An Open Letter to Bin Laden Death Revelers

www.michaeladelberg.com

On May 1st, the President announced that U.S. Navy Seals had landed deep inside Pakistan, penetrated an Islamist enclave in Abbotobad, and killed Osama Bin Laden. News of this announcement set off spontaneous celebrations. Jubilant crowds gathered at Ground Zero, outside the White House, and several college campuses chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Monday morning media coverage continued the theme: the death of the 9-11 instigator was a celebratory story and the spontaneous patriotic eruptions represented a “coming together” of Americans in these hyper-partisan times.

I don’t question the necessity of killing Bin Laden or downplay the tremendous bravery and skill of the Seals who carried out the mission. But there is something creepy about celebrating the death of a person—however evil his past acts. Watching crowds exult in the death of Bin Laden made me uneasy, even as I struggled to know why.

I searched for someone, anyone, who shared my unease with the way Bin Laden’s death was celebrated. To my surprise, I found only one prominent voice that shared my concern. On May 3rd, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi released the following statement regarding the death of Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden, as we all know, bore the most serious responsibility for spreading divisions and hatred among populations, causing the deaths of innumerable people, and manipulating religions for this purpose. In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred. [bold face added]

The Vatican nailed it. Bin Laden was a warped man with an evil ideology. Sadly, killing him necessary. But this should be treated as a grim and solemn task, not celebrated as if our team just won Super Bowl.
A few pundits cautiously suggested that images of Americans partying on news of Bin Laden’s death could be used against us in the Mideast. Maybe this is true. But these pundits miss the point as much as the chanting crowds. The wrongness of celebrating the death of a person is not dictated by whether a foreign demagogue exploits the video.

Days after the Atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the Japanese surrendered and the U.S. erupted in celebrations. We celebrated our victory in a war, the end of a long period of self-sacrifice, and, above all, we celebrated the cessation of killing. We didn’t celebrate the deaths that our superior war machine inflicted upon the enemy.

No one believes that Bin Laden’s death means victory in the war against terrorists. Sober analysts have stated for years that Bin Laden, largely because of U.S. efforts, was already cut-off from Islamist-fighters in hot-zones like Afghanistan and Yemen. His death might be a blow to the morale of our enemies, but Bin Laden’s death doesn’t alter the battlefield or Al Qaida’s desire to execute new acts of terror. The War on Terror is not over; celebration is premature.

Bottom line: We are, or at least should be, better than blood lust. Being the world’s cop is lonely work and there’s always some kook somewhere plotting our harm. As 9-11 proves, some of these kooks are very dangerous and they must be defeated. It is regrettable that we must engage in some ugliness in the pursuit of policies premised on advancing democracy and prosperity across the world. As Dwight Eisenhower once observed, “America is not good because we’re great, America is great because we’re good.”

But there is no goodness in celebrating a person’s death.

An Open Letter to 2nd Amendment Absolutists

www.michaeladelberg.com

I don’t know much about gun control as a public policy issue, so I will avoid stepping into that bucket. But it drives me crazy, especially in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, to hear gun-advocates portray the Founders of the Republic as fans of unrestricted gun ownership. Such statements are not well grounded in historical fact.  

When charged with governing, the Founders showed showed no sanctity to gun ownership . From its first days as a proto-national government, the 2nd Continental Congress advised States to disarm individuals suspected (but not convicted) of disloyalty and to impress the arms of those living in areas where arms might fall into British hands. George Washington’s first action of 1776 was a campaign to confiscate the private arms of the citizens in Queens Co., New York. Different local militias in New Jersey confiscated arms from African-Americans and inhabitants of the vulnerable shoreline.  These were not actions taken against a handful of traitors, but against large groups of people. The public's need to wage a war repeatedly trumped an individual's private property right to own a gun.

A decade later, as the Federalists attempted to make the Constitution more attractive to a skeptical public, they added a Bill of Rights (ten amendments to the Constitution) to lessen fears that the Constitution would become "an engine of tyranny". The Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment so that "a well regulated militia" (the key phrase in the 2nd Amendment), properly armed and governed by officers, would exist to resist potential federal encroachment. The 2^nd Amendment spoke to the Colonial experience of British soldiers forcing tax collection on localities that had no voice in the creation of the tax.

