Both the WSJ editorial
and Bret Stephens in the NYT are missing a crucial point that they cannot make because
they are stuck in their political correctness. If Saipov’s parents had been
Buddhists there would be nothing in Buddhism for him to be radicalized to. Had
Saipov's parents been Buddhists there would never have been a problem in
the first place .
The diversity program lottery became the Islamic
roulette because Saipov was Muslim. With Muslims we should take special precaution. Why?
Because Islam is also a political ideology. During the Cold War communists
could not enter the United States except through a waiver, so since Islam
is also a political ideology why are immigrants from Islamic countries
not treated the same way communists were during the Cold War? Extra screening needs
to be applied to differentiate between what Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls the “Mecca Muslims” (i.e., “Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship
devoutly, but are not inclined to practice violence”) and the “Medina Muslims”
(who “see the forcible imposition of Shari’a as their religious duty”)
The New York Times
Bret Stephens NOV. 1, 2017
We heard what sounded
like a crash and what might have been a gunshot, but it didn’t register at
first. Lower Manhattan is loud at every hour with traffic and construction, and
my wife and I have grown used to ignoring the ambient noise. Even when one police
siren follows another. Even when it is followed by dozens more.
Two of our three
children had been out shopping for Halloween. Then our 12-year-old son came
home. He told us he had seen a truck smashed on our corner; that there had been
a shooting; that he’d seen what looked like blood on the windshield. He said
the police were swarming the neighborhood and helicopters were flying overhead
and our building was locked down. He was composed as he told us all of this. He
must have missed the attack by a few minutes at most.
Where was our
teenager? We experienced a moment of parental panic until she answered her
phone and came home. I checked the news and saw something about bodies strewn
along the bike path along the Hudson. I must have said “terrorism.” Our
8-year-old started to cry. “We’re safe up here,” my wife assured her. “No,
we’re not,” she replied, not unreasonably.
I went downstairs to
try to see things for myself, just as I had when I lived in Jerusalem during
the second intifada and similar events were an almost weekly occurrence. The
day was clear and crisp. There were fire trucks and gurneys outside Stuyvesant
High School, the elite public school that anchors the northern end of our
neighborhood. I tried to get to the bike path, but stern-looking police
officers waved me off at every corner. A woman pushing an infant in a stroller
was sobbing; I heard her say that she had been outside when the crash took
place. I stopped a paramedic to ask what he knew about the number of
casualties. “A lot,” he said.
It was clear that
terrorism had returned to Manhattan, barely a year after a bomb went off on
23rd Street and injured more than 30 people. Within an hour it became clear
that it was the act of another jihadist, most likely a self-starter inspired by
what he had seen on TV of similar attacks in Barcelona and Nice. Ted Cruz and
other right-wing populists sometimes deride Manhattan as a liberal La-La Land
of privileged people living far from the real world. But on Tuesday there was
only the stark reality of multiple homicides outside our home and grim-faced
emergency medical workers racing to the scene.
Disasters that strike
close to home inevitably affect us differently from those we observe at a
distance. I cross the bike path near the spot where the terrorist crashed his
truck every day. My kids learned to ride their bikes on the same path that
became Tuesday’s scene of carnage. We celebrated our older daughter’s bat
mitzvah at a restaurant just off that path. My son went to soccer camp at Pier
40, where the rampage began. “There but for the grace of God go I” may be the
world’s most shopworn phrase, but it’s one you feel keenly after an event like
this.
Disasters at close
range also have a way of making ideological pronouncements seem remote,
feckless and wretched. Donald Trump promised in a tweet to “step up our already
Extreme Vetting Program.” Then he blasted Chuck Schumer, New York’s Democratic
senior senator, for the diversity visa lottery under which the suspect,
Sayfullo Saipov, supposedly arrived in the United States from Uzbekistan.
Yet the notable fact
is that even if the administration’s signature multination travel ban had been
in place for decades, it would not have kept Saipov from entering the country
legally and obtaining a green card before going on his killing spree. And
getting a visa through a “diversity program” does not mean that he wasn’t
vetted by the United States before his arrival or that he couldn’t have been
denied entry on security grounds.
Determined fanatics
will usually outwit the Department of Homeland Security’s games of
whack-a-mole. A heavy-handed immigration policy will never be an effective
counterterrorism strategy.
In the meantime, the
responses that are meaningful, and for which one feels actual gratitude, are
all local: Ryan Nash, the officer who shot the suspect as he waved what seemed
to be two guns (toys, as it turned out) in the middle of West Street; the
parents and teachers at P.S. 89 for sheltering the kids just as they were being
let out for the day; the police and fire departments and emergency medical
services for turning the world’s most vulnerable city into one of the safest
and most welcoming.
