On Terror in Brussels

Very briefly, it is extremely difficult to reiterate the point that the only short term ameliorative to Sunni Salafist terrorism by groups like the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda is good police work to maintain surveillance on suspected violent extremists and, as much as possible, break up plots before their realization.  Such amelioratives are imperfect - some plots will not be stopped.  The prosecution of armed violence by sufficiently well-organized, financed, and secretive networks of individuals and groups, militantly committed to a particular vision of the world and willing to pursue its realization by all means necessary may, on occasion, yield extreme instances of carnage, despite the best efforts of law enforcement and civil defense authorities to prevent them.  There are, of course, more proactive alternatives, like aggressive military action in Southwest Asia, especially in Syria and Iraq but also in the Sinai peninsula and Libya, to breakup the emergent safe havens of IS and other groups.  And there are the extreme alternatives of closed borders and aggressive restrictions on the civil and religious freedoms of Muslims in Western societies, as if Islam, as a theological generality, is to blame for current patterns of violent extremism.  Evidently, the populations of every Western state, the U.S. included, are eager to specify an appropriate scapegoat for transnational violent extremism in order to prosecute its successful excision from the world, by isolation or prophylactic annihilation.  In this manner, it is difficult but necessary to argue that violence begets further violence, and selective exclusion in closed borders breeds internal xenophobia and external jealousy and enmity.  In Western society, we've spent two hundred years building a culture grounded in liberal internationalism, anticipating a borderless world of indiscriminate, free human civilization.  Western Europe is enduring a dark chapter in its history of standing as one under the principle that open borders and open democratic societies best realize economic development and nurture cultural heterogeneity and exuberance.  As a defender of such principles, I hope that we are not watching the Salafists win in destroying the light of open, liberal, pluralist democracy in a unified Europe, or even replacing such high values with unity on the perverted principle of a war against Islam.  Grieve the dead, pursue and prosecute the perpetrators, but leave the freedoms of peaceful believers intact and the borders open to refugees seeking a brighter future in a sphere of cultural and economic liberty and pluralist democracy.