The Sub-prime Times Square Bomber

Canadian human rights activist Mark Steyn applies his typical dark humor to the Times Square Bomber incident.

The story of the Times Square bomber reads like some Urdu dinner-theater production of Mel Brooks’ The Producers that got lost in translation between here and Peshawar: A man sets out to produce the biggest bomb on Broadway since Dance a Little Closer closed on its opening night in 1983. Everything goes right: He gets a parking space right next to Viacom, owners of the hated Comedy Central! But then he gets careless: He buys the wrong fertilizer. He fails to open the valve on the propane tank. And next thing you know, his ingenious plot is the non-stop laugh riot of the Great White Way. Ha-ha! What a loser! Why, the whole thing’s totally — what’s the word? — “amateurish,” according to multiple officials. It “looked amateurish,” scoffed New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. “Amateurish,” agreed Janet Napolitano, the White House amateurishness czar.

Contessa Brewer makes her bigotry concerning the hoped-for identity of the bomber clear.
Captain Ed:

Brian Maloney gives us this entry for the Someone Left the Irony On Department, in which Contessa Brewer tells Stephanie Miller that she’s really unhappy that she couldn’t use the Times Square bombing attempt to prove Tea Party “bigotry.” Never mind that this clip shows the bigotry of Brewer in relation to conservatives — that all of the opponents of Barack Obama and the Democrats are somehow the equivalent of the Hutaree militia in Michigan. Brewer really wanted a way to smear conservatives, and now she’ll just have to wait a little longer:

Listen to the video at the link. In her mind, the bomber is a typical example of an immigrant who wants to become an American citizen.  ( Never mind that he went to Pakistan for terrorist training).  She really seems to have no clue how much she has insulted typical immigrants, or made suspicion of them more likely.  AMAZING.

Yes, Contessa, there do seem to be a lot of people who want to “justify writing off people who believe in a certain way” as either terrorists or racists. Your network employs more than a few.

The young Contessa can't help it. She was taught in school to close her mind to thinking outside the progressive catechism. She is upset that "there are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent . . . as justification for really outdated bigotry." On the other hand, the form of bigotry she reflexively expresses is the New Hotness and needs no justification. All her friends think like that. James Lileks:

Good people not only don’t judge before-hand, they want to refrain from judging after-hand, so they can theoretically judge someone who didn’t do it, but might.

Steyn applies a little reality to Mayor Bloomberg's similarly bigoted speculation about who was responsible for the bombing attempt.  But first, he lets some air out of the exaggerated fear of prejudice against Muslims among those on the Left.    The Left once again demonstrates that it is easier and more satisfying to stand up against a threat that's not very threatening than against a really dangerous imminent  threat:

As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since 9/11, au contraire: Were America even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen, and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the last nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” America might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society: Instead, President Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” — rather than the rights of the ever lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized, and murdered for not wanting to be covered. America is so un-Islamophobic that at Ground Zero they’re building a 13-story mosque — on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning.

So, in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.

And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mayor Bloomberg a day or two before Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit was “someone who doesn’t like the health-care bill” (that would be me, if your SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). Even after Shahzad’s arrest, the Associated Press, CNN, and the Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Just as, after Major Hasan, the “experts” effortlessly redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone, so now the housing market is the root cause of terrorism: Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit? . . .

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Now we get beyond cultural issues to the really serious political issues: Read the first link, to a piece by Richard Clarke concerning the inevitable bomb plot which DOES NOT fail. He worries, among other things, that counter-terrorism officials will be blamed, even though these attacks are extremely hard to stop:

The reason such attacks are hard to stop is rooted in the identity of the attackers. They often seem to be successful or well-educated members of society, uninvolved in any form of radicalism. But then, the drip-drip of terrorist propaganda -- either on the Internet or circulated through friends -- has its effect. They quietly make contact with radical groups overseas, perhaps even traveling abroad for training and indoctrination. They throw away the life they have made in the West and agree to stage an attack. Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square terrorist, fits that profile, as have others in the United States and Europe.

The second link suggests one of the things that Clarke fears: firing the head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. Partly because she does not seem to recognize the profile of past attackers which Clarke describes, and partly because of the brazenly political nature of her rhetoric.

And contact between would-be attackers and radical groups has not always been as "quiet" as Clarke suggests. The Underwear Bomber's father, at great personal risk, went to a U.S. embassy to warn about his son. But the son still got on a plane bound for the U.S. Napolitano said "the system worked". And the Times Square bomber went to a terrorist training camp:

Napolitano's rhetorical slip is a little too serious to be palmed off with some linguistic woolgathering. She has made clear repeatedly that she believes people with Gadsden flag bumper stickers are a greater threat to domestic tranquility than out-of-the-closet terrorists who receive training and material assistance in foreign terror centers. She has been wrong about this every time, and she will continue to be wrong until Americans actually die.

This is an obvious politicization of her office. (Napolitano's favored targets -- health care protesters and disgruntled veterans -- are distinguished not by their propensity toward violence but by their opposition to the administration.) But if you believe in the necessity of a Homeland Security Department, every day Napolitano is in charge of it creates an actual risk to life and property. Napolitano has a positive burden of proof: She needs to demonstrate some understanding of how to do her job, or she needs to be fired, for the security of the United States and the safety of the American people. . .

It's one thing when Contessa Brewer is judgmental only against politically-approved targets. It's another thing when Janet Napolitano is similarly blinded by politics.

MORE on the irrational belief in higher education that today's political violence is most likely to come from the Right.  And these people call themselves "Reality-Based".