This is real America.
Most of the people who live or work nearby, from the Goldman bankers to the
Stuyvesant whiz kids, are strivers who came from other places and started with
a lot less. We feel intense pride in our city and country, though we don’t feel
the compulsion constantly to profess that pride as proof of our patriotism or as
an expression of a cultural resentment.
Few of us may go to
church or own a gun, and hardly any of us voted for the president. But we are
good friends to our neighbors, look out for their children and feel nothing but
gratitude for the people who protect us. And we choose to live in a place that
we know is a target for fanatics because fanatics will always target the things
we prize most: openness, diversity, sky-high ambition and the belief that we
are more than simply our racial or religious identities.
Something unreal, as
people say, happened in my neighborhood on Tuesday. But we stayed real, and
trick-or-treating proceeded on schedule.
The Wall Street Journal
The diversity visa
program is far from the main terror threat.
By The Editorial Board
Law enforcement
continues to investigate Tuesday’s terror attack in which a 29-year-old from
Uzbekistan used a truck to murder eight pedestrians in lower Manhattan. So it’s
unfortunate and counterproductive that President Trump’s first instinct has
been to politicize the tragedy by blaming—what else?—immigration.
The President
apparently got a scoop early Wednesday that the alleged terrorist Sayfullo
Saipov was admitted to the U.S. in 2010 under the State Department’s diversity
visa lottery. He then shot off a barrage of tweets blasting the lottery, which
he called a “Chuck Schumer beauty,” singling out the Senate Democratic leader.
“We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery
Systems. We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter),” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Later in the day he
again attacked the visa program, and in an aside lashed chained migration that
benefits relatives of U.S. citizens and green card holders. While we’re all for
better vetting of immigrants, and monitoring of terror risks, the sad reality
is that a radicalized U.S. citizen could also have committed the attack.
Congress established
the diversity lottery as part of the Immigration Act of 1990—which Mr. Schumer
co-sponsored along with several Republicans—to diversify the pool of
immigrants. Chained family migration favors countries in Latin America while a
disproportionate number of Chinese and Indians have immigrated on
employer-sponsored visas.
Each year, 50,000
visas are awarded at random to immigrants from countries whose admissions
totalled fewer than 50,000 over the preceding five years. Lottery winners make
up less than 5% of the total legal immigrants. Applicants must have graduated
from high school or have at least two years of formal training in an
occupation. Initially, most visas went to European countries, but Africa has
lately been soaking up the most.
While it would make
sense to substitute the diversity lottery for more guest-worker visas,
restrictionists aren’t interested in this trade. The Gang of Eight bill that
passed the Senate in 2013 would have replaced the diversity lottery with more
employer-sponsored visas, but the bill stood no chance in the House. Arkansas
Senator Tom Cotton has proposed eliminating the lottery as part of a bill to
shrink legal immigration by half.
In any event, reducing
immigration or improving background checks wouldn’t have prevented the New York
attack or many of the other two dozen or so Islamist-motivated attacks since
2001. Testimony from Mr. Saipov’s former acquaintances suggested that he didn’t
come to the U.S. radicalized and that he became emotionally disturbed over
time.
The Tsarnaev brothers
who bombed the Boston marathon immigrated as kids from Kyrgyzstan after their
parents received political asylum. The security guard Omar Mateen who shot up a
night club in Orlando was American-born. So was San Bernardino shooter Syed
Rizwan Farook, though his wife and collaborator was a legal immigrant.
Police have found
evidence that Mr. Saipov had some allegiance to Islamic State, and his truck
rampage followed the ISIS playbook. Yet John Miller, the New York Police
Department’s counterrorism chief, says Mr. Saipov hadn’t been investigated by
his department or the FBI. Mr. Miller has often told us that his nightmare
cases are self-radicalized individuals who only appear as a threat when they
attack.
More than an
immigration crackdown, the Saipov case might call for better monitoring of
terror websites and groups that are more likely to be radicalized. We’re also
with Mr. Trump—and Senator John McCain —in suggesting that Mr. Saipov should
have been interrogated at length before he was read his Miranda rights. The
first priority is preventing future attacks and breaking any terror networks.
Perhaps we will learn
that Uzbekistan is a terror breeding ground from which immigrants need special
vetting. But the Commander in Chief in particular should wait for answers
before jumping to policy conclusions or exploiting immigration fears.
