Incompatible with Civilization

Monday night the Manchester Arena was bombed, at the end of a concert, where many young people—often along with their parents—were attending. The perpetrator was among the 22 dead. He was an Islamist extremist. Of course.

In today’s world, despite news media going far out of their way to hide names, ethnicity, and religion, heinous mass murder attempts are 99% of the time Islamist extremists.

There’s always this overweening concern that if the fact is mentioned, there will be a backlash against non-extreme Muslims. While that backlash has been mostly non-existent, the failure to provide truth is stirring people to anger. Muslims who are not Islamist extremists have a stake in clarifying who they are, in contrast to the terrorists. They need to find a way to separate out the wicked from among them, for their own sake as well as for civilization at large.

I don’t know how they should go about this. But I wish them well, because the friends we’ve had who are Muslim are very well suited to civilization, and we want them with us.

I believe clarity will help. Since I’m about defining civilization, I appreciated a response from Steven Crowder on Tuesday.

Instead of civilization, he refers to Western culture, but for now we’ll call that a synonym. He lays out several beliefs that are incompatible with Western culture:

• Want sharia courts? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to marry a six-year-old? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to strike your wife for ANY reason? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for apostasy? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for “blasphemy”? You’re not welcome.

It’s a big more specific than what we at the Spherical Model call the requirements for Civilization:

·         Honor God—which must include freedom of thought, freedom of belief, and freedom of speech that disagrees with those who believe differently. As one of the Articles of Faith in my religion puts it, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” [Articles of Faith 11]

·         Honor life—protect the life of each innocent human life, including the weak and defenseless, such as the unborn and the elderly and the afflicted. All human life is valuable, more valuable than other animals; no groups of humans can be categorized as subhuman. Categorizing any “them” as subhuman leads to atrocities.

·         Honor family—respect parents, and reserve sex for marriage, where mother and father raise children faithfully to adulthood.

·         Honor property—never taking what belongs to someone else, never expecting something to be given to you at someone else’s expense.

·         Honor truth—real objective truth, that exists outside ourselves and we are obliged to do our best to perceive.

Crowder’s list mainly targets freedom of thought and honoring life. But he’s right; you can’t get along in the civilized world when you’re believing savage things. We have to say, “If you believe in savagery, you’re not welcome among us.”

The full video is about seven minutes, and includes commentary on the need to “shame” the believers of what he accurately refers to as political Islam—because it’s seeking power rather than righteousness. Worth watching:

Some people are crying that this is Islamic terrorist attack is a new low—targeting children. But that’s not accurate. This savagery has long included targeting children. Michelle Malkin, in her piece "The Forgotten Slaughter of the Innocents," reminds us of eight previous attacks targeting or including young people and children.

She didn’t include Beslan, September 2004. Glenn Beck retells that event, from his days at CNN:

There’s a school in Beslan, and it started on the first day of school. In Russia, they have this tradition that the parents bring their kids to school for the first day of school. And so the parents brought their little kids into school, and there waiting for them were monsters, armed Islamic groups. They ushered everybody into the gym. Anybody who spoke out, anybody who cried, was killed. The mothers and the daughters were raped in front of everyone. It lasted three days. There were 1100 hostages, 777 children. They killed 385.

Every civilized person in the world can recognize this behavior as savage. There is no reason within the sphere of civilization that can include this behavior. The perpetrators will have no place in the afterlife but hell, and they have no place among civilized human beings on this planet.

What should be the civilized response? Celebrities, such as Katy Perry, call for love and unity. Blogger Matt Walsh responds to that call:

I realize that celebrities who pontificate about love and unity aren’t talking about the kind of love or unity that actually requires us to do anything or make any kind of sacrifice. That’s why they feel comfortable telling us about “love” even as they treat their own spouses and children like disposable props. The love that keeps a marriage going is active and self-giving. The “love” Katy Perry refers to is just a vague feeling of pleasant indifference towards all of humanity. She “loves the world” by shrugging her shoulders at it. And when she tells us to respond to these tragedies with “love,” she means only that we ought not do anything to actively stop it from happening again. Instead, we should throw our hands up in loving surrender, and if more of us are brutally slaughtered, well, that’s a price Katy Perry is willing to pay.

Perry and others who call for “no borders or barriers” hypocritically live in gated, guarded homes. They know, for the sake of their own life and property, they can’t just invite the world to “co-own” their home.

But, just to consider the “love” response, let’s keep an open mind and assume, if you could retrain the brains of these brainwashed savages, they could come to choose civilization. Theoretically I’d like to believe that’s possible. 

