Perhaps there could be no more of a poetic dichotomy than LeBron James furiously masturbating all over the national media during the exact same moments Oakland’s African-American community begins its slow-motion implosion, an event that threatens to leave a sinkhole which could once again drag all of California down along with the isolated events of one city.

While every major news channel was busy reporting about a ball game, a jury lacking a single black member ruled that Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot Grant in the back after he was called a “bitch-ass nigger” and while he was handcuffed facedown on the ground, was guilty only of involuntary manslaughter.

The legal equivalent of accidentally jumping a curb and running someone over with your car, admitting only that Grant is in fact dead and Mehserle’s reckless – but possibly accidental – actions lead to his death.

Folks in Oakland are now, understandably, just a little bit unhappy.

Any outside element seeking to sow the seeds of dissension and unrest in America doesn’t have to squint too hard to see that there are potentially hundreds of thousands of other men who might be a little bit pissed off and a little bit predisposed to violence.

Men who have spent time in prison, have no jobs, no love for the police, and who might jump at the idea of killing a few of them. And the nation we’re currently engaging in a soft nuclear detente with is easily the most likely to try and take advantage of this situation, which was best illustrated by what Iran did at the very start of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Right after they released all the women and children, they released one other subset of the hostages.

All of the African-Americans, making a direct appeal to their status as fellow victims of American oppression.

And yet most Americans had almost no idea that the ’79 Revolution, which put the current theocratic totalitarian regime into power, was going on at all. Other than maybe Kermit Roosevelt, pretty much no one in America had the slightest clue that anything of any importance was going on in Iran until the hostage crisis began at the tail end of the Revolution, on November 4^th, 1979. The hostage crisis was the culmination of the Revolution, it had begun nearly two years earlier in early 1978, when the first street rallies and demonstrations coalesced on Qom’s dusty streets.

It was the Iranian hostage crisis that held the world’s attention rapt for 444 days, and which suddenly made events that before seemed utterly immaterial to the average American a staple of their nightly news.

And, fittingly, it was the hostage crisis which gave birth to the formalized hierarchy of American Special Operations, the United States Special Operations Command, which still exists largely unchanged today. The botched rescue effort, thwarted by insufficient planning and operational naivete, served as a telling foil for the aptitude and guile the Iranian regime went on to demonstrate in countless acts of state sponsored terrorism in the years that followed.

President Carter’s botched rescue effort, Operation Eagle Claw, was a clusterfuck in every sense of the word. Not only did eight American servicemen lose their lives as a desert sandstorm whipped up and made helicopter flight all but impossible, but Iran gained control of six state-of-the-art American helicopters. It’s hard to imagine a mission going worse.

Iran, on the other hand, soon proved itself a master of irregular warfare. The furnace of the Revolution burnt away any element of Iranian society which might have weakened the new regime, and allowed it to sharpen Iran’s military into a formidable and deft weapon.

In 1983 the Iranian military masterminded the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, one of the most devastating surprise attacks in American military history. And then throughout the 1980′s Iranian sponsored terror took lives in Jerusalem, Rome, and countless other Western cities – soon becoming classified by the United States as the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist attacks.

But what is state-sponsored terrorism really?

On a purely analytical level, it’s simply another term for irregular warfare. Whether or not an act of violence breaks the Geneva Conventions shouldn’t be the judge of whether or not it’s considered “terrorism.” Certainly not whether it’s considered an act of Political Terrorism, a phenomenon that has clearly defined boundaries.

Because terrorism, as a means, has such a broad nature you have to categorize terrorist violence within a framework before you make any sort of analysis if it’s going to mean anything at all.

The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes. It’s the outcome of violence used with precise timing and targeting in the right set of social circumstances. Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media’s attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step’s retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism. Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist’s real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can’t goad the established authority into striking back.

It is this retribution that validates his ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

And in just the last year, a new term has been coined to describe what happens when the cycle of Political Terrorism is triggered within an international context of warfare that allows travel between nations and cultures, and the instantaneous transmission of events from anywhere in the world to everywhere in the world.

Before coining the term “accidental guerrilla,” David Killcullen fought as a member of the Australian military in theatres of war on multiple continents, and served as a counterterrorism adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General David Petraeus, as well as serving as the chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department. The term accidental guerrilla has its origins in the native resistance to the War on Terror that began after 9/11.

As Killcullen traveled to areas where there was ongoing military action against declared “terrorists,” he noticed an odd phenomenon.

Many, in fact most, of the men fighting against American forces didn’t actually ascribe to the violent jihadi ideology that led al-Qaida to perpetrate 9/11. They were just average locals who found outsiders engaged in a shooting war on their turf, and felt compelled to join in. In the words of one Afghani villager who spontaneously joined in with the Taliban in an ambush against American troops, “when the battle was right there in front of them, how could they not join in? …This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley in years. It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out.”¹

As outlined in his ground-breaking book The Accidental Guerrilla, the phenomena follows a four step cycle that’s nearly identical to Political Terrorism, and that can be simply understood as Political Terrorism within a specific framework. Kilcullen describes accidental guerrillas as the result of a syndrome, and illustrates it using biological analogies and four stages:

1. infecting an area where the State has a waning influence
2. reaching a virulent potential for widespread media dissemination by carrying out acts of captivating violence
3. drawing in outside intervention to deal with this new virulent threat
4. a rejection of the heavyhanded outside intervention by the local population, which wins the infectious agents sympathizers and followers

And so accidental guerrillas are born when they become infected by the virulent influence of al-Qaida or any other radical ideology, and fight back against any outside intervention that follows. Not necessarily because they agree with the radicals, but because they feel compelled to reject what they’ve come to see as an unjust and illegitimate outside power.

The rest of the book goes on to illustrate how the accidental guerrilla syndrome rallied locals to the side of international jihadis everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan to East Timor, and argues that the syndrome was responsible for mobilizing most of the violence against an outside American military presence. Locals who either want in on the action, or are afraid “the Crazies will kill them,”² reportedly make up nearly 90% of those fighting back against what’s been sold to them as a military operation undertaken by outsiders.

In the last few chapters of the book, Kilcullen addresses the potential for Europe to act as a stating area for terrorism and future accidental guerrillas, as well as the role there of micro-havens, “urban undergrounds, alienated ethnic groups, and slums where the writ of government does not always run and where police and security services’ situational awareness is low.”³

But oddly enough, the potential for accidental guerrillas to emerge in America is never explored.

Another nearly identical term for “microhavens” is State Shells. At the broadest level, State Shells are semi-autonomous polities hosted within a nation that are able to impose their own will and organizational structure on some segment of society beyond the reach of local government regulation.

Strictly speaking, State Shells are cohesive organizations which have “a monopoly on the means of violence; territoriality; taxation; and public bureaucracy”⁴ within their stomping-grounds. The depth and breadth of the will they are able to impose varies greatly from situation to situation, but generally State Shells establish a following in a society by filling gaps left open by the government.

The less able a government is to provide public works and order, from hospitals to schools to support for the needy, the bigger the opportunity a State Shell has to gain credibility and then power within a pocket of that state. Hezbollah, the PLO, the IRA, ETA, and the Shining Path, are a few of the more notorious State Shells.

A crucial common-denominator among all State Shells is economic independence from the host government – State Shells must be able to raise their own funds, either through their own taxes, outside support, or often via the illicit trade and smuggling of drugs and guns. Within America the drug trade forms a particular poignant example of this, as the hierarchy of gang commerce has come to mimic the corporate pyramid of power – with lots of low-level workers propping up a few kingpins.

Many of the world’s most recognizable terrorist groups are prime examples of State Shells filling the gaps created when a government – beset by political violence, incompetence, or upheaval – is unable to fully govern.

Or, in the modern American case a government may lose its grip on governance because of economic catastrophe, as California is one of the first but not the last state to openly discuss ending many forms of public welfare and support for the needy, and is already laying off cops and other public officials. This creates even wider gaps for gangs to fill, as in many urban black communities gangs already provide jobs in the form of drug dealing, and act as the de facto security force and arbiters of justice.

Within a State Shell there is no such thing as the rule of law, and the exercise of Godfather-esque impersonal power that is based not on a code of justice but individual whim is paramount over political representation or citizenship. Although they do provide public works, a State Shell’s overall effect is not a positive one on the society that hosts it, as they are by nature exploitative and predatory.⁶

Examples of this behavior span numerous continents and countless generations. But nowhere and never has it been so apt than among the minority populations of America’s innercities. Gangs serve as imperfect examples of State Shells, but examples all the same. If there’s anywhere a State Shell might find traction in America, it’s among our urban minority innercities. For generations our urban innercities have been haunted by gang life and the drug trade.

Neither gang life nor the drug trade manifested spontaneously out of the black community. They only emerged after racially biased drug laws caused blacks, who make up 14% of our drug-users but over half of those imprisoned for drug-use, to find their lives dictated by a life behind walls we all built but refuse to see.

Nearly any way you look at it, our current economic crisis is impacting our poor black communities much more acutely than our poor white ones. The most obvious indicator is the still skyrocketing unemployment rate, which for young black males is now twice as high as their young white counterparts. But simple unemployment doesn’t capture the full scope of economic distress.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ’79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent.

It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

And for going on two generations now, America’s level of economic disparity has been steadily rising. This ongoing financial crisis may be what finally causes it to crest over.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”²⁵

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.”²⁶

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970′s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

One way to capture it is by examining what portion of America’s total income the top 1% of earners receive. The share of that top 1% has nearly doubled since 1970, and it’s now the same size as the income earned by everyone in the bottom 40% of earners combined.²⁷

So the very few families who make up the top 1% of all earners have a combined income that matches the incomes of all the families in the bottom 40% of earners.

Looking at economic well-being another way, in terms of financial wealth or “stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses, and other financial instruments,” as of 1998 the top 1% of families controlled nearly half of that pie, with the top 20% controlling fully 93% of it. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of families actually have negative financial wealth – their debts actually surpass their assets.²⁸

And this cavernous gap has only been widening, between 1998 and 2001 the net worth of families in the top 10% of America jumped 69%, significantly more than any other group.²⁹ In the years leading up to that point, between 1988 and 1999, the difference in net worth between black families and white families grew by $16,000 and the gap in net financial assets grew by $20,000. By 2004 white families had an average net worth of $81,000, and black families an average net worth of just $8,000 – roughly a tenth the average white family’s.³⁰

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and fully 60% among our middle class,³¹ the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth. Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods³² – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.³³

And as the real estate market has crashed blacks have suffered much more severely than whites. As it was stated earlier, even when income and credit are controlled for black families now have their homes foreclosed on and are thrown out into the street three-times as often as white families.

Even the very idea of what it means to be poor is color-coded, as while 1 in 3 blacks live in poverty, less than 1 in 10 whites do. And yet the very definition of poverty itself now varies to the point of absurdity, since “poverty level whites control nearly as many mean net financial assets as the highest-earning blacks, $26,683 to $28,310. For those surviving at or below the poverty level, this indicates quite clearly that poverty means one thing for whites and another for blacks.”⁷

The impact of these facts have echoed across generations, as nearly three-quarters of all black children grow up in homes with no net financial assets. That’s nearly double the rate of white kids. And nine in ten black kids grow up in homes without enough monetary reserves to last more than three months at the poverty line if their income were to drop, roughly four times the white ratio.⁷

Even Eminem seemed to have no sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations. The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration. This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”⁸

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.⁹

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.¹⁰

Hotlanta served as a case study for mortgage-based racism, as the Pulitzer-winning series in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution “The Color of Money” so aptly captured.

