A week ago we were in the throes of a full fledged hating on all Christians because of the presumed motives of the terrorist who killed people, injured people and terrorized many more in Colorado Springs. As his ex-wives and present girlfriend and others described him what emerged was a violent, mean hypocrite who, as one of his ex wives truthfully said, didn't follow the Bible he pretended to.
This weekend we are listening to the family, members of the mosque he used to attend and others who can't explain the motives of the man who murdered even more people at a civil service agency in San Bernardino. From what most of them are saying, it seems likely that he was recruited to terrorism through the wife he met online and brought back from Saudi Arabia, the breeding ground of terrorist groups and the major banker of terrorists in the middle east and elsewhere.
Saudi Arabia is governed by some of of the worst human rights violators in the world where beheading and stoning and slavery and human trafficking is mixed with some of the most radical oppression of women found anywhere but those men who maintain that government also are jillionaires sitting on oil that is a vitally needed raw material in many places so that government is seen as untouchable. Needless to say if the West, somehow, chose to do without Saudi Arabia's oil, China would not be so fussy about the range of violation of rights - it being another of the major violators of human rights in the world - and back in the day not averse to funding a bit of terrorism. As the communists became commui-capitalists they would seem to have discovered other things are more profitable.
I heard a report on the radio about the possibility that terrorist groups are recruiting women to marry Muslim men in the United States and elsewhere as a means of radicalizing their husbands and others. I don't know how reliable those reports are but it seems to be a possible explanation of what happened in San Bernardino. Syed Rizwan Farook's family and his co-workers say he never seemed to have violent radicalized tendencies in the past, some of them are saying there were definite changes in him. He stopped, abruptly, going to his mainline mosque which wasn't supportive of that use of the label of Islam.
The news that his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had posted her allegiance to ISIS on her Facebook page poses a troubling issue. If we are going to make it illegal for American law enforcement to monitor such internet activity, we're going to find it impossible to prevent such under the radar terrorists from operating. I think we're going to be forced, eventually, to accept that such stuff will be monitored in other countries as they are less paranoid about such monitoring and it is stupid in the extreme to allow the United States to be an open opportunity for it. I've come to believe that the realistic option will be to have better law enforcement who are absolutely dedicated to democratic values who will be trusted to do that kind of monitoring or we're going to get one that is doing it anyway and which isn't dedicated to democratic values. To do nothing will hand victory to the right-wing paranoiacs because as there are more incidents like this they are going to use them to gain power. That is happening now. Liberals have to give up the paranoid-libertarian nonsense on those issues or they will be discredited by the results. Knowing that someone like Tashfeen Malik has done that on Facebook after she's killed lots of people doesn't cut it. Greenwald and Snoweden are not going to win that argument in the end, pretending they will is only going to guarantee that the fall out will be worse than it has to be.
The government of the United States and governments in Europe have to start cracking down on Saudi and other governments that allow their countries to fund terrorists. While I'm no expert, I can't help but wondering if factions of the Saudi government don't see such terror as their means of practicing hegemony in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa. I would like to know what role it plays in things like the trafficking of slaves for the Saudi elite and in other features of their worse than medieval system. And, no doubt, the bankers who do business with that establishment, also need to be cracked down on. I can't imagine many of those aren't found outside of those regions, certainly some of them on North America or in some of the money laundering countries such as Switzerland and various island archipelagos.
I haven't had the stomach to look at the right wing websites but, no doubt, they are a mirror of Muslim bashing to last weekends' Christian bashing on the pseudo-left websites. The majority of the people who have been killed by the terror funded with Saudi money have been Muslims, though non-Muslims in the region are treated the full force of such barbarity. That isn't a shock considering how other religions and minorities are treated under the laws in Saudi Arabia. I can imagine lots of Muslims despise it as much as many non-Muslims do. That is one thing that can be said of the phenomenon of "Islamic" terrorism that can't be said of "Christian" terrorism, there is no vast source of wealth fueling it, today. It won't stop as long as that funding source is in place. That is what the West is at war with, not the Muslim people who are as terrorized and oppressed by it as anyone is. This isn't the secular, or even "Christian" west against the world population of Muslims anymore than it was the west against the people of Russia, this is the west against the wealthy elite who want to expand their control through pseudo-Islamic terror. Not realizing that will only enable them, I have to wonder who is benefiting here by pushing that guaranteed to fail framing of the issue.
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