But you can only do that if you put a stop to their killing first. And that requires defense: killing, imprisoning, or containing in their own walled-off corner of the globe—every single one who holds the belief that killing us is a delight to them and their god.

Misguided Search for Meaning

Along with the rest of the country, I’ve been trying to make some sense of the senseless terrorist murders in Orlando.

I am working on a theory that this—and a number of other challenges to civilization—are related to a misguided search for meaning.

Going back in history, for a moment, this is from The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, concerning the Six-Day War in Israel:

After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces were also wiped out that same afternoon. In the next few days Israel captured all of the Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, while crushing the forces of the frontline Arab states. It was a psychological turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslim. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.

There was in this equation the tacit understanding that God sided with the Jews. Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region Jews had lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier (p. 38).

So, there was a loss, among Muslims in these Middle Eastern countries, of the sense that they were right, or possibly better than their neighbors as they had supposed. The way they saw it, God no longer favored them. So it was up to them to get back in God’s graces—by doubling down on being more of what they had been.

Fascism is an idea of coercion. It is extreme. They see a need to be extreme in order to assert their superiority. As with the Nazis before them, the fascist Muslims asserted their superiority through coercion, force, and death to the unbelieving or the different.

I wrote some months ago, after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, about the siege in Mecca. The perpetrators of that terrorist attack were executed. During that one-month window between the end of the siege and the executions, the Soviets attacked Afghanistan.

Abdullah Azzam, who, according to The
Looming Tower (from which this photo
is taken) "issued a fatwa in 1984 that called
upon Muslims everywhere to 'join the caravan' of
the Afghan jihad.

It was a mythos that got Osama bin Laden. He had a teacher at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, a Palestinian named Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. According to Wright, Azzam

embodied in a modern fashion the warrior priest—a figure that was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan. Azzam combined piety and learning with a serene and bloody intransigence. His slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues” (p. 95).

Azzam started traveling to Peshawar to help in the Afghan resistance. His descriptions were a recruiting tool, catching the imagination of bin Laden. As Wright explains,

The Afghans, in his tableau, represented humanity in a pristine state—a righteous, pious, pre-industrial people—struggling against the brutal, soulless, mechanized force of modernity….

The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against jahiliyya—the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism and sexual equality. Here in this primitive land, so stunted by poverty and illiteracy and patriarchal tribal codes, the heroic and seemingly doomed Afghan jihad against the Soviet colossus had the elements of an epochal moment in history. In the skillful hands of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the legend of the Afghan holy warriors would be packaged and sold all over the world (p. 96).

So bin Laden was captured by that mythos and used it to recruit throughout his deadly career. It appealed to others like him—the wealthy and educated,

According to research by Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist in Cairo, most of the Islamists who had attacked the mosque in Mecca were young men from villages who had come to the city for schooling. The majority were the sons of middle-level government bureaucrats. They were ambitious and tended to be drawn to the fields of science and engineering, which accept only the most qualified students. They were not the alienated, marginalized youth that a sociologist might have expected. Instead, Ibrahim wrote, they were “model young Egyptians. If they were not typical, it was because they were significantly above the average in their generation.” (p. 58) This type continued in recruiting of Saudis to Afghanistan.

It was never about recruiting the disenfranchised, the poor, the oppressed striking out at an unfair world. It appealed to privileged college students, wealthy sons, the comfortable—who lacked purpose, principles, and a sense of meaning. The mythos described for them led them to go fight in far off Afghanistan—at least during a school break. Maybe longer if they got the thrill they sought.

Afghan fighters, the mujahideen, tolerated the Saudis such as bin Laden, but only barely. They were untrained, undisciplined, unworthy of trust in times of war. Bin Laden spent the first several years with a “fear of bodily participation,” (p. 100). Later, ashamed, he pushed for greater Saudi participation in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was often ill, and militarily unwise. But he eventually maintained a training camp in a strategically located mountain overlook called the Lion’s Den.

There was a single battle, near the end, in which this ragtag group prevailed, almost accidentally, at a critical time. It followed their worst defeat, a three-week siege, at the end of which bin Laden ordered the destruction of the camp so the Soviets had nothing to pillage.