The Federalist Papers, written by the Founders to explain the benefits of the Constitution, discuss basic rights of American citizens: fair treatment before the law, the right to vote, freedom of religion and the press, etc. To the degree firearms are addressed, the Federalists speak to the right of Americans to organize into militias to resist federal encroachment. Federalist #29 declares “it is a matter of the utmost importance that a well-digested plan should be adopted for the proper establishment of the militia” and Federalist #46 discusses the strength of a militia "with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties." However, The Federalist Papers—85 essays and 200,000 words long—never speak to an individual’s right to own firearms.

Based on actions taken during their presidencies, Washington and Adams had no qualms with seizing private property for a perceived public good. Washington's confiscations of arms and property from the "Whiskey rebels" of Pennsylvania and Adams's impressments under the Alien and Sedition Acts demonstrate this. Even Jefferson, who counseled “the government is best that governs least,” opted to limit the 1^st Amendment when he championed "salutary coercion" of a press he believed overly partisan and irresponsible.

Though deeply suspicious of Federal over-reach, the Founders were not libertarians in any modern sense of the term, certainly not when governing. They supported a well regulated militia, but were ambivalent to private gun ownership when gun ownership ran up against a reasonable "public good" argument. Individual families often owned a rifle or two (the muzzle-loaded rifles of the day fired only one bullet and took two minutes to re-load) but it was the responsibility of local government to keep the really dangerous stuff—casks of gun powder, artillery, etc.—under guard in public magazines.

Even the most powerful men of the day did not keep private stores of dangerous weapons (with the exception of privateers battling foreign enemies at sea). Washington’s estate at Mt. Vernon, for example, had nothing more dangerous than a small number hunting rifles. People like John Hancock and Robert Morris purchased huge quantities of war materials, and then immediately turned them over to state and local governments.

When it comes to gun control, argue whatever position you want, but it is inconsistent with the historical record to believe that the Founders supported the private ownership of firearms capable of killing dozens of people.

An Open Letter to "War on Christmas" Conspiracy Theorists

http://www.michaeladelberg.com/

The week after Thanksgiving, a few things reliably happen. Christmas music fills the radio; Christmas specials fill the TV; Christmas ads fill the newspaper; Christmas decorations light-up the neighborhood. And in recent years, amidst all the red and green, a few voices reliably complain that there is a “War on Christmas”.

Best I can tell, “War on Christmas” complaints are spawned from a handful of local controversies in which a school board bans the singing of Christmas songs in the elementary school, or a city council resolves to remove a manger from city hall’s front lawn. Then news-ish talk shows on cable TV (most famously Bill O’Reilly, but others too) point to these oddball controversies as proof that there is a “War on Christmas.” The charge is leveled loudly and often enough to achieve parity with fact. So now we have a War on Christmas.

Non-Christians, including yours truly, are mostly ambivalent to the small-town controversies about the Christmas carol and the manger. We don’t cheer when the manger is pulled down, and we don’t care whether or not our kids sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in school. These things are small potatoes, and we understand that the majority culture is entitled to set the cultural agenda. We even patronize favorite pieces of Christmas culture: we stroll through Christmas light shows and happily watch the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, again and again.

The U.S. is now and has always been a Christian nation. All non-Christian religions put together claim less than 10% of Americans; another 10% or so are atheist or ‘no preference’. That means that over 80% of Americans are Christian. Even nominal Christians who rarely attend church still love Christmas. The huge majority of non-Christian Americans—whether Muslim, Jew, atheist, or whatever else—understand this. We don’t make waves.

With this in mind, let’s return to the “War on Christmas”. War, by its very definition, implies organized hostility by one group against another. I challenge anyone to find an organized movement to subvert the annual Christmas tsunami. Even the ACLU, the boogeyman of many a “War on Christmas” yarn, has defended the right of Christians to celebrate Christmas a half dozen times since 1999.[i]

If there has been a War on Christmas, it is the lamest offensive in the history of warfare. But don’t trust the word of this secular humanist, do the research yourself. Examine the TV Guide for the month of December and count the number of Christmas-related programs. On broadcast TV alone you will find dozens, and you will find dozens more if you include cable TV. Then examine the number of real cases in which Christmas symbols, carols, books, etc., were defiled or removed from a public setting. You will find only a handful of local provocations, half of which were reversed in short order because of local outcry.

This is no War on Christmas. There are only conspiracy-theorists with megaphones. 

