THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIV, Issue # 63, April 3, 2012
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
IT'S NOT ROAD RAGE, IT'S TERRORISM
By Dr Daniel Pipes
A RECURRING PROBLEM OF POLITICIANS, LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, & THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN THE U.S.A. & OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES:
THEIR UNWILLINGNESS TO STARE ISLAMIST TERRORISM IN THE FACE & ASCRIBE MURDER TO IT -- THE WESTERN ESTABLISHMENTS' REPEATEDLY CONJURING UP
LAME EXCUSES FOR ISLAMIST ACTS OF TERROR, INCLUDING "A WORK DISPUTE," A "STORMY [FAMILY] RELATIONSHIP," THE ACNE DRUG ACCUTANE, AN
"ATTITUDE PROBLEM," & "LONELINESS & DEPRESSION" -- THE TENDENCY TO ASCRIBE ACTS OF JIHADI MURDER TO INSANITY, OR DIMINISHED MENTAL
CAPACITY -- WESTERNERS IGNORING THE RELIGIOUS & IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF ISLAMIST TERRORISM & THE CONSEQUENT HEAVY PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID BY
THE NATION-STATES OF THE WEST
FULL STORY:
On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli doctor of American origins, went to the Mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and murdered 29
Muslims with an automatic weapon before being overwhelmed and himself killed. This massacre prompted conspiracy theories and riots in Muslim circles,
including accusations that the government of Israel stood behind Goldstein, an allegation that strenuous denunciations of his attack by the Israeli government
did not fully deflect.
On March 1, four days later, Rashid Baz, a New York livery driver of Lebanese origins, fired two guns at a van carrying Hasidic Jewish boys on a ramp leading
to the Brooklyn Bridge, killing Ari Halberstam, 16, a Yeshiva student. Baz was quickly apprehended, convicted, and sentenced to 141 years in prison.
Circumstantial evidence pointed to a link between the two events, for Baz was immersed in the Arabic-language media coverage of Goldstein's attack, he
attended the incendiary Islamic Center of Bay Ridge, and he was surrounded by Muslims who condoned terrorism against Jews. More than that, friends
indicated that Baz was obsessively angered by the attack in Hebron and the psychiatrist for his legal defense, Douglas Anderson, testified that Baz "was
enraged" by it. "He was absolutely furious. . . . Were it not for Hebron this whole tragedy [in New York] wouldn't have occurred."
Yet, the seemingly obvious connection between Goldstein and Baz could not be established, because Baz accounted for his violence by referring to
post-traumatic stresses from his experiences in Lebanon. And so, despite the preponderance of evidence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation adopted Baz's
own dissemblance and called the murder on the Brooklyn Bridge an act of "road rage." Only after Halberstam's mother devoted years of effort, did the FBI, in
2000, reclassify the Baz attack as terrorism.
And thus matters rested, until a few days ago, when Baz's confession in 2007 finally became public via a New York Post article. In it, Baz acknowledged
the impact of the Goldstein atrocity on him, admitted having specifically targeted Jews, and confessed to following a van of Hasidic boys for two miles from the
Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary to the bridge. Asked if he would have shot at a van full of black or Latino people, he replied, "No, I only shot them because
they were Jewish."
This belated confession points to a recurring problem of politicians, law enforcement, and the press with Islamist terrorism: their unwillingness to stare it in the
face and ascribe murder to it.
Most recently, this avoidance reared its ugly head in the case of Mohammed Merah in Toulouse, France, where the establishment's immediate impulse was to
assume the murderer of three soldiers and four Jews was a non-Muslim. As my colleague Adam Turner notes in the Daily Caller, "the elite Western
public officials' and media's speculation about the true killer, prior to the discovery of his identity, heavily focused on the belief that he was a white European
neo-Nazi." Only when Merah himself boasted of his crime to the police and even sent videos of his actions to Al Jazeera did the other theories finally
vaporize.
The Baz and Merah examples fit a much larger pattern of denying Islamist terrorism that I trace as far back as the 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in
New York City by El Sayyid Nosair, an attack initially ascribed by the Police Department's Chief of Detectives to "a prescription drug for or consistent with
depression." Since then, time and again, the Establishment has conjured up similarly lame excuses for Islamist terrorism, including "a work dispute," a "stormy
[family] relationship," the acne drug Accutane, an "attitude problem," and "loneliness and depression."
Most disturbing, however, is the tendency to ascribe Islamist terror to diminished mental capacity. As Teri Blumenfeld notes in the current issue of the
Middle East Quarterly, "Muslims who kill in the name of their religion frequently evade punishment in Western courts by pleading insanity or mental
incompetence." In Western courts, indeed, defense lawyers routinely attribute acts of jihadi murder to insanity.
Ignoring the religious and ideological roots of Islamist terrorism carries a heavy price; not thoroughly investigating the Kahane assassination meant
overlooking materials that could have prevented the World Trade Center bombing in 1993; and Merah's apprehension sooner would have saved lives.
Islamism must be squarely faced to protect ourselves from future violence.
© Daniel Pipes 2012
Originally Published in National Review Online, April 3, 2012
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from DanielPipes.org, April 3, 2012
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/10941/rashid-baz-road-rage-terrorism
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Islamist Fifth Column -- America's Internal Enemies:
Disloyalty, Subversion, Sedition, & Treason
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and President of the Middle East Forum,
Publisher of Middle East Quarterly,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for National Review Online, Front Page
Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and
developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network
television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the
U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately
twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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