civilized life. We need to be safe in our homes, safe at our schools and workplaces, safe on our streets and in our subways. Once this goes, a “Mad Max” dystopia looms. In one of my earliest articles for The American Spectator, I wrote, quoting George Orwell, that “people sleep peacefully at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” I further observed that “the need for good and decent people to sleep peacefully at night justifies the actions of rough men on their behalf. It may be the only true justification for those actions.”

So as we enter the new year, let’s resolve to embrace the most fundamental of conservative tenets. Let’s stand unequivocally for the notion that ours is a good society, worthy of protection. Let’s uphold the proposition that, even when we need to make our society better, we can accomplish this through peaceful means. And finally, once and for all, let’s offer no quarter to those who would try to destroy all that we hold dear.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.

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