It showed how blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for. And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts. However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites.¹¹

Even well-to-do blacks have been unable to escape from this institutional prejudice.

Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors. Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.”¹²

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” however the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

This racial stratification has created neighborhoods ripe for infection by radical Islamists hoping to begin the accidental guerrilla syndrome. Black neighborhoods have more crime, more poverty, and less governance than wealthy white ones – the ideal conditions for an outside terrorist infection to set in. And the process is made even easier when you consider the effect the prison system has on black communities, isolating young men away from their friends and families and everything they’ve ever known for years at a time, the ideal circumstances for softening someone up for radicalization.

Once radicalized, they’re released back to their old neighborhoods to begin spreading the contagion that had been injected into them in prison while they were held prone by hopelessness, isolation, and fear.

If the Accidental Guerrilla theory of terrorism is correct, America shouldn’t be worried about the detonation of a nuclear device in one of our ports, about the release of a biological plague, or any outside element directly attacking our country. The risk of retribution is simply too great, as Tom Clancy so bluntly illustrated in Executive Orders – if any attack can be traced back to your soil, America will not hesitate to blithely erase you from the map.

As the events of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 have made abundantly clear, adherents of radical Islam who seek to attack the West won’t do it through any weapon of mass destruction. Homemade bombs with cell phone triggers have already proven highly effective, and are easily produced.

And as events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have borne out – the most effective way for radical Islamists to attack a society isn’t by using overpowering technological capabilities or advanced biological weaponry to inflict massive civilian casualties. Instead, it’s by co-opting weak and vulnerable elements of the society who don’t feel like they have protection from a strong central government, and by exploiting pre-existing social tensions and fissures.

To create accidental guerrillas from a desperate and angry minority community that feels abandoned by their neighbors and their nation.

As revolution burns in Iran, what emerges will either be a strong and progressive state intent on embracing choice and human freedom, or a totalitarian theocracy hardened by the violent removal of any element of dissent. Iran is just warming up, the Islamic Revolution took the better part of two years, this progressive one will at least take several more months.

It might seem like what’s going on over there won’t touch your life here.

But if Iran were to look for a weak point in America’s armor, it would be where accidental guerrillas have emerged in other societies – among our disaffected minority populations, who have been subject to an incredibly disproportionate amount of time in prison, as well as several generations of stifling economic realities.

If African-Americans who have been converted to radical Islam while in prison do successfully pull off an attack that claims innocent lives (as already happened in Arkansas and was attempted in New York), and the police cracks down on their communities in turn – it’s not hard to imagine the urban black communities protesting and rioting against what they’ve in the past seen as an unwarranted and unjust crackdown.

Our urban police forces don’t exactly have a calm or productive relationship with our urban minority communities, accidental guerrillas will be far from endangered if the cycle of Political Terror begins in America.

America isn’t supposed to be about advancing the strongest members of our society while isolating weaker ones, but about providing a fair chance to everyone. So long as we continue to look the other way, and pretend nothing is wrong as economic and judicial realities tie the hands of so many of our neighbors, we remain exposed to the threat of outside forces inciting accidental guerrillas.

- learn more about Tremble the Devil -

The budget crisis, unemployment, all of that is going to the last of your average Californian’s worries before the summer’s out. Probably the last of many of our worries, as what begins in California will inevitably spread to many of our doorsteps. Getting to that point though, that requires a little bit of explaining.

In one of the opening scenes of the coming-of-age cinematic classic Dazed and Confused, the history teacher yells after her class on the last day of school that over the summer during the holiday weekend “when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha,” they shouldn’t forget “what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, rich white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

There’s a lot of truth to that sentiment, although it’s not something anyone studies much in high school – where we focus on the social and philosophical elements of the American Revolution and, for the most part, ignore its underlying economic element. But if those rich white men had been taxed more fairly, the Revolution might never have occurred. Something you’re reminded of every time you see the cheeky slogan on a DC license plate.

American classrooms condition us only to think of the Revolution as the triumph of Freedom, Virtue, and Truth over the evil rule of a tyrannical and monarchical Empire. But if the colonists had been economically well-off, would any revolution have come to be?

Rich, happily employed people have never staged any sort of rebellion at any point in history.

A more historically sound argument that economics played a crucial role in the American Revolution was captured by Benjamin Franklin, who noticed upon returning to the Colonies from England that a real estate bubble had been in the process of inflating.

It popped, and revolution ensued.

The Civil War is a more traditional event to examine through an economic lens. No one would argue that the economies of monopolies, embargoes, and slavery didn’t play a role in the South’s choice to secede. Exactly what role it played is nebulous, but certainly without economic conflict the Civil War would not have occurred how and when it did.

Similarly, the French Revolution famously happened when the price of bread was at its peak. It seems there was a tipping point of food inflation which helped provoke the common Frenchmen to rise up, along with other mitigating factors. But arguably, the French Revolution was as much about the price of bread as it was the Rights of Man.

Every single revolution or great social upheaval throughout history has had a strong economic element to it. China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, even the Iranian Revolution received a heavy push from economic discontent.

So it seems a little odd that with America going through an economic upheaval that just about everyone agrees will be at least on par with the Great Depression, that the only historical metrics it seems anyone is using to judge the impact of what’s happening around us are those provided by Zimbabwe and Wiemar Germany.

Other than the specter of inflation, our America shares next to nothing with either of those countries in terms of culture or national story. Besides the fact neither of their currencies were the linchpin of the international financial system, socially and historically there’s basically no parallel to be found.

But where can we find out what happens in America when the social situation gets tense? Well, we don’t have to go very far at all. In fact, we don’t even have to leave our own shores.

Within the intelligence community there’s a phrase that’s used whenever a report that’s still being written is made obsolete by new occurrences. Whether you’re writing analysis about political tension, economic upheaval, or the location of a high-value target, oftentimes something will happen to make your report moot.

Say you’re writing a lengthy in-depth report about a high-value target, and the suddenly he gets whacked by a rival. Well fuck, that might be two weeks of work out the window. And on top of your report you’d probably write “OBE” – or “overtaken by events.”

Economic analysts, like all analysts, tend to get an odd sort of tunnel vision. There are dozens and dozens of websites run by incredibly talented and deeply insightful individuals dedicated to predicting what’s going to happen three, six, even two-dozen months down the road. When a recovery is going to happen, how close we are to a housing bottom, whether or not the value or precious metals will spike, convincing arguments about either inflation or deflation occurring.

Some of them bring in wry humor and mind-bending technical jargon, others offer unique and informed analysis but skew it with bombast.

It is impossible to draw a direct causal line between recent outbreak of terrorist violence and the deteriorating economic conditions. Everything that’s happened could be brushed off as coincidence, because there’s simply no way to reliably measure exactly how much economic distress it takes to set any one individual off. Inarguably though, individuals are being set off by the tanking economy.

It started a few months ago, with a rash of horrifying murder-suicides in quiet suburban American communities. Men killing off their families and then taking their own lives, all of them apparently driven to and then past the brink by economic distress.

In your gut, you probably feel like something isn’t right. Unless you happen to be loaded and are only friends with other rich people, odds are you know at least one person who seems more desperate than you ever remember them.

And desperate individuals, those who feel like they have nothing to lose and nothing left to live for and no way out, often take drastic action. Economics aren’t the only factor, but rich succesful people tend not to go on shooting rampages. Mix enough desperate individuals into any society, and a few of them will inevitably go off.

This has been happening again and again at an alarming rate, from multiple debt-driven murder suicides in California, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, and other states to simple suicides in many others.

This afternoon, there was a shooting at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist, who much like the Unabomber was trying to promote his ideology through violent action. Then a few weeks ago there was the murder of George Tiller, whose shooter didn’t really become a terrorist until he threatened that more was to come, that he was just the beginning.

The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes.

Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media’s attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step’s retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism. Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist’s real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can’t goad the established authority into striking back.

It is this retribution that validates the terrorist’s ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

Looking at American history, it’s tough to argue that white supremacists are going to incite a widespread crackdown by the authorities. Waco is sometimes pointed to, but that was more of a cult than a white supremacy group. Arguing that radicalized black Muslims are going to be able to incite a crackdown, now that’s a whole lot easier.

Because take your pick.

Authorities in America have shown a propensity for bringing too heavy a hand against both Muslims and blacks, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that black Muslims will have a hard time inciting the authorities to bring violence against them.

Plus there’s the fact that neither George Tiller’s killer nor today’s Holocaust shooter was trying to escape. They knew full well going into their attacks that they were going to be caught, and were content going down shooting. Not the case with either instance of violence by fundamentalist black Muslims. In the purest sense, George Tiller’s murderer didn’t really become a terrorist until a few days after the attack when he threatened that more violence against other abortion doctors was coming, and the Holocaust shooter didn’t become one until hate messages and an anti-minority rant were found in his car.

The NYC cell had no intention of getting caught as they no idea their apparent terrorist liaison was really an FBI informant, and Abdulhakim Muhammad was only stopped after he was pulled over by the police, with all evidence pointing to the fact he was bent on continuing his spree. And the NYC cell wasn’t stopped because the FBI took action, they only closed out their sting after the four terrorists finally decided it was time to get their hands on some C-4 and plant it at a local synagogues.

After over a year of interaction with the FBI informant, why did they choose the moment they did to finally act? Was it random? Or did it have something to do with deepening economic crisis, and the fact that the unemployment rate for African-American males is now almost twice the national average?

Even before the current crisis, in 1995 the wealth-gap between black and white was so wide that blacks owned only 8 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites. Just eight-cents to the dollar.

In other terms, as of 1998 the average white household’s net worth was $100,700 higher than the black average. And that wasn’t even the peak of the gap, according the most recent data, from 2007, the gap in household net worth is now $142,600.

Take a moment to consider that gap. Your average white American family
has a $140,000 leg up on the average black American family.

These are only the most obvious statistics – like every economic downturn, this one is hitting the poorest of us the hardest. The sub-prime meltdown has hit the poor, and disproportionately the black poor, much harder than any other segment of our population. The poor have little to no savings, their everyday existence is a tenuous balance between hope and necessity. And in America, especially within our cities, being black has an extremely high correlation with being poor.

“The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives.”

California is going to explode. No state holds all of the necessary ingredients at the same high concentration as California.

First off, its economy is notoriously hosed, to the point that Arnold is threatening to eliminate welfare, cut pensions, and even close state parks. There might be other states whose economy is worse off in real terms, but it’s hard to actually name one. Once heralded as a state that in terms of GDP was one of the world’s top ten largest economies, California is swiftly closing in on bankruptcy and insolvency. Tax revenue is now down nearly 20% from last year, leading their Controller to state that California is just 50 days from a complete fiscal meltdown.

The social impact of their economic implosion is going to be enormous. Their unemployment rate is one of the worst in the nation, the entire city of Oakland is mulling bankruptcy. In Sacramento, the city is laying off 300 deputy sheriffs. Any thought that the status quo will be maintained, while the economic meltdown occurs is well beyond wishful thinking.

And their foreclosure rate is one of the worst in the nation:

Next is the fact that California’s prison system is both the largest in the nation and one of the most dysfunctional. In February a three-judge ruled that California’s prisons were so overcrowded that the state would have to find a way to release some 57,000 prisoners. Part of this problem stems from California’s enormous population, but the three-strikes law certainly doesn’t help. And much like every state, an inordinate majority of these prisoners are minorities, with blacks being the most heavily represented.

It’s staggering, according to DoJ numbers only 14% of regular drug users in 2005 were black and yet they consisted of more than 50% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.