The Saudi group hid within the forest and attacked one-by-one any Soviets that approached. Sometime during this assault, bin Laden fainted (claimed he was calm enough to fall asleep). It was confusion within the dense forest that led the remaining Soviets to overestimate the number of the enemy and give up the attack. As Lawrence Wright describes it,

Osama bin Laden, photo from
The Looming Tower, "in a cave in Jalalabad
in 1988, at about the time that he
began al-Qaeda"

From the Soviet perspective, the battle of the Lion’s Den was a small moment in the tactical retreat from Afghanistan. In the heightened religious atmosphere among the men following bin Laden, however, there was a dizzying sense that they were living in a supernatural world, in which reality knelt before faith. For them, the encounter at the Lion’s Den became the foundation of the myth that they defeated the superpower. Within a few years the entire Soviet empire fell to pieces—dead of the wound the Muslims inflicted in Afghanistan, the jihadis believed. By then they had created the vanguard that was to carry the battle forward. Al-Qaeda was conceived in the marriage of these assumptions: Faith is stronger than weapons or nations, and the ticket to enter the sacred zone where such miracles occur is the willingness to die (p. 120).

Bin Laden was presented a rifle taken off one of the killed Soviets, which he brandished thereafter. He had neither shot the rifle nor killed the Soviet. But that didn’t matter; it looked good for building the mythos.

This is only a quarter of the way into Wright’s book. There’s much more to the story on the way to 9/11. But I think this beginning gives us some clues. Islamist extremists are people who:

·         Seek something to give meaning to their lives.

·         Reinterpret what they see in the world to suit their version of reality.

·         Define an extreme version of belief as “good” and all else as “evil.”

·         Believe they are superior and dehumanize anyone not among them.

·         Tolerate no belief outside their orthodoxy.

·         Seek power over anyone not associated with them in full, or annihilation of any who cannot be coerced to submit.

·         Believe that whatever they do is justified.

·         Delight in hating all who believe differently.

I do not think it is a bad thing to seek meaning in our lives; I think we should all do that.

But seeking meaning only in the southern hemisphere of the Spherical Model—below civilization—leads only to savagery.

And coercion will never be the right way to persuade others to find shared meaning. Real conversion comes only by invitation, “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned, by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile.”[i]

It is undeniable that Islamist terrorists are the most dangerous of the savagery-loving meaning seekers today. And we should do all in our power to identify and defeat this enemy-of-all-that-is-good.

But they are not the only savagery-loving meaning seekers. I’m seeing connections I hadn’t seen before, which may explain in part why our president fails to identify the enemy, let alone protect us by defeating that enemy. I’ll talk that about in Part II.

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[i] Doctrine and Covenants 121:41-42 

The Cruelty Trademark

I’ve been re-reading a couple of classic youth novels for book club, and I’m reminded that, in order to become a classic, a piece of literature needs to touch our desire to  understand and strive for what is right, just, and civilized.

Black Beauty was published in 1877. It’s the story of a horse’s life—told from the point of view of the horse, in England when horses were necessary for most transportation. Horses are servants to humans, nothing to be done about that. But there’s so much about the way they’re treated that determines whether they can be a good servant.

Nineteenth Century England is somewhat far off, and yet there’s some wisdom that transcends.

While Black Beauty is still at his first master Squire Gordon’s, he is cared for by a good and skilled stable master named John, and his assistant James. John has come upon a scene of a young man trying to force his pony to jump a fence that is too high. The pony keeps refusing, and eventually tips the boy into a thorn hedge. John, rather than helping the boy out, allows him to learn from the scratches, and then lets the father know what has happened—letting them stop worrying after the riderless pony has arrived home, and letting them know the pony was not at fault. The father sees the need to do some teaching with his son.

Back home, John tells the incident to James, and James remembers an incident with that boy at school. James had found the boy catching flies, pulling off their wings, and enjoying watching the resulting torture. James had whopped him, and then explained himself to the school master.

“Of course I said fair and square at once what I had done, and why; then I showed the master the poor flies, some crushed and some crawling about helpless, and I showed him the wings on the window sill. I never saw him so angry before; but as Bill was still howling and whining, like the coward that he was, he did not give him any more punishment of that kind, but set him up on a stool for the rest of the afternoon, and said that he should not go out to play for that week. Then he talked to all the boys very seriously about cruelty, and said how hard-hearted and cowardly it was to hurt the weak and the helpless; but what stuck in my mind was this: he said that cruelty was the devil’s own trade-mark, and if we saw anyone who took pleasure in cruelty we might know who he belonged to, for the devil was a murderer from the beginning, and a tormentor to the end. On the other hand, where we saw people who love their neighbors, and were kind to man and beast, we might know that was God’s mark, for ‘God is Love’” (p. 59).

I’m thinking this is much different from a likely teacher’s response today. A no tolerance policy for fighting wouldn’t even wait for an explanation; the protector against cruelty would be punished.

