Fear No Evil
Just be aware it exists. It turns out you don’t have to go all the way out to Amherst to find a jihadi. The feds claim they’ve nabbed one in Sudbury. Charming little bit of old New England just upstream from that rude bridge in Concord where once embattled farmers stood. Boston Herald:
A 27-year-old man from Sudbury has been arrested on charges he planned terrorism attacks inside and outside the United States, including a plot to use automatic weapons to open fire at shoppers and emergency responders in shopping malls, federal prosecutors said today.
Tarek Mehanna, of 6 Fairhaven Circle, is accused of conspiring with Ahmad Abousamra and others to obtain the automatic weapons needed to carry out a mall ambush in which they planned to open fire at random, said Acting U.S. Attorney Michael K. Loucks. Mehanna was already out on bail from a federal arrest last year, charged with lying during a terrorism probe.
Mehanna was arrested at his home at 6 a.m. this morning and booked at the Sudbury police station before being turned over to federal authorities. Federal agents have searched Mehanna’s home and say he is a U.S. citizen. A bail hearing has been scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in federal court.
Abousamra left the United States for Syria on Dec. 26, 2006, officials said. He said he would be back within a month after visiting his wife, but has never returned, officials said.
“At this time we don’t believe there are any active terrorist cells in this area,” said FBI special-agent-in-charge Warren T. Bamford.
The plot included plans to fire at emergency responders, but was abandoned because the men could not obtain the weapons, authorities said. They declined to name the mall or mallsthe men were targeting.
“We live in a free country. We don’t live in a police state. We do have places where if someone wants to do a terrorist act they can probably accomplish it,” said Loucks at a press conference. “We do our best. It’s amazing it hasn’t happened yet.”
Automatic weapons may be more of a challenge, but if you can’t get your hands on guns, even in Massachusetts, you aren’t trying hard enough.
It looks like the kind of bust that, during the Bush years, some people would have considered a joke. You don’t hear the sneering anymore. Instead, people behave and talk as though the threat is dated, passe, no longer a concern.
Mehanna, according to the feds, is no novice, though. Read on.
It isn’t so much ones they catch I’m worried about. It’s the ones they haven’t yet. The ones they might not catch in time. The ones who might manage to lay their hands on guns and explosives. Between Mehanna and Abousamra in Massachusetts, Najibullah Zazi in Denver, John Muhammed in Washington, D.C., and numerous others, we have no reason to think they aren’t are out there. The joke gets less funny if you should find yourself shielding your kids at the mall, or if, as some people experienced several years ago, you are shot while pumping gas.
Regarding small attacks of the sort the feds say was plotted in Boston’s Metrowest area, I’m surprised al-Qaeda hasn’t tried it yet. I always thought after 9/11 the best follow-on, to really paralyze the United States, make us stay home, would be a few coordinated mall, ATM, fast food attacks. But al-Qaeda always aimed for the big spectacular.
I also thought, and told friends and co-workers in those first post-9/11 days, we all need to learn how to live like Israelis now. Watch. Be ready. Ready to fight. Ready to die if you have to.
Thought about it again in August 2006, during a time of heightened terrorism alerts. Here’s kind of a quaint artifact from that time, when the memory was fresh and people still had viceral reactions to terrorism threats. Nothing’s really changed, except maybe how people think about it. From the Boston Herald’s archives:
Do you know anyone whose Sept. 11 fears have returned? Someone with a sick feeling and a tightening of the chest, bordering on panic? Someone distraught or perhaps just withdrawn and distracted in the past few days?
What do you say to calm their fears? We drive each day on highways where the likelihood that a dumptruck will veer into our path far outstrips the possibility that we will find ourselves on an airplane targeted by terrorists. The chances that we will get it in any number of benign but equally deadly ways are exponentially higher than the chances that those who want to kill us will, in any given case, succeed.
Logic is irrelevant in combating these fears, as it is with children who fear monsters under the bed. This is not to disparage these fears. The threat is real. And while statistically remote, there is a factor that elevates terrorism beyond the many mundane fates we all dodge daily. It is the malice.
There are men out there who want us dead. This is undeniable. They want to see us all dead. Each and every one of us. They don’t know our names, they don’t know what our thoughts are about their grievances. They don’t know what our actions are and how we’ve lived our lives. They don’t care. They just want us dead.
I wish I had a sweet, comforting post-Sept. 11 lullaby to sing the ones I love to sleep when they experience fear of these evil men. But I don’t. Lullabies combat false monsters. Real monsters require something different.
Psalms, like lullabies, give comfort. But they don’t mask or deny the threat. They embrace it, and show the way to strength and ultimately comfort from within. What might a psalm say to anyone whose 9/11 fears have been reawakened?
As Orwell once noted, strong, ruthless men and women go long hours without sleep for you. They do everything they can to keep you safe. They are your shield. They will kill for you, and die for you. You can take comfort from that knowledge and draw strength from their example.
But that is not enough. There is something you have to find within yourself. It may be that one day, our shield will fail, and the insidious foe that operates from beyond our borders and even within them will penetrate that shield and kill some of us again.
You must decide for yourself that you will not let them deter you from your path. If they rise against you, you must be prepared to meet them. Prepared to be ruthless in defense of what you love. It may mean that you will die. We all do someday. As a friend of mine who knew what he was talking about once said, it’s not a matter of whether we will die,but how we will die. And when the time comes, the best we can hope for in this life, the one thing we might be able to control, is that we die well.
Each of us must look within ourselves for the strength that pushed the passengers of United Flight 93 forward against their hijackers on Sept. 11, in a successful if tragic assault that prevented further death and destruction.
We must look to the bravery of men such as Rick Rescorla, the British-American security executive and Vietnam war hero who shepherded thousands of people out of the World Trade Center but who stayed back himself with the last and ultimately died in the wreckage.
They are towering figures, but each of us has a little, just enough of that in us that we can draw on, to carry us through. We honor them by endeavoring to live up to their example. It begins by repeating to ourselves the words from which others have drawn comfort in time of war and peril for more than 2,500 years.
I will fear no evil.
Like I said, it’s kind of quaint. Seems like a long time ago, and it is. At least until it isn’t anymore.
HotAir: Slow-mo terror plot wasn’t the work of a sleeper cell, it was a coma plot.
Jawa updates his original 2008 Mehanna post.
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Topics: Boston, terrorists
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:31 pm on Wednesday, October 21, 2009
One Response to “Fear No Evil”
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October 21st, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Tarek Mehanna is typical of the damage being done by militant Islam in western societies: He’s not a physical threat himself, but the inspiration and instigation he causes among impressionable, angry young men is incalculable. This is exactly the agenda of Saudi-funded fundamentalist mosques, which should be broken open and aired out, every time one of their members gets caught advocating or attempting jihad.