American prisons have proven to be the most fertile recruiting grounds in the country for groups who promote versions of fundamentalist Islam, such as al-Qaeda. The FBI now suspects that prisons have surpassed even mosques as the recruiting grounds of choice for Islamic terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda. Largely as a result of this recruiting drive, Islam has become the fastest growing religion in American prisons and converted Muslim prisoners are estimated to number some two-hundred thousand.

What’s being passed off as true Islam in American prisons today is neither moderate nor modern, it’s the extreme salfi version that’s characterized by rhetoric of murder and intolerance, the same sort that al-Qaeda ascribes to. Some have begun to call it “Jailhouse Islam,” as it bulwarks salfi ideals with the loyalty and violence of prison gangs.

Prisoners are especially ripe for conversion, as their environment amplifies the same feelings of alienation and loneliness – the need for a pack – which bring men into the fold of terrorist cells. Trapped in a threatening and hopeless environment, prisoners exposed to fundamentalist Islam are soon burning bright with the need to manifest their new beliefs as violent action.

And despite all of these factors being reported to everyone from the Director of Homeland Security to members of the House and Senate, next to nothing is being done to correct the system.

The Washington Post reported in a poll in May of 2007 that African-American Muslims were three-times as likely as immigrant Muslims to have a favorably view of al-Qaeda, and are only about half as likely as Muslims immigrants to dislike the group.

These numbers alone testify to the fact that when Muslims terror again seeks to take American lives, the role black ex-cons have in that violence will be greater and more integral than ever before.

It’s now near impossible for a black man to go through the penal system, which one-third of them eventually do, and not at least be exposed to radical Islam. Many of those in charge of religions education in our prisons ensure that this is so.

The Imam in charge of the firing of hiring of one state’s Muslim prison chaplains, and who exercised complete control over the specific doctrinal points that are to be taught to potential converts until he was forced into retirement in 2003 when the media got hold of his story, told the prisoners he taught that the attacks of 9/11 were justified and that the terrorists involved in it were not murders but martyrs.

The state he was in charge of during his twenty-five-year tenure added fifty-six Muslim clerics, more than any other state in the nation. It is a state with one of America’s largest prison populations, and with America’s largest city. That state is New York, and the man’s name is Warith-Deen Umar.

But even more troubling than the fact that the very state which was most effected by 9/11 was allowing its inmates to be exposed and converted to salfi Islam, are the details of Umar’s autobiography. Despite his foreign-sounding name, Umar is in fact African-American, and he is himself an ex-convict who converted to Islam after his experience in prison.

And it’s not like the potency of “homegrown” terrorism that becomes possible when natives of a country turn against it has gone unnoticed in New York, as the Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism of the NYPD publicly acknowledged it as an emerging threat when he testified before the Senate in September of 2006.

All the same, a 2004 survey revealed that only half of New York prison services were monitored at all, and there’s no comprehensive system that monitors either radical clerics or the radical texts, both of which flow freely from prison to prison. On top of that, there’s the growing problem of contraband cell phones scattered by the thousands inside of our prisons. And not only does rhetorical radicalism flow freely within the prison system, it flows unmonitored from it as well.

Between 2002 and 2004 some 90 unmonitored letters were sent from three of the bombers responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. At least one of these was published by an extremist Islamic newspaper. But several more of them found a much more potent audience.

While behind bars in a Colorado prison, the incarcerated bombers found a few extremely motivated pen-pals. Before carrying out their own attack on March 11^th of 2004, the Madrid bombers had read correspondence from their American forbearers. Although the FBI is charged with translating correspondence from extremist prisoners within two months, in reality it often takes as long as eighteen months. And this is only for the most dangerous already-identified prisoners, the vast majority of outgoing mail is never read at all.

So when fundamentalist Islam does find root in the American penal system, it’s able to spread from cell to cell and then prison to prison. Neither the words that carry its ideals nor the men who preach them and personally win over individuals are effectively monitored by the system, and so their potential for growth is unlimited. Fundamentalist Islam is growing in our prisons, how fast nobody knows. However the potential to reach a Tipping Point and become a full-out social epidemic should seem like much more than a distant threat.

The racial disparity in our prison population is so pronounced that even our Department of Justice has lied to try and make it seem like the black prisoner population has been reduced by much more than it actually has. This predominately black population provides a ready and willing pool of recruits for Islamic extremists.

Disparities aside though, prisons are by far the most fertile ground for Islamic fundamentalists to recruit converts. America’s most notorious black Muslim, Malcolm X, was converted to Islam in prison. All four members of the NYC cell that was just rolled up were converted to fundamentalist Islam while in prison. But the Arkansas military recruiting center shooter wasn’t converted to radical Islam in an American prison

He was converted to radical Islam in a Yemeni one.

Back in 2007 a terrorist cell whose members were converted to radical Islam formed inside California’s Folsom state prison, was thwarted before they were able to carry off any attacks after a gas station attendant turned over a phone dropped during what at first seemed like a run of the mill robbery.

Unsurprisingly, they were looking to target military recruitment centers as well as Jewish sites. The NYC cell had exactly the same target set – two Jewish synagogues, and a National Guard plane. And Abdulhakim’s justification for his shootings is exactly the same one given by the DC Sniper: both claim their attacks weren’t murder, merely retribution for all the times the American military has killed Muslims in foreign lands.

What makes ex-cons who have been converted to radical Islam so dangerous is that they don’t at all see themselves at all as terrorists, but instead as commandos, as soldiers fighting in a justifiable war. That cannot be said about George Tiller’s murderer nor the Holocaust Memorial shooter – they were explicitly trying to get their message out, to give life to an ideology of fear with their own blood.

But the NYC Cell and Abdulkarim had no intention of dying for an ideology, because they believed their ideology is already full fleshed-out. They never intended to martyr themselves for a belief that wasn’t yet accepted, instead they saw their ideology as alive and well, and saw themselves as noble warriors fighting under its banner.

With this in mind, it seems almost certain that the NYC cell and the Arkansas shooter are just tips of an angry fundamentalist iceberg that’s suddenly being pushed to the surface by the force of our economic collapse.

Shortly after last fall’s presidential election, al-Qaeda released a tape specifically evoking Malcolm X’s legacy of opposition to the American government’s opression of Muslims as a counterweight to Obama, who they accused of being a “House Negro.” And al-Qaeda is clearly aware of the potential recruitment pool that our prisoners provided, as in a May 2007 message from “Adam the American,” they demanded not only the closure of Gitmo, but that the US “free all Muslim captives from your prisons, detention facilities, and concentration camps.”

However al-Qaeda hasn’t been a centralized movement for well over a decade, it’s much better understood as an “-ism,” a worldview. Their remaining central leadership is incapable for providing any direct material support to any convereted prison cells in California’s prison system.

But there is someone who can.

It is one of the indelible images of the Civil Rights era. Birmingham police chief, Bull Connor, turning attack dogs and against civil rights marchers and bowling those the dogs spared over with high-pressure fire hoses. Sitting in Bay Shore, Long Island a seventh-grader sat and watched his television, his mouth agape at the violence. And something inside of him began to grow.

David Belfield would later call the feeling “an implacable hatred toward all symbols of American authority,”¹ and in a few years he would refuse to mouth the words of the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day, telling his family that he could tell the words didn’t apply to everyone.

He’s not sure what in particular pushed him over the edge, but the more he read about American slavery, the more he saw the stark future of other blacks whose lives seemed to be “the Third World in a First World setting,” and the more he read W.E.B. DuBois and works from other discontent thinkers – the more he realized he wanted to act. He’s not clear about whether the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were the specific incidents which inspired his course of action, but it seems improbable that they didn’t play some role setting him on his course of action.²

And so, all of this in mind, he did his homework.

Although he knew there was an excellent chance that he’d die in the process, he decided he wanted to take out either Kermit Roosevelt or Henry Kissinger, men he thought had carried out key roles in the violent American-inspired overthrow of two foreign governments. But, as it turns out, that’s not what fate had in mind for him.

Shortly before he turned eighteen, David met a Korean War vet at a meeting of black activists and writers, and admired the vet enough to take him seriously when he told David that he’d stop talking to him unless David read the Koran. After reading Islam’s holy book and being struck, much like Malcolm X, by the fact that the Koran seemed color-blind and by the themes of social justice, David converted to Islam and changed his name to Dawud Salahuddin.

In the following months he began spending time in DC-area mosques and even edited a local Islamic newspaper. It was during this time that Dawud first met with Iranian agents at a student center in northern Virginia run by the Ayatollah Khomenini’s supporters in America. Fresh off the successful overthrow of the Shah, Iran had sent its revolutionaries to America to see what kind of a foothold their interpretation of Islam might find inside America.

And in Dawud they found just such a foothold. He proved willing to follow whatever instructions the Iranians had for him, which at first were to begin recruiting fellow Americans for “political activities and violence.”³

It’s unclear whose idea it was, Dawud’s or the Iranians, but this recruitment would take place almost exclusively in one place. Dawud spent much of the early 1970′s looking for fellow black Americans in a place more and more of his colored countrymen would find themselves in the years to come.

He was, of course, recruiting heavily from prisons.

Just how many black inmates he won over to Islam will never be known, but we know for sure that at least ten African-Americans that Dawud met were won over because on July 21^st, 1980 they either aided or abetted him in the assassination of Ali Akbar Tabatabai. Tabatabai was an Iranian exile living in Bethesda, Maryland who the Khomeini regime suspected was plotting against the newly installed Islamic government in Iran.

To guarantee that he wouldn’t succeed in usurping the clerical regime, all of the evidence supports the allegation that Iranian agents in America directed Dawud to kill Tabatabai.

And so Dawud disguised himself as a postal delivery men and shot Tabatabai in the gut three-times with a Browning semi-automatic pistol he had secreted inside a false package he was carrying, before fleeing in a haphazard but successful exodus to safety in Iran. The investigation into the assassination would reveal that Dawud was assisted by the aforementioned ten associates, most of them disaffected African-Americans like himself.

Exactly what role the Iranian government played in this killing has never been precisely pinned down, but when all the circumstantial dots are connected it becomes hard to argue that the death of Ali Akbar wasn’t the result of a direct order from the Iranian government.

An order carried out by an American operative who had been recruited on American soil.

Although the U.S. Muslim population is notoriously difficult to track, California is almost always cited as the state with the most Muslim immigrants, and in 2007 the LAPD drew fire for their Muslim mapping effort, which critics decried would set the framework for religious persecution.

Presently, California contains what is probably the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, a diaspora that numbers close to 700,000. Within that immigrant community, Los Angeles is often referred to as “Tehrangeles.” This is not to say that Iranian-Americans as a whole present a threat to America.

Only that if the Iranian regime were to coordinate another attack inside America, there would be no more likely state for this to happen in than California. Especially when you consider California’s expansive port system and incredibly porous border with Mexico, where there have already been rumors that Iranian-backed Hezbollah is smuggling goods and people into America after using their well-established presence in South America as a staging area.

California has far and away the largest population of immigrant Muslims, so if any state is playing host to Muslims – whether they be Sunni or Shia – hoping to co-opt radicalized African-Americans and provide them with training or material – it’s California.

If the FBI informant who helped roll-up the recent NYC cell really had been a terrorist facilitator able to get his hands on C-4, or just brew up homemade explosives from fertilizer and other household goods, that story would have come to our attention in a much more tragic series of events. A series of events that may have been delayed for now.

But it’s only a matter of time before a well-trained and highly-coordinated (or even just not completely incompetent) cell of radicalized ex-con terrorists manages to get their hands on some high-explosives or automatic weapons, and when that happens?