I have no fondness for flies and feel no compunction about using a flyswatter if they enter my home, but that’s different from inflicting torture. There are studies and statistics showing that adult predators were often cruel to animals and small creatures as children. Black Beauty is fiction. But somehow that long ago society knew animal cruelty was wrong way before the studies.

Also, today the teacher would hardly be allowed to mention the devil and God as his reasoning against cruelty.

And yet this paragraph is rather satisfying for a lover of civilization.

Later in the story, James, the assistant, moves on to a new job, and is replaced with a 14-year-old boy who needs an opportunity to learn a trade. There is an instance when Joe, the new boy, is getting along well, and is riding Black Beauty on an errand. They pass a brick field, where a man is beating his horses to pull his overladen cart out of mud. Joe calls to him to stop. He points out that the wheels are too stuck, and beating the horses won’t help them move the cart. Joe offers to help unload some of the bricks. The man—angry and drunk—tells him to mind his own business, and continues whipping the horses.

Joe goes to the house near the brickyard and finds the brickyard owner and tells him what is happening. The man thanks him. Later he has him testify to a magistrate. And young Joe does it all bravely.

When Joe gets home, John notices he is upset and has Joe tell him what happened. Then he says,

Right, Joe! You did right, my now, whether the fellow gets a summons or not. Many folks would have ridden by and said ‘twas not their business to interfere. Now, I say, that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it; you did right my boy (p.88).

There are things we know about being civilized. We need people with a desire to be good. And we still have some innate understanding of what that looks like.

As we’re reminded in the Ten Commandments, we need to honor God, life, family, property, and truth. And we have additional lists like this one in I Corinthians 13, reminding us what pure love entails: being long suffering, kind, not envious, not thinking oneself above others, not unseemly (crude, inappropriate, coarse), not self-serving, slow to anger, avoiding evil thought, no joy in vice, but finding joy in truth.

And, one of my favorites, an admonition from Paul, Philippians 4:8, reminds us what to fill our minds with:

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Do we have a taste, a preference, for these things? Isn’t it better to strive for civilization—with good, kind, humble, truthful people—rather than savage people, who are unkind, quick to anger, vengeful, prideful, evil thinking liars?

And isn’t it better to be with civilized people who value life, liberty, and property for themselves and others, rather than live among those who seek to take away life, liberty, and property from those who disagree with them, or those who live differently, or those they dislike for whatever reason?

We suffered yet another savage tragedy this weekend. There can be no sympathy for the perpetrator who killed as many as fifty people in Orlando, Florida. He is dead, after a three-hour standoff. He was an Islamist terrorist.

Orlando tribute
photo from here

There is something particularly savage about mass murdering and claiming it’s for your religion.

Religion is our search for how to live the best possible life. We can share our religions, but we cannot force others to believe.

Religions can and do define what behaviors qualify as good enough for belonging, for calling oneself by that religion’s name. But the power ends before coercion. Before force. Before physical punishment. The ultimate punishment a religion has a right to inflict is excommunication—removing one’s name from the membership. That is for serious wrongdoing, and usually for the unrepentant continuing wrongdoer.

No religion has authority to physically punish its members. And no religion has a right to condemn and mete out punishment on nonbelievers. A so-called religion that condones these things is a usurper of political authority masquerading as a religion.

I suspect there’s a lot I do not want in my lifestyle that the victims this weekend chose for theirs. It was a gay bar; I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t have sex outside of marriage. I’m like a lot of religious people.

But the idea that anyone would murder them is abhorrent. Murder is far deeper into savagery than anything those victims might have been doing. That should be so obvious that everyone who can be comfortable living in civilization must see this truth.

I do not know anyone who wishes for the death of people whose lifestyle is different. I do not know anyone who hates people whose lifestyle is different—even though we get defined as haters simply for not agreeing to embrace and approve of things that are antithetical to our religious beliefs.

There is nothing civilized about terrorism. There is no excuse for it. It is a delight in cruelty and killing that most of us can hardly imagine—even though in this country we’ve now faced 86 terrorist incidents since 9/11/2001. Almost without exception, the terrorist plots we face are Islamist. Their behavior has the mark of the devil, who is “a murderer from the beginning, and a tormentor to the end.” They lack “God’s mark, for ‘God is Love.’”

Terrorism can’t be condoned, given excuse, or tolerated. It needs to be prosecuted, prevented, and wiped out. Every tool at our disposal should be used, especially common sense.

If someone is Muslim, I’m afraid they will continue to be burdened with the necessity of proclaiming their difference from radicals who condone terrorism. We civilized people will continue to honor them and embrace them as they do so. But it is unfortunately true that the terrorists trying to murder us do it in the name of Islam.