[i] For example:  The ACLU of Rhode Island (2003) interceded on behalf of an interdenominational group of carolers who were told they could not sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve to inmates at the women's prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. The ACLU of Virginia (1999) represented Rita Warren and her right to erect a crèche on Fairfax County government space that had been set aside as a public forum. The ACLU argued that restricting the use of the public forum to county residents only was an unreasonable restriction. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The ACLU of Massachusetts (1996) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on behalf of two women who were fired for refusing, on religious grounds, to work at a racetrack on Christmas Day. The ACLU of Massachusetts (2003) intervened on behalf of a group of students at Westfield High School who were suspended for distributing candy canes and a religious message in school. The ACLU succeeded in having the suspensions revoked and filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit brought on behalf of the students against the school district. The ACLU of Massachusetts (2002) filed a brief supporting the right of the Church of the Good News to run ads criticizing the secularization of Christmas and promoting Christianity as the "one true religion." The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had refused to allow the paid advertisements to be posted and refused to sell additional advertising space to the church.

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An Open Letter to Anyone Fretting over the Muslim on Your Plane

http://www.michaeladelberg.com/

Few terms raise my neck hairs like "racial profiling", and for good historical reason. Racial profiling, the practice of applying extra-surveillance to a certain racial or ethnic group because that group is more prone to dangerous behavior, has a nefarious history in the U.S. It has undergirded many of our nation’s worst moments: Japanese Internment camps, Jim Crow, discriminatory lending, bigoted law enforcement. Though broadly discredited by responsible voices across the political spectrum, the question of racial profiling has recently re-arisen in the context of air travel and Muslims. Case in point: Liberal pundit Juan Williams famously confessed discomfort when flying on the same plane with people in traditional Islamic clothing.

These comments come as airport security grows increasingly inconvenient (some would say invasive), and the T.S.A. implements full body screening. Critics of the new screenings argue that everyone now suffers the inconvenient new screenings because political correctness has made it impossible to admit that Muslims pose a greater risk to air travel than other groups.

Here’s the approximate argument in favor of profiling Muslims at airports: This group of people can be linked to nearly every instance of air travel terrorism or attempted terrorism in the last two decades. It is wasteful and inconvenient to subject all travelers to increased security procedures when those efforts could be reasonably confined to one group of people and have the same net impact on air travel safety.

But anyone who thinks hard about a how a Muslim profiling program might be implemented will immediately understand how problematic it is: One fifth of the world’s Muslims are Sub-Saharan African, including the so-called Underwear Bomber, and another fifth are East Asian, including the Filipino Muslims of Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group. Nigerian or Filipino Muslims look like Africans and Polynesians, not Arabs. And if Airport security staff started screening all people who look “Muslim” , imagine the uproar when US-born Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Latinos gets selected for increased security because a T.S.A. Officer interprets one as “Muslim-looking.” Applying increased security to people with Muslim names or dress is even sillier. The British/Caribbean shoe-bomber is named Richard Reid and his dress was completely western. Name changes are easy; slipping on jeans and a t-shirt easier still. Screening based on name or dress may throw a bone to nervous travelers, but it won’t catch a terrorist.

Immediately after 9/11, airport security staff engaged in profiling. I was walking proof. With two days of scruff and dark features, I was consistently “randomly” selected for the extra pat-down at the airport and manual bag checks. One of my son’s toy racing cars once ended up in an odd seam inside my travel bag and I was detained twenty-minutes while airport security staff emptied all the contents of the bag in search of the elusive offending item. Other days, when flying clean-shaven in a business suit, I zipped through the security lines. I never gave the security staff a bad time—an extra pat-down really isn’t a big deal—but this undeclared profiling program bothered me because it was so plainly ineffective. A clean shave and tie was all that was needed to beat the profilers.

There is a time and place for profiling, albeit not racial profiling. Law enforcement and airport security already profile: Felons and people linked to dangerous organizations, even in absence of a particular concern, are singled out for higher scrutiny. And if law enforcement had a credible threat that an Arabic-looking terror suspect was likely to enter an airport on a given day, profiling Arabic-looking individuals that day would be in order. The concept of credible threat is the key, and it cannot be reasonably applied to Muslims as a whole.

 

There are over a billion and a half Muslims in the world, several hundred of whom are legitimate security threats. Even if we could deduce that fifty thousand Muslims are terrorists, that would mean only 1 in 30,000 Muslims are dangerous to U.S. air travelers. A much higher percentage of U.S. highway drivers text while driving; a much higher percentage of U.S. restaurants serve diseased food. Both represent a far greater threat to your safety than the Muslim who just boarded your plane