No one can say for sure, but there’s a high likelihood that any police crackdown on African-American communities would be met with the inevitable violence and protests that’ve so often flared up in California’s poorest areas following heavy-handed police action.

And no matter what happens, you’d do well to keep the advice of another group of anti-establishment Californians in mind…

- learn more about Tremble the Devil -

Jared Cohen is the rather remarkable young man responsible for Twitter delaying its regularly scheduled maintenance shutdown during the Iranian uprising in the summer of 2009 so that communications and updates could continue unabated, he’s the author of the insightful book Children of Jihad that charts how young people everywhere in the Middle East from Iran to Israel have much more in common than they realize, and he’s a Stanford grad and Rhodes Scholar who’s now attached to the State Department.

In the above talk he outlines how technology is shaping and changing the way everything from militant attacks in Afghanistan to anti-authoritarian uprisings in Iran to grassroots resistance against FARC are organized and executed.

It’s a tremendously interesting talk that’ll change how you look at the evolving sometimes hidden role social media is carving out for itself among young people and societies across the globe.

- learn more about Tremble the Devil -

The day before Yeardley Love was murdered, at least three other women were murdered in acts of domestic violence.   You don’t know their names, and you never will.  Their deaths never concerned you, and they never will.  Each and every day in America before Yeardly Love died, three women died in acts of domestic violence.  Like horrible clockwork, since at least 2005 three women a day have died as victims of domestic violence.

Each and every day prior to May 3rd 2010, an average of 600 women were raped in the United States.  And yet there were no headlines, no accusations.

The greatest tragedy isn’t that Yeardly Love died, it’s that it took the death of a rich, white, wealthy, privileged athlete to closely examine a phenomenon that’s been with us a long, long time.  From everything we’ve learned in her passing, if anything Love would be abhorred that her death is being used as a platform to condemn athletics as a culture, and lacrosse as a sport.

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post asked a question that illustrates the problem:

Should women fear athletes? Is there something in our sports culture that condones these assaults? It’s a difficult, even upsetting question, because it risks demonizing scores of decent, guiltless men. But we’ve got to ask it, because something is going on here — there’s a disturbing association, and surely we’re just as obliged to address it as we are concussions.

Men in power, whether because of sports or politics or wealth or entertainment or athletics beat women.  The idea that athletics, in and of itself, might somehow condone assaults is beyond asinine.  Athletes don’t beat women, powerful men do.

Sometimes those powerful men are athletes.  Sometimes they’re CEOs, sometimes they’re Senators, sometimes they’re singers.

But just floating the idea that something is “wrong” with athletics belies a horrible naivete, and a horrible complacency.

Why does it take a high-profile death to raise the specter of violence against women?  Probably the same reason it took an earthquake for the rest of the world to care about poor starving brown people.  Prior to Haiti’s earthquake, an African child died every three-seconds from AIDs or extreme poverty.  And yet that never crosses our minds.   Why did it take an earthquake to make us care about the lives we could save?

Lacrosse is an easy sport to demonize.   Its athletes are predominately white, and predominately wealthy.  To an outsider, it has a culture which might be categorized thusly:

Ultimately, in my experience, this meant hanging out with a lot of guys—friends of friends, I guess—that partied really hard, and treated a lot of people like crap. Girls, non-athletes, authority figures… Pretty much anyone that wasn’t one of them either didn’t exist, or existed solely as an object of ridicule.

That’s not the portrait of a lacrosse player, that’s the portrait of a douchebag.  Said douchebag might be a successful lacrosse, football, baseball, basketball, or hockey player.  Or he might not be an athlete at all. If lacrosse players were such a clear and present danger, how come Andrew Sharp wasn’t writing about them before?  Because he’s a sad, small-minded excuse for a journalist seizing on a horrible death as an opportunity to vilify an entire sport.

Lacrosse isn’t the issue, rich entitled privileged white kids are.  Some of those kids play lacrosse, many of them don’t.  Sharp isn’t describing lacrosse players, he’s describing rich, predominately white, kids.  The larger problem isn’t lacrosse, it’s the segregation of our education system, which is now worse than it was during the time of MLK’s death.

Powerful men are violent against women.  Oftentimes they sexually assault women, and it’s not uncommon for them to kill their victims.  That’s not a problem symptomatic of lacrosse, it’s symptomatic of powerful men.

Yeardley Love’s death was a tragedy.   But it was far from an exception.

Her death shouldn’t be the story about a lacrosse player committing a murder.  It should be the story of the 1,799 women who will die in 2010 at the hands of an intimate partner.  Love wasn’t singled out because she was a lacrosse player, she died because she was female.

If her death is going to have any lasting impact, it won’t be in demonizing lacrosse.  It will be in demonizing any senseless preventable death, athlete or not, lacrosse player or not, and wealthy and white or not.

Makes it kind of hard to get home.

Wait wait, make that non-explosive fertilizer actually – because you’re too stupid to bother googling what kinds of fertilizer actually blow up.   Plus, what makes it even harder to get home is also locking your house keys inside of the same carbomb.  And it’s probably an ever worse idea to release a YouTube video claiming responsibility for the attack before it even happens… especially when your attack hinges on a bunch of fireworks left in a bucket igniting a bunch of explosive material that’s not even exposed to the air.

But that was the modus operandi for Faisal Shahzad, just one in a long line of really, really stupid terrorists.

For reasons that’ll soon grow obvious, after the successful execution of an FBI sting against a group of ex-cons who’d converted to radical Islam in prison last summer, one of the media’s favorite quotes has been that at least one of the men is “intellectually challenged.”

If it wasn’t for weed, we might still have Ghandi, Abe Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, and JFK with us today.

You might even say that their deaths never would have happened if some old dead Muslims hadn’t been baked out of their minds. Nowadays when you get high you’re pretty much only a threat to someone’s life if they happen to be a Dorito, but back in the day getting higher than a giraffe’s ass was an inescapable prerequisite for joining what’s become the world’s most notorious fraternity of killers.

And the term “fraternity” isn’t used loosely here, as about any SAE pledge-master would be put to shame by the initiation ceremony of the original Assassins – but more about that shortly.

The term Assassin actually loosely translates to “pot-head.” Labeled Hashshasheen in their native Arabic, literally “those who smoke that dank-ass Mediterranian hash,” the Crusaders who first encountered them decided this was a bit too much of a mouthful so over the years the term was anglicized to the more familiar “assassin.” As it turns out, smoking the sticky-icky was an integral part of becoming an Assassin.

Led by the Old Man of the Mountain, who you can think of as some kind of terrible killer Arabic pot-smoking Santa Claus, the original Assassins were a Shiite sect headquartered in the Persian crags where they’d plot their attacks, swooping down into cities and royal courts to stab the hell out of whoever was opposing their will. After, of course, smoking copious amounts of dope. In this way the Assassins managed to consolidate an empire that was both vast and, presumably, very hazy.

To become an Assassin you first had to go through a trial that is fairly unique in history. A prospective initiate had to smoke hash until he blacked out. Seriously. The first step to becoming an assassin was to literally smoke yourself retarded.

Afterwards you’d awaken in a lush garden, filled with fountains and the most beautiful damsels in all the land, who would feed him every type of delicious morsel and subject you to sexual pleasures he might not even had known were possible. Odds are, to become an assassin you’d have to be cool with having a finger stuck somewhere uncomfortable. Possibly the back of a Volkswagen.

As the day went on you were given more and more pleasures, and more and more hash, until you passed out from the dope once again. A finger may still have been somewhere uncomfortable. When you woke up, the whole process began again, until finally an Assassin explains that what you’ve just experienced was but a tiny glimpse into the Paradise that awaited you if you would die for Allah as an Assassin.

Once you accepted their offer you would learn all the ways of the dagger (while high), how to mix poisons (while high), become a master of disguises (also while high), and how to pass for a member of any religion or culture in the region (while, of course, high). On your mission you must be focused on the kill alone, not your own escape, or where to find some munchies.

Assassins carried out hundreds of bleary-eyed killings as they spread their empire from Persia across the rest of the Middle East, and faded from notoriety only after their supply of marijuana finally ran dry.

But the best part…

Actually, they never ran out of dope, they were all brutally slaughtered by Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde in 1255.

One of them, probably while giggling and making Big Lebowski references, felt it necessary to assassinate one of Genghis’s sons because he wouldn’t let his Muslim sect – big shocker coming – pray as much as they wanted to.

So Genghis Khan sent word out that there was going to be a census, and every member of the Assassin sect made their way to the nearest city so that they’d be counted and get their piece of the pie, or pot-brownie or whatever.

But instead of being counted, the assembled Assassins were brutally slaughtered where they stood by the Golden Horde’s cavalry. The few who escaped were eventually tracked down and sent to the widow of Khan’s brother, so that she could torture them to death one-by-one in whatever manner she wished. So tap a little out for your most infamous forbearers the next time you pack a fatty in front of season two of The Chappelle Show.

Shockingly, the history of terrorism only gets more absurd in modern times.

4. Terrorists weaponize cars, kind of

Using automobiles as weapons has become the modern terrorist’s specialty. The very first carbombing was Hezbollah’s attack on the Marine barracks in Beiruit which killed 241 Marines in a blast that had the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT, but which actually came from just a few hundred pounds of plastic explosives packed into a cleverly disguised food-delivery truck.

Nothing about that attack seems funny at all, and the truck’s driver, Mr. Chubtarasha, is hailed by terrorists around the world for his heroics – for his steely courage as he drove into the maw of the imperialist American beast towards his certain fiery death.

But the reality is that Mr. Chubtarasha likely thought he was riding up a rainbow inside a giant Technicolor unicorn into a giant gumdrop full of tap-dancing Smurfs. Because before he got into his van he was fed a massive dose of hallucinogens hidden in, of all things – a cookie.

Chubtarasha wasn’t brave, he was tripping on a laced Oreo.

A decade later terrorist again successfully attacked America using cars, this time right at home in New York City. Ramzi Yousef came to New York in 1993, dressed in a silk suit he’d paid for with his wages as a Domino’s Pizza deliveryman (seriously), intent on killing as many Jews as he could.

And ultimately he decided on attacking the World Trade Center towers not because of their symbolic or tactical value, but because he’d heard from one of his buddies back home in Pakistan that lots and lots of Jews worked in them. Really, that was the driving factor behind his decision.

Where he could kill the most Jews. And since rumor had it that a lot of Jews worked there, the World Trade Center seemed as good a place as any.

As questionable as his decision making was, Yousef was proficient a assembling homemade bombs, and spent several weeks mixing batches fertilizer and nitric acid in his apartment before shuttling them in his rusted-out 1978 Chevy Nova into a self-storage shed in Jersey City. Yousef was lucky not to have one of these unstable batches blow his face off, but that’s not the ridiculous part of this attack.

After spending two months and thousands of dollars planning his attack and building his bomb, Yousef was ready to find a driver and van for his attack.

It’s unclear why Yousef didn’t just drive the van himself, but that probably has something to do with being hospitalized after crashing his ’78 Nova shortly after arriving in NYC and not exactly trusting himself behind the wheel.

You might think Yousef would take some time to carefully hand-select his driver and meticulously search to find the rental agency that would allow for the most anonymity, but that’s not how it went down. Yousef spent the night before the attack flipping through the local Yellow Pages making dozens and dozens of frantic phone calls. He was trying to find both a rental agency with a Ryder van that was big enough to hold the bomb, and someone willing to drive a van filled with thousands of pounds of fertilizer under the Twin Towers.

He figured it made sense to wait until the night before the attack to do this, and yet was still called a terrorist “mastermind.”

Despite this impetuousness, Yousef managed to avoid the even absurd blunders made by the terrorist group that carried out the Bali nightclub bombings, the Jemaah Islamiyah.

One member of the group had died on the way to an earlier attack when one of his buddies, meaning to call his cell phone to wish him luck, dialed the wrong number and instead called the phone attached to the trigger of the bomb.  And on the night of the Bali bombing, when the terrorist selected to drive the explosives-laden Mitsubishi van got into the driver’s seat on the night of the attack, he told his buddies there was a problem.

The van had a manual transmission, and he had no idea how to drive stick.

But the best part…

Is how Yousef got caught. Before the dust had even settled Yousef was already on board a plane to Karachi, but he left the men who helped him build the bomb behind. One of them, Mohammed Salamehm was pretty broke, and after the attack he decided to try and get the $400 rental deposit for the van back.

He showed up at the Ryder agency the next day demanding his money back, and was of course turned away – for some reason, the rental agency hadn’t gotten their van back and was used to dealing with angry people with funny accents who weren’t too good with cars. Salamehm returned the next day, bluffed again, and was again turned away.

But he didn’t let this stop him.

Still broke, he returned again for a third time, still angry, and this time found the FBI waiting for him. The VIN number from the van’s bumper had survived the blast, and he was taken into custody and thoroughly interrogated. Mohammed knew enough to give the authorities the leads they’d use to track Yousef down in the Philippines.

Yousef failed to topple the World Trade Center towers or kill any Jews. His bomb was equivalent to 1,500 pounds of dynamite, but it only killed a dozen construction workers. But years later different terrorists would return to New York and successfully topple the Twin Towers, and yet even that terrible day isn’t without its ridiculousness.

3. The final hours before 9/11

In the years since it occurred, 9/11 has been portrayed as the most devious and well-executed terrorist plot the world has ever seen. And the men who carried it out have been placed in the highest pantheon of heroes by Islamic extremists and the lowest pits of hell by just about everyone else.

But placing them in either of these places misses the reality of who they were. The nineteen hijackers were many things, but most importantly of all – they were a bunch of dingleberries.

Far from being highly-skilled operatives they were a bunch of jack-offs who, despite living in America with no cover and intending to carry out the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history, still managed to ring up a whole rack of speeding tickets and other moving violations.

You might think they’d be disciplined enough to stay under the law-enforcement’s radar, but you’d be wrong.

And yet maybe the most ridiculous part about 9/11, is what the hijackers were doing the night before the attack. Calling them jack-offs earlier was in no way meant metaphorically.

The night before the attack they selected a few select films from their hotels’ on-demand library. Despite imagining themselves as agents of purity and justice, on a holy mission of retribution from God himself, they still felt it was a good idea to rent a porn flick. Maybe this particular film involved goats or two dudes sword-fighting – or both. And maybe not, all we do know is that they did in fact rent a porno.

And, we can infer from the fact that the average hotel-rented porn flick is on for about five minutes, they sat around rubbing one out a sacreligiuos last time.

Maybe they had blankets pulled up over themselves, and were surreptitiously stroking their little jihadist soldiers and hoping the kid in the next bunk wouldn’t catch on like a bunch of nervous fourth-graders at summer camp. Or maybe they were all pretty cool with what the six of them were all doing in their cramped hotel room.

But the best part…

Maybe because they were all a little bit too relaxed after the previous night’s festivities, the hijackers who flew out of Boston didn’t exactly stick to a strict operational schedule. You might think operatives who were, supposedly, well-trained and highly-motivated would be very sure to have a time-table that would account for every possibility and ensure that they’d make their flight.

But the reality is that part of 9/11 very nearly didn’t happen at all. The team who flew out of Boston’s Logan Airport nearly missed their flight, they made it to their gate with just six minutes to spare.

Six minutes. A fender-bender, a belligerent customer in the ticket line, dropping a really big deuce – any number of things could easily have caused them to miss their flight entirely.

If you want to keep believing that 9/11 was the work of devious and highly skilled killers, go right ahead.

You now just have to acknowledge the fact that they were devious and highly skilled killers who managed to get a whole slew of traffic tickets and almost missed their flight because they sat around jerking-off to a porno the night before their big operation.

2. Al-Qaeda is born, cross-eyed and club-footed

It’s probably pretty hard to fish the keys to your Toyota out of a public toilet of an African hospital right smack in the middle of the afternoon lunch rush. Even if you’re elbow deep in the thing, groping around in the water like you were tying to noodle catfish.

But that’s what Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali (whose name translates literally as: douchebag who blows up hundreds of Africans) found himself doing as the hospital he was in filled with the hundreds wounded by the truck bomb he’d just blown up on the street in front of the American Embassy in Nairobi. He panicked, threw his keys in the toilet – but then changed his mind and decided to try and fish them out.

It was supposed to be al-Qaeda’s opening salvo in their pre-declared war against America, but the terrorists hit a few hitches. They meant to get their truck-bomb inside the Embassy compound, except that as al-Owhali got out of the Toyota’s shotgun side and menacingly approached the Marines guarding its gates and reached into his jacket pocket for the pistol he was going to shoot the American imperialists with he stopped in his tracks and – yes, this becomes a steady theme the more terrorist attacks you learn about – realized there was a problem.

He wasn’t wearing his jacket. It was back in the truck, next to his buddy. And so al-Owhali did the next-best thing: he started ululating and threw the flash-bang grenades he had on him at the Marine guards behind the Embassy gate. Who ran away, probably laughing and wondering what in the shit was going on, since the magnesium and ammonium-perchlorate detonation of a flash-bang grenade is at most capable of stunning people in tightly-enclosed spaces.

Throwing them at Marines who are outdoors makes about as much sense as getting in a fight with GSP and only trying to slap him once it starts. The man fiercely pinches his own nipples to get himself jacked before winning the UFC middle-weight title fight.

Despite months of the “best” training terrorists could get at al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan and spending several years dedicating their lives to jihad, al-Owhali and his buddy were complete screw-ups when it came time to actually carry out an attack. Al-Owhali turned and ran like hell after leaving his gun in the truck, and his buddy blew up the bomb where it would do almost no damage to the Embassy and would kill only a dozen Americans.

The only reason the attack attracted so much attention was because the bomb in the truck was the only part of the attack that wasn’t completely botched, and did manage to kill a number of Africans.

It’s fairly surprising the bomb was as potent as it was, as terrorists have frequently proven themselves utterly incapable of constructing crude bombs, a process which frighteningly enough can be successfully done by a Mongoloid fourth-grader who has a chemistry set and enough Ritalin.

In fact, our buddy Yousef was finally caught when the bomb he was working on began to prematurely combust, setting his apartment ablaze and the Filipino Special Terrorism Task Force hot on his heals.

A task force not headed by Delta Force or SEAL Team Six, but by Aida Fariscal: a grandmother known for wearing bright-pink lipstick, rubber slippers, hoop earrings, and a flowered muumuu who chased him down in the early-morning Manila streets and tied his hands with clothesline (she left her cuffs in the office, hey – grandmothers have a lot on their minds) and hailed a rusted-out WWII-era jeep that’d been converted into makeshift taxi to get him back to the station. That she was even kind enough to pay for.

Yup, that’s how a man then considered the world’s foremost terrorist mastermind was brought to justice. By a grandmother wearing a flowered muumuu.

But the best part…

The point of the Embassy attacks wasn’t to kill African bystanders, it was to destroy the Embassies and kill hundreds of Americans. Well, the US Embassy in Nairobi was largely undamaged by the blast and only a dozen Americans were killed, and the simultaneous attack on the Embassy at Dar es Salaam (which, in a cruel twist of history, really does translate to “House of Peace”) neither damaged the main Embassy building or killed any Americans.

The African Embassy bombings were, from anything close to approaching a rational perspective, complete gong shows. They were supposed to destroy both Embassies and kill hundreds of Americans. But what happened is they demolished a few walls, walls which were built in front of the Embassies to – get this – absorb a bomb blast, and killed only twelve Americans.

However they did mark the emergence of al-Qaeda from its womb, it was the organization’s first attack that provoked a substantial response against what it saw as the evil American imperialists on the world stage. But al-Qaeda came out like it’d been gestating in some terrible four-toothed hillbilly who liked to down bottles of Jack before engaging in her favorite hobby of throwing herself down the nearest rocky hillside and then repeatedly smacking herself in her pregnant belly with the empty bottle.

And yet this malformed retard seemed threatening enough to warrant a barrage over a dozen million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missiles, which succeeded in utterly flattening their target.

Sadly, this target turned out to be a factory that made pharmaceuticals, and possibly baby food. Which brings us to our final moment.

1. Every time someone flips out about it

One of our greatest Presidents once said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In the years that followed this saying proved to have a lot of merit to it.

Unless of course you were one of the tens of thousands of Japanese who died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundred of thousands of American soldiers who gave their lives in European trenches, or one of the six-million Jews who died in one of the dozens of Nazi concentration camps.

So, in hindsight, maybe FDR would’ve been better off saying “we have nothing to fear but fear itself, unless of course we’re at war – in which case you need to worry about getting shot, nuked, burned alive, gassed, crippled, enslaved, and otherwise dismembered, maimed, or killed. Yeah, worry about that stuff.

And, at its core, that’s what terrorism is always attempting to do.

Create a war, or failing that the fears that piggyback on war, when there really isn’t anything there. Acts of terrorism are meant to create the perception of war and the retaliation and hatred that ensues, when the reality is the guys carrying them out would be hard-pressed to construct a forty-eight piece Lego set without starting two fires and putting an eye out.

Terrorism relies on its targets overreacting, on us not really seeing their explosions for what they are. Terrorists don’t create terrorism, terrorists are a bunch pot-smoking jerk-offs who have to get lucky to not die in car accidents or blow themselves and each other up.

Being afraid of terrorists makes about as much sense as being afraid of a drunk blindfolded one-legged midget who’s hopping around throwing cabbages at your head.

Terrorists don’t create terrorism – we do.

Terrorism is the monster under our bed, the boogeyman in our closet, the one-night stand who swore she was on the pill who you used a condom with anyways but who you still left a fake number with because hey no reason not to play it safe right? As horrible and terrifying as acts of terrorism can seem, all it takes to neutralize them entirely is to take them in perspective, and just see them for what they almost always are.

The actions of attention-whores writ large. Really, really dumb attention-whores.

For terrorism’s entire crazy story, visit Tremble the Devil’s mainpage

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab won’t only go down in history as the first guy who tried to blow up an airplane with his underwear, according to testimony given by Pentagon officials on Capitol Hill on Wednesday he now he also holds the record for the world’s most quickly recruited and trained terrorist:

Mr. Abdulmutallab was identified, contacted, recruited, and trained all within six weeks, according to a Pentagon counterterrorism official. That’s much faster than the two and a half years it took for Osama bin Laden to hatch the plan to attack the US nine years ago.

But terrorist recruiting via the mass media is nothing new.   Modern terrorism was born the same year the world’s first television satellite was launched, when the PLO’s Black September attacked the Israeli athletic compound in Munich:

The potency of this event was not imbued only because the Olympics are the world’s grandest stage, but because in the early ’70s the mini-cam, the battery-powered video recorder, and the time-base corrector were invented. These portable devices first allowed reporters to broadcast live transmissions from any point on the globe.

In the months after Munich, the PLO was granted special observer status by the UN, its leader was allowed to speak at the UN General Assembly, and the PLO gained diplomatic relations with fourteen more nations than Israel.  Clearly the PLO understood the potency of its act of Symbolic Terror, as it went on to write that Black September’s assault had been “from a purely propagandistic view-point, 100-percent successful” since it had been “seen from the four corners of the earth.”

The PLO taught an unforgettable lesson to the world.  Since inside four-years “a handful of Palestinian terrorists had overcome a quarter-century of neglect and obscurity” and “achieved what diplomats, statesmen, lobbyists and humanitarian workers had persistently tried and failed to do” the rest of the world was quick to take note. Within a decade the number of discrete groups committing acts of terrorism either on the international stage or against foreign targets in their own nation had more than quadrupled.⁷

All of this change after just fifteen-hours of terror.

London birthed the next generation of terrorism on 7/7.   After that attack it wasn’t the media that gave us the first images of terror, but the public itself.   Images captured by camera phones provided witness to the attacks, as coverage of terrorist attacks became self-assembling and instantaneous:

The men who ascribe to Radical Islam do not see themselves as terrorists, they see themselves as soldiers.   And their training and conversation no longer happens in terrorist camps or in personal exchanges – as was the case with the 7/7 bombings conversion and radicalization often occurs in the amorphous world of online media interactions.

This is not some ersatz training method, the same social forces that powered Twitter and Facebook’s ascension are now being used by terrorists to find recruits in society’s margins.  And there’s no way to keep terrorists with the ability to bring America to her knees out, no way to stop them from entering our country.

Because they’re already here.

First, Tuesday’s Washington Post story on Al-Qaeda’s desire to use WMDs against America:

“…a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.

The report, by a former senior CIA official who led the agency’s hunt for weapons of mass destruction, portrays al-Qaeda’s leaders as determined and patient, willing to wait for years to acquire the kind of weapons that could inflict widespread casualties.”

So a retired intelligence official is alleging that a WMD attack from al-Qaeda is a genuine threat, based purely on the strength of his musing.  The report cites absolutely no evidence at all, and has no empirical support.  It’s simply speculation.

Let’s take a moment to consider its assertion though, in light of what we’ve learned from al-Qaeda’s most recent round of recruits.

Successfully deploying nuclear, chemical, or biologically weaponry is insanely delicate and difficult, military units trained to use or defuse that kind of weaponry are some of the most intelligent and well-trained.  WMDs are incredibly fragile, requiring careful handling and precise calibration to be deployed effectively.  Only the most intelligent enlistees are chosen for WMD training, a task that takes several months to complete.  Conversely, everyone in the military learns how to shoot a gun within the first few weeks.

So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that, in the past decade, more Americans have died by pulling a vending machine onto themselves than through a terrorist WMD attack. Probably about twice as many.

Meanwhile, men allied with al-Qaeda (which, it’s important to remember, is much more an Ism than a discrete club) have often shown themselves incapable of so much as properly lighting a fuse.  There’s Richard Reid the infamous shoebomber, and the more recent underwear bomber, Umar Mutallab.  Plus the bomb outside a UK nightclub in 2007 which fizzled, and the bomb the same cell put into their jeep and drove into the awning of the Glasgow Airport, which also fizzled.  And whose driver was thwarted by a local cabbie, who famously kicked the fleeing terrorist in the nuts so hard that the cabbie nearly broke his own foot.

Creating simple homemade explosives is clearly the absolute upperlimit of men who choose to become terrorists, something they often as not manage to flub.  Deploying WMDs are an entire order of magnitude more difficult than that, which is why outside of military action they’ve almost never been used.   Is their use feasible?  Yes.  Is it damn well bloody likely that men who can’t even properly manage the simplest of homemade explosives are ever going to successfully use them?  Not so much.

However the Washington Post still decided that pure unadulterated fear-mongering speculation was worth putting in its front section:

“He cites patterns in al-Qaeda’s 15-year pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that reflect a deliberateness and sophistication in assembling the needed expertise and equipment.”

The only clear pattern in al-Qaeda’s past fifteen years is one of sophomoric amateurism.  Men who’ve chosen to associate with al-Qaeda have shown time and time again that just assembling conventional homemade explosives is an iffy proposition.  Even the 9/11 attacks relied on an incredible amount of luck, one group of hijackers that morning were so late getting started that they only made their gate with six-minutes to spare.

Terrorist attacks have not been getting more hierarchical-dependent and sophisticated, they’re becoming self-assembling and simple.  Last June a radicalized American citizen killed an Army recruiter and wounded another by simply shooting them, and last November a radicalized American citizen 13 and wounded 43 more also by simply shooting them.  And the DC Sniper, who brought the blue Chevy Caprice used in all the attacks on 9/11 as homage to bin Ladin, also just shot all of his victims – in the process creating the single most efficient terrorist campaign in America to date, drawing in law enforcement from across the eastern seaboard and nearly disrupting an election.

Which brings us to the story you probably missed, about the attack that didn’t happen.

At 4am on the same Tuesday morning as the Washington Post carried that story, New Jersey police arrested Lloyd Woodson after the clerk in a local Quick Chek store called 911 when Woodson entered his store and began behaving suspiciously.  Police arrived, Woodson fled.

He was subdued with pepper spray a few minutes later in a trailer park behind the store, and was found in military fatigues with a bullet proof vest beneath, and toting a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that’d been altered so it could shoot .50 caliber rounds.  He had four additional magazines of ammo on him, but that wasn’t the half of it.

Back in his room at the Red Mill Inn, police found a Cobray rocket-propelled grenade launcher, two rifles (one with a nightvision scope), hundreds of rounds of .38 and .50 ammo (some of them armor-penetrating), a police scanner, a map of Fort Drum, a map of a community subdivision, and a keffiyeh.  Also among his personal effects according to New Jersey law enforcement, were other unnamed items which tied him to radical Islam in general and to a specific Islamic militant group.

And unlike your average weapon of mass destruction, his arsenal wasn’t exactly difficult to acquire.  He’d simply purchased them on the streets of New York City, and defaced their serial numbers so they’d be difficult to later track.

It’s quite possibly he might ultimately have wussed out at the last moment, although it’s obvious he’d devoted an awful lot of time and preparation to at least plotting an attack on a military facility.   And having spent time in the Navy, it’s likely he had the basic training necessarily to operate the rather impressive firepower he’d brought along.

We’re still waiting to learn more about Woodson’s background, and the FBI has stated that he wasn’t part of any larger terrorist plot – even though items were found that linked him to an established Islamic militant group.   However it’s extremely unlikely his ideas came to him in a vacuum, and although he may never have made face-to-face contact with any proven terrorists, when the investigation is finished you’d be betting good money if you wagered that he made contact with extremists online at one point or another.

And although we’ve yet to learn whether Woodson spent any time in prison or if he began his association with Islam there, we do know he was previously convicted of a felony gun possession charge… so don’t be surprised if it turns out that like so many others, he was initially exposed to radical Islam while in prison.

The Arkansas shooter, Abdulhakim Muhammad, made his initial extremist contacts online before ultimately converting to radical Islam while in prison, and recently changed his plea:

“My lawyer has no defense,” Muhammad wrote in the two-page letter, dated Jan. 12. “I wasn’t insane or post-traumatic nor was I forced to do this act.”

In letter, Muhammad described himself as a soldier in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and called the shooting “a Jihadi Attack.”

“This was a jihad: attack on infidel forces. That didn’t go as plan. Flat out truth,” Muhammad wrote in the letter.

The men who ascribe to Radical Islam do not see themselves as terrorists, they see themselves as soldiers.   And their training and conversation no longer happens in terrorist camps or in personal exchanges – as was the case with the 3/11 Madrid bombings, conversion and radicalization often occurs in the amorphous world of online media interactions.

This is not some ersatz training method, the same social forces that powered Twitter and Facebook’s ascension are now being used by terrorists to find recruits in society’s margins. Which do you really think is more of a threat: a terrorist with access to WMDs who’s actually savvy enough to use them when his average companion can’t even set off a simple bomb, or a pissed-off ex-con with access to firearms and a grudge against the government?

Our gravest threat doesn’t come from a sophisticated Bruckheimer-esque WMD attack, it comes from the margins of our society.  Men who feel alone and isolated.  There’s no better place to find and radicalize such men than in prison – where an overwhelming majority of America’s recent terrorists got their start.

And because of our drugs laws, an incredibly disproportionate number of those men are black.  Yet the Washington Post feels it’s more productive to report sensationalist baseless speculation, than the fact that the African-American unemployment rate is double or triple the national average depending on where you are, that African-Americans are three-times as likely to have their homes foreclosed on than whites, that African-American families currently have just eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and that an African-American child is nine-times as likely as a white child to have a parent in prison.

That’s where terrorism comes from.

Not from some unspeakable evil cabal, but from the lives and families we’ve spent the past forty years gutting with one hand, and awkwardly trying to high-five with the other.

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The Chinese have a powerful sense of their identity and worth. They have never behaved toward the West in a supplicant manner, for reasons Westerners persistently fail to understand or grasp.

China is simply not like the West and never will be. There has been an underlying assumption that the process of modernization would inevitably lead to Westernization; yet modernization is not just shaped by markets, competition and technology but by history and culture. And Chinese history and culture are very different from that of any Western nation-state.

And so far as I can tell, no one protested this observation as racist or even remotely controversial.  It’s simply a cultural observation.

Chinese culture is not Western culture.  It is, as they say, what it is.

Cultures instill different values, they have different norms, they lead to markedly different behaviors.  As the article so aptly put it, our “failure to understand the Chinese has repeatedly undermined its ability to anticipate their behavior.”  Western culture, it’s often said, is rooted in “Judeo-Christian” values.  These values have become imbued in our legal systems and constitutional rights, over thousands of years religion has seeped into our sense of justice, of right and wrong.

This exact same argument of culture dissonance can be made when it comes to religion, between Christianity and Islam, although just about everyone seems terrified to bring up the obvious.

And yet almost ironically, the single biggest difference between Christianity and Islam is a simple temporal one.  The paths these two great Western religions took barely even meander from the same path, one of the two just moved much more slowly.  This temporal dissonance, the fact that Christianity took hundreds of years to get to the same point that Islam reached in just a few generations, is central to understanding the differences in how the two great world religions are applied in a modern everyday context.

As much as most Christians would like to believe that their religion’s story ends with the Bible, it doesn’t.  Christianity was just one of scores and scores of mystery cults in the ancient world until Constantine co-opted it and made it the official state religion in 312AD, up until that point Christians had been persecuted along with others who were viewed as occultists. Countless elements of Christian ritual are shamelessly borrowed from existing mystery cults: drinking communal blood and the Cult of Mithras, rebirth and Osiris, and the unavoidable Zorastrian influence we’ve since collectively decided to forget.

Now that Christianity was the official religion of the most powerful empire in the West… lots and lots of non-Christians were summarily put to the sword.

At this point Christianity had a pretty firm foothold on the world stage.  It’s worth taking a moment to notice that no specific element of biblical doctrine was used when Constantine decided it would be okay to kill anyone who wasn’t a Christian.  And yet this was ultimately what spread the faith across the Western world.  Peter didn’t singlehandedly spread Christianity as the end of the New Testament would have us believe.  Christianity seeped across the world benignly at first, but it only gained prominence at the tip of a sword.

But since Christianity’s official doctrine doesn’t talk about killing people who don’t convert, you feel pretty safe saying “killing people who won’t convert is un-Christian.”  Look at the history though, and you find that killing people who refuse to convert spread Christianity much more broadly and deeply than any peaceful means.

Even after Constantine, Christianity wasn’t firmly entwined with Western culture until Charlemagne came along and continued with the “convert or die” approach.  Following his birth in 742AD, he wiped our the remaining pagan and animist religions in Europe by killing untold thousands who refused Christ’s salvation.  In the process he set the groundwork for the French and German empires, and arguably the entirety of Western civilization itself.

It’s kinda funny neither him nor Constantine are really considered prominent Christian figures, even though without them there’s no reason to think Christianity ever would have made it past the status of mystery religion without them.

Islam is roundly denounced because it was spread via military conquest, which leads to the argument that Islam condones violence.  Muhammad was a military leader, he and his immediate successors killed lots and lots of people as they spread Islam across the globe.  Whereas Jesus wasn’t a military leader, and none of his strictly religious successors ever killed a soul as far as we can tell.

This differing level of first-generation violence may be largely due to the fact that Christianity took several hundred years to be institutionalized, while Islam was a cohesive institution from its very start. After Christianity was finally institutionalized by the Catholic Church and Byzantine Empire, men who took up the cross such as Clovis and Charlemagne were responsible for plenty of carnage and death in Christ’s name.  The names of the untold hundreds of thousands put to the blade by nominally Christian generals have been lost to history – but their deaths and their neighbors’ fearful conversion were no different from the converts won and deaths caused in Islam’s early spread.

In terms of pure volume and square millage, Clovis and Charlemagne forcefully spread Christianity farther than anyone who came before them.  However neither the Bible or any official Christian text really addresses this, and so it seems very far divorced from the faith itself.  It isn’t.  Christianity didn’t become fully rooted in Western culture until those men aided and abetted its spread – a spread just as violent and terrible as Islam’s early years.

So fairly or not, Christians today tend to overlook the violent actions of those nominally Christian men and only allow the use of the lives depicted in the Bible during debates of how “early” Christianity was spread or what Christianity is “really” about.  But in the history of all three great Western monotheistic religions, there is no escaping the tension between religious party and political power:

Like any social organization, the religious party is at first a natural rival to political power.  The struggle is all the more intense when a religion is universalist in nature, as are Christianity and Islam.  The universalist religions… naturally cohere as ‘ideological communities.’  In other words, they include all those who accept their dogma and exclude all those who do not.  Founded on a credo, such communities define and organize every aspect of the society to which their members belong.  In their early phases, such organizations are mostly interested in religious or philosophical problems.  As they grow in number and confidence, however, they extend their influence to other spheres of social organization and ultimately set their sights on definitive social control through political power.^11.5

Nearly everyone in the West holds that the story of how early Christianity spread ends where the Bible does, and holds that as a comparison of how Jesus and Mohammad lived their lives and spread their faiths tells the entire story.

In the nine years after announcing the concept of jihad in 624AD Mohammad ordered at least twenty-seven military campaigns, personally commanding nine of them.¹² In the Bible, there isn’t mention of Jesus so much as backhanding a mouthy disciple.  But this shortsightedness is incredibly limiting, Christianity and Islam trace nearly identical paths of violent proliferation, the only difference is a temporal one – Christianity took many hundreds of years to cover the ground Islam only took a few generations to cover.

And yet being martyred in early Islam is being killed while battling for the spread of faith, being martyred in early Christianity is being publicly murdered for the sake of imperial oppression and entertainment. Mohammad and his followers spread their faith on horseback, often lopping off the heads of those who opposed them. Jesus and his followers spread their faith on horseback, often getting their heads lopped off by those who opposed them. Islam can and has been a peaceful religion for epochs at a time, and Christianity has been invoked in the name of violence just as much if not more than Islam – but when it comes to martyrs there is a difference lurking in the origins of each religion. The very idea of martyrdom is much more plastic within Islam, and much more open to debate.

Membership has never been debated in Islam, from its conception either you follow the five doctrinal pillars or you aren’t a Muslim. Very simple. And although succession was debated, it was a matter of choosing between two successors to Mohammad and not of deciding what true Islamic faith meant as it was in the Christian faith, at least not to the same degree.

But since Christianity’s later spread by emperors is divorcable from it’s early origins, people feel like Christianity and Islam are utterly different.

They share the exact same story.

They both preach ideals of empathy, compassion, grace, and forgiveness, and yet neither were spread by kindly peaceful conversion but instead by violent domination and conquest. Christianity just took several hundred years longer than Islam to do it, so that part of its story is often ignored.

For the modern Muslim and the modern Christian though, there are immediate repercussions.

Even though, from a distance, it’s obvious that Christianity and Islam followed nearly the exact same path, the fact that Islam took a single generation to follow the path it took Christianity several hundred years to blaze does result in some behavioral differences.  Because Islam’s birth and its conquest of the world occurred so close together, it’s much easier to excuse and condone violence using its traditions and texts.

The Crusades occurred when the West was struggling and Islam was thriving, now that the opposite is true it only makes sense that Muslims are looking to violence to protect their coreligionists and ensure their survival.

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Perhaps there could be no more of a poetic dichotomy than LeBron James furiously masturbating all over the national media during the exact same moments Oakland’s African-American community begins its slow-motion implosion, an event that threatens to leave a sinkhole which could once again drag all of California down along with the isolated events of one city.

While every major news channel was busy reporting about a ball game, a jury lacking a single black member ruled that Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot Grant in the back after he was called a “bitch-ass nigger” and while he was handcuffed facedown on the ground, was guilty only of involuntary manslaughter.

The legal equivalent of accidentally jumping a curb and running someone over with your car, admitting only that Grant is in fact dead and Mehserle’s reckless – but possibly accidental – actions lead to his death.

Folks in Oakland are now, understandably, just a little bit unhappy.

Any outside element seeking to sow the seeds of dissension and unrest in America doesn’t have to squint too hard to see that there are potentially hundreds of thousands of other men who might be a little bit pissed off and a little bit predisposed to violence.

Men who have spent time in prison, have no jobs, no love for the police, and who might jump at the idea of killing a few of them.  And the nation we’re currently engaging in a soft nuclear detente with is easily the most likely to try and take advantage of this situation, which was best illustrated by what Iran did at the very start of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.   Right after they released all the women and children, they released one other subset of the hostages.

All of the African-Americans, making a direct appeal to their status as fellow victims of American oppression.

And yet most Americans had almost no idea that the ’79 Revolution, which put the current theocratic totalitarian regime into power, was going on at all.  Other than maybe Kermit Roosevelt, pretty much no one in America had the slightest clue that anything of any importance was going on in Iran until the hostage crisis began at the tail end of the Revolution, on November 4^th, 1979. The hostage crisis was the culmination of the Revolution, it had begun nearly two years earlier in early 1978, when the first street rallies and demonstrations coalesced on Qom’s dusty streets.

It was the Iranian hostage crisis that held the world’s attention rapt for 444 days, and which suddenly made events that before seemed utterly immaterial to the average American a staple of their nightly news.

And, fittingly, it was the hostage crisis which gave birth to the formalized hierarchy of American Special Operations, the United States Special Operations Command, which still exists  largely unchanged today.  The botched rescue effort, thwarted by insufficient planning and operational naivete, served as a telling foil for the aptitude and guile the Iranian regime went on to demonstrate in countless acts of state sponsored terrorism in the years that followed.

President Carter’s botched rescue effort, Operation Eagle Claw, was a clusterfuck in every sense of the word.  Not only did eight American servicemen lose their lives as a desert sandstorm whipped up and made helicopter flight all but impossible, but Iran gained control of six state-of-the-art American helicopters.  It’s hard to imagine a mission going worse.

Iran, on the other hand, soon proved itself a master of irregular warfare.  The furnace of the Revolution burnt away any element of Iranian society which might have weakened the new regime, and allowed it to sharpen Iran’s military into a formidable and deft weapon.

In 1983 the Iranian military masterminded the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, one of the most devastating surprise attacks in American military history.  And then throughout the 1980′s Iranian sponsored terror took lives in Jerusalem, Rome, and countless other Western cities – soon becoming classified by the United States as the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist attacks.

But what is state-sponsored terrorism really?

On a purely analytical level, it’s simply another term for irregular warfare.  Whether or not an act of violence breaks the Geneva Conventions shouldn’t be the judge of whether or not it’s considered “terrorism.”  Certainly not whether it’s considered an act of Political Terrorism, a phenomenon that has clearly defined boundaries.

Because terrorism, as a means, has such a broad nature you have to categorize terrorist violence within a framework before you make any sort of analysis if it’s going to mean anything at all.

The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes.  It’s the outcome of violence used with precise timing and targeting in the right set of social circumstances. Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media’s attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step’s retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism.  Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist’s real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can’t goad the established authority into striking back.

It is this retribution that validates his ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

And in just the last year, a new term has been coined to describe what happens when the cycle of Political Terrorism is triggered within an international context of warfare that allows travel between nations and cultures, and the instantaneous transmission of events from anywhere in the world to everywhere in the world.

Before coining the term “accidental guerrilla,” David Killcullen fought as a member of the Australian military in theatres of war on multiple continents, and served as a counterterrorism adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General David Petraeus, as well as serving as the chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department.  The term accidental guerrilla has its origins in the native resistance to the War on Terror that began after 9/11.

As Killcullen traveled to areas where there was ongoing military action against declared “terrorists,” he noticed an odd phenomenon.

Many, in fact most, of the men fighting against American forces didn’t actually ascribe to the violent jihadi ideology that led al-Qaida to perpetrate 9/11.  They were just average locals who found outsiders engaged in a shooting war on their turf, and felt compelled to join in.  In the words of one Afghani villager who spontaneously joined in with the Taliban in an ambush against American troops, “when the battle was right there in front of them, how could they not join in? …This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley in years.  It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out.”¹

As outlined in his ground-breaking book The Accidental Guerrilla, the phenomena follows a four step cycle that’s nearly identical to Political Terrorism, and that can be simply understood as Political Terrorism within a specific framework.  Kilcullen describes accidental guerrillas as the result of a syndrome, and illustrates it using biological analogies and four stages:

1. infecting an area where the State has a waning influence
2. reaching a virulent potential for widespread media dissemination by carrying  out acts of captivating violence
3. drawing in outside intervention to deal with this new virulent threat
4. a rejection of the heavyhanded outside intervention by the local population, which wins the infectious agents sympathizers and followers

And so accidental guerrillas are born when they become infected by the virulent influence of al-Qaida or any other radical ideology, and fight back against any outside intervention that follows. Not necessarily because they agree with the radicals, but because they feel compelled to reject what they’ve come to see as an unjust and illegitimate outside power.

The rest of the book goes on to illustrate how the accidental guerrilla syndrome rallied locals to  the side of international jihadis everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan to East Timor, and argues that the syndrome was responsible for mobilizing most of the violence against an outside American military presence.  Locals who either want in on the action, or are afraid “the Crazies will kill them,”² reportedly make up nearly 90% of those fighting back against what’s been sold to them as a military operation undertaken by outsiders.

In the last few chapters of the book, Kilcullen addresses the potential for Europe to act as a stating area for terrorism and future accidental guerrillas, as well  as the role there of micro-havens, “urban undergrounds, alienated ethnic groups, and slums where the writ of government does not always run and where police and security services’ situational awareness is low.”³

But oddly enough, the potential for accidental guerrillas to emerge in America is never explored.

Another nearly identical term for “microhavens” is State Shells.  At the broadest level, State Shells are semi-autonomous polities hosted within a nation that are able to impose their own will and organizational structure on some segment of society beyond the reach of local government regulation.

Strictly speaking, State Shells are cohesive organizations which have “a monopoly on the means of violence; territoriality; taxation; and public bureaucracy”⁴ within their stomping-grounds. The depth and breadth of the will they are able to impose varies greatly from situation to situation, but generally State Shells establish a following in a society by filling gaps left open by the government.

The less able a government is to provide public works and order, from hospitals to schools to support for the needy, the bigger the opportunity a State Shell has to gain credibility and then power within a pocket of that state. Hezbollah, the PLO, the IRA, ETA, and the Shining Path, are a few of the more notorious State Shells.

A crucial common-denominator among all State Shells is economic independence from the host government – State Shells must be able to raise their own funds, either through their own taxes, outside support, or often via the illicit trade and smuggling of drugs and guns. Within America the drug trade forms a particular poignant example of this, as the hierarchy of gang commerce has come to mimic the corporate pyramid of power – with lots of low-level workers propping up a few kingpins.

Many of the world’s most recognizable terrorist groups are prime examples of State Shells filling the gaps created when a government – beset by political violence, incompetence, or upheaval – is unable to fully govern.

Or, in the modern American case a government may lose its grip on governance because of economic catastrophe, as California is one of the first but not the last state to openly discuss ending many forms of public welfare and support for the needy, and is already laying off cops and other public officials. This creates even wider gaps for gangs to fill, as in many urban black communities gangs already provide jobs in the form of drug dealing, and act as the de facto security force and arbiters of justice.

Within a State Shell there is no such thing as the rule of law, and the exercise of Godfather-esque impersonal power that is based not on a code of justice but individual whim is paramount over political representation or citizenship. Although they do provide public works, a State Shell’s overall effect is not a positive one on the society that hosts it, as they are by nature exploitative and predatory.⁶

Examples of this behavior span numerous continents and countless generations. But nowhere and never has it been so apt than among the minority populations of America’s innercities.  Gangs serve as imperfect examples of State Shells, but examples all the same.  If there’s anywhere a State Shell might find traction in America, it’s among our urban minority innercities. For generations our urban innercities have been haunted by gang life and the drug trade.

Neither gang life nor the drug trade manifested spontaneously out of the black community.  They only emerged after racially biased drug laws caused blacks, who make up 14% of our drug-users but over half of those imprisoned for drug-use, to find their lives dictated by a life behind walls we all built but refuse to see.

Nearly any way you look at it, our current economic crisis is impacting our poor black communities much more acutely than our poor white ones.  The most obvious indicator is the still skyrocketing unemployment rate, which for young black males is now twice as high as their young white counterparts.  But simple unemployment doesn’t capture the full scope of economic distress.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity.   The American Revolution, the French Revolution,  China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ’79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent.

It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

And for going on two generations now, America’s level of economic disparity has been steadily rising.  This ongoing financial crisis may be what finally causes it to crest over.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open.  Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”²⁵

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.”²⁶

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure.  In the early 1970′s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

One way to capture it is by examining what portion of America’s total income the top 1% of earners receive.  The share of that top 1% has nearly doubled since 1970, and it’s now the same size as the income earned by everyone in the bottom 40% of earners combined.²⁷

So the very few families who make up the top 1% of all earners have a combined income that matches the incomes of all the families in the bottom 40% of earners.

Looking at economic well-being another way, in terms of  financial wealth or “stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses, and other financial instruments,” as of 1998 the top 1% of families controlled nearly half of that pie, with the top 20% controlling fully 93% of it.  Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of families actually have negative financial wealth – their debts actually surpass their assets.²⁸

And this cavernous gap has only been widening, between 1998 and 2001 the net worth of families in the top 10% of America jumped 69%, significantly more than any other group.²⁹ In the years leading up to that point, between 1988 and 1999, the difference in net worth between black families and white families grew by $16,000 and the gap in net financial assets grew by $20,000.  By 2004 white families had an average net worth of $81,000, and black families an average net worth of just $8,000 – roughly a tenth the average white family’s.³⁰

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and  fully 60% among our middle class,³¹ the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth.  Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay  what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods³² – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.³³

And as the real estate market has crashed blacks have suffered much more severely than whites. As it was stated earlier, even when income and credit are controlled for black families now have their homes foreclosed on and are thrown out into the street three-times as often as white families.

Even the very idea of what it means to be poor is color-coded, as while 1 in 3 blacks live in poverty, less than 1 in 10 whites do.   And yet the very definition of poverty itself now varies to the point of absurdity, since “poverty level whites control nearly as many mean net financial assets as the highest-earning blacks, $26,683 to $28,310.  For those surviving at or below the poverty level, this indicates quite clearly that poverty means one thing for whites and another for blacks.”⁷

The impact of these facts have echoed across generations, as nearly three-quarters of all black children grow up in homes with no net financial assets.  That’s nearly double the rate of white kids.  And nine in ten black kids grow up in homes without enough monetary reserves to last more than three months at the poverty line if their income were to drop, roughly four times the white ratio.⁷

Even Eminem seemed to have no sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations.  The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration.  This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”⁸

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.⁹

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation.  The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans.  Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house.  All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.¹⁰

Hotlanta served as a case study for mortgage-based racism, as the Pulitzer-winning series in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution “The Color of Money” so aptly captured.

It showed how blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for.  And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts.  However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites.¹¹

Even well-to-do blacks have been unable to escape from this institutional prejudice.

Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors.  Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.”¹²

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years.  And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” however the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

This racial stratification has created neighborhoods ripe for infection by radical Islamists hoping to begin the accidental guerrilla syndrome.  Black neighborhoods have more crime, more poverty, and less governance than wealthy white ones – the ideal conditions for an outside terrorist infection to set in.  And the process is made even easier when you consider the effect the prison system has on black communities, isolating young men away from their friends and families and everything they’ve ever known for years at a time, the ideal circumstances for softening someone up for radicalization.

Once radicalized, they’re released back to their old neighborhoods to begin spreading the contagion that had been injected into them in prison while they were held prone by hopelessness, isolation, and fear.

If the Accidental Guerrilla theory of terrorism is correct, America shouldn’t be worried about the detonation of a nuclear device in one of our ports, about the release of a biological plague, or any outside element directly attacking our country.  The risk of retribution is simply too great, as Tom Clancy so bluntly illustrated in Executive Orders – if any attack can be traced back to your soil, America will not hesitate to blithely erase you from the map.

As the events of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 have made abundantly clear, adherents of radical Islam who seek to attack the West won’t do it through any weapon of mass destruction.  Homemade bombs with cell phone triggers have already proven highly effective, and are easily produced.

And as events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have borne out – the most effective way for radical Islamists to attack a society isn’t by using overpowering technological capabilities or advanced biological weaponry to inflict massive civilian casualties. Instead, it’s by co-opting weak and vulnerable elements of the society who don’t feel like they have protection from a strong central government, and by exploiting pre-existing social tensions and fissures.

To create accidental guerrillas from a desperate and angry minority community that feels abandoned by their neighbors and their nation.

As revolution burns in Iran, what emerges will either be a strong and progressive state intent on embracing choice and human freedom, or a totalitarian theocracy hardened by the violent removal of any element of dissent.  Iran is just warming up, the Islamic Revolution took the better part of two years, this progressive one will at least take several more months.

It might seem like what’s going on over there won’t touch your life here.

But if Iran were to look for a weak point in America’s armor, it would be where accidental guerrillas have emerged in other societies – among our disaffected minority populations, who have been subject to an incredibly disproportionate amount of time in prison, as well as several generations of stifling economic realities.

If African-Americans who have been converted to radical Islam while in prison do successfully pull off an attack that claims innocent lives (as already happened in Arkansas and was attempted in New York), and the police cracks down on their communities in turn – it’s not hard to imagine the urban black communities protesting and rioting against what they’ve in the past seen as an unwarranted and unjust crackdown.

Our urban police forces don’t exactly have a calm or productive relationship with our urban minority communities, accidental guerrillas will be far from endangered if the cycle of Political Terror begins in America.

America isn’t supposed to be about advancing the strongest members of our society while isolating weaker ones, but about providing a fair chance to everyone.   So long as we continue to look the other way, and pretend nothing is wrong as economic and judicial realities tie the hands of so many of our neighbors, we remain exposed to the threat of outside forces inciting accidental guerrillas.

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Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the Joker’s rubric on terrorists.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

Because we lose any chance of gaining useful insight when we label Hasan a terrorist, stuffing him into a box of our choosing. Instead of trying to see the box that he saw himself in, and carefully crafted for himself.

Terrorism isn’t about creating chaos simply for chaos’s sake. Terrorists don’t kill for the pure joy of killing, they aren’t evil embodiments of some dark sinister incomprehensible force. That’s where the Joker fails as a metaphor for terrorism.

The Joker is terrorism only as we see it, he perfectly embodies terrorism only as we perceive it. But that perception is never the entire story. If anything the Joker embodies just how limited society’s take on terrorism so often is, we are unwilling to approach it unless it seems to be disfigured by insanity, the twisted product of a warped and disturbed mind.

But viewing terrorists that way masks who they really are. It hides their true identities, and prevents us from either understanding or preventing their actions.

The men we call terrorists view themselves as fighting the good fight, as dying for for something greater than themselves. Each and every one of them, to a man. They view themselves as serving a cause, as sacrificing their life at the altar of some worthy or noble duty. Judging their moral calculus, pressing our own ideas of when killing is or isn’t justified onto them, does absolutely nothing to help us understand or analyze their actions and their origins. Lives we see as innocent, they see as necessary or unavoidable collateral damage.

Innocence and innocents alike are lost in the stench of terror’s breath.

In times of war, civilians lose their lives. By the thousands, sometimes by the millions. But in the context of war, as a society we’re okay with that. Innocent lives can be sacrificed at the altar of warfare, it’s an unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect that we don’t let ourselves be troubled by. And in the same way, killing civilians doesn’t trouble terrorists either.

Because terrorists see themselves as soldiers. Soldiers fighting a war worth dying in, a war that transcends their lives, and any interpretation of right or wrong and good vs. evil that we – as outsiders – might bring in from the outside.

The shooter of an Arkansas military recruitment center, Abdulhakim Muhammad, who made his initial extremist contacts online before ultimately converting to radical Islam while in prison,  recently changed his plea:

“My lawyer has no defense,” Muhammad wrote in the two-page letter, dated Jan. 12. “I wasn’t insane or post-traumatic nor was I forced to do this act.”

In letter, Muhammad described himself as a soldier in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and called the shooting “a Jihadi Attack.”

“This was a jihad: attack on infidel forces. That didn’t go as plan. Flat out truth,” Muhammad wrote in the letter.

The men who ascribe to Radical Islam do not see themselves as terrorists, they see themselves as soldiers.   And their training and conversation no longer happens in terrorist camps or in personal exchanges – as was the case with the 3/11 Madrid bombings, conversion and radicalization often occurs in the amorphous world of online media interactions.

Terrorism has always been and will always be the little brother of warfare. Its primary goal is to make the targeted society’s members feel like they’re at war. Terrorism is at its awful finest when no one knows if they might die next, when death comes at random to their doorstep – unannounced and shrouded in unpredictability.

That’s the point of the chaos. That’s why they want the world to seem like it’s burning.

And to sow this illusion of warfare, the men we label terrorists must themselves become soldiers. They prepare themselves for going to battle and likely death by saying goodbye, and letting go of their earthly possessions. They see themselves as fighting and dying in a war, often against an outside aggressor whose violence can only be responded to in kind.

The only time terrorism seems complicated or nuanced is when we bring our own moral framework into a situation where it doesn’t apply. The men who see themselves as soldiers, who we would call terrorists, don’t fit into our moral framework. So if you really want to understand terrorism, you have to leave your own moral framework and interpretations behind.

If you can do that, then you’re ready to continue on down the rabbit hole.

And you’re ready to learn about the role Gideon played as the godfather of all terrorists, and about how modern terrorism is simply another step down a path we’ve all been on since the beginning of history.

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