The failure of this administration to acknowledge this basic fact is hurting all of us—including the peaceful Muslims.

If we are less safe from terrorists, then we have greater need to defend ourselves. Yet this administration blames our right to defend ourselves with arms, while avoiding identifying the terrorists’ beliefs.

Armed security at that gun-free nightclub might have helped. And people were prevented by law from arming themselves at many of the terrorist tragedies worldwide.

It cannot be about disarming law-abiding citizens; it must be about disarming terrorist plotters. You do that by identifying them. Our civilization is at stake.

The Usual Suspects

Tragedy struck again yesterday. It happened at a Christmas party at Inland Regional Center, a social services center for the developmentally disabled, in San Bernardino, California. Fourteen were killed, and an additional seventeen were injured, including a police officer (numbers may change as further reports come out).

Inland Regional Center, site of the tragedy
photo credit KTTV via AP

The details are available in multiple news reports, and more information will continue to come out. But when something like this happens, logic and experience tell us it is likely one of two things: an insane individual (usually male, loner, and known—or should have been known—to be insane and possibly dangerous), or Islamist terrorists.

A couple of other possibilities also come to mind: drug cartel violence or gang violence. In fact, inner city black-on-black gang violence is so common (more killed and injured in Chicago inner city over the weekend than in yesterday's slaughter) that it ceases to be news. There was also a shooting spree in New Orleans on November 22; 17 were injured (no deaths, at least by the time of the story I read). Almost no news about it.

This one was radical Islamist terrorism. In this case, the suspects, who were killed in a shootout with police later in the day, were not as easily identifiable as some. The male, Syed Rizwan Farook, age 28, was a US citizen, a graduate of a local high school. He attended local mosques, was known as mild mannered, and fellow Muslims were unaware of his Islamist radicalism. He worked as a food inspector.

The other perpetrator was female—his wife, Tashfeen Malik, age 27. He went to Saudi Arabia a year or more ago (reports vary—maybe just last spring), during Hajj, and had plans to marry her there. Some reports say they had a baby. I have not seen reports of where the baby was during their attack, and where the child is after the death of its parents. For the child’s sake, it may be better that we don’t learn that from media. But curiosity leads to some questions: was someone else notified of the parents’ plans? Did a childcare provider have anything to do with the planning?

Explosives, AK-47s, pipe bombs, as well as other weapons are reportedly part of the incident, including the makings of maybe a dozen pipe bombs and/or IEDs in the couple’s garage. Neighbors of Farook report seeing Middle Eastern men delivering large boxes to the garage, where police found the explosive materials. Neighbors hadn’t reported suspicious activity, however, for fear of appearing racist. When the perpetrators were apprehended in the vehicle, police were cautious about possible explosives being rigged in their SUV.

The couple wore assault-style clothing and gear (may have included body armor). It should go without saying, but one doesn’t accumulate assault gear and explosives on the odd chance that an argument might come up at a workplace. Clearly it was a planned event. The particular target may have been a spontaneous decision, but they appear to have been preparing for such an attack for some time.

The news reports, and details coming from police and FBI officials throughout the afternoon and early evening, refused to say what they knew about the perpetrators—that they were Islamist terrorists. There may have been some tactical reason for keeping that information from the public. But it makes us in the public wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to be honest with us, so we can keep a lookout for additional danger.

San Bernardino Chief of Police Jarrod Berguan
at a news conference following the attack
photo credit KTTV via AP

A couple of essential questions come up. Why would anyone do such a thing? And how do we identify people who would do such a thing?

I can’t say why someone would become a radicalized Islamist. I am guessing it has something to do with wanting meaning in life while also wanting control over anyone who isn’t part of the meaning-granting ideology.

The question of how we identify people who would do an Islamist terrorist attack grows increasingly challenging, especially if we don’t want the dragnet to sweep up many innocents. But we can start with the stereotypes:

Muslim. That should go without saying, because no Islamist terrorist isn’t Islamist, which is an ideology within or attached to Islam. The questions should, therefore, include belief. But if the people who attend at the same mosques can’t identify the radicals, that is definitely problematic.

Middle Eastern heritage, or possibly Pakistani (Farook was from a Pakistani family). Although black American Muslims (a good number of whom are converted/recruited in prison) and black African Muslims might also be among the suspicious. And occasionally even white Americans have been recruited and radicalized. Still, Middle Eastern Muslim is the most likely radical Islamist.

Male. Probably between age 16-45. But because that is the stereotype, radicals are learning to push the envelope, including women, children, and older men. The second perpetrator in this attack was a woman, with a child. Which adds to the difficulty of identifying the radicals. Still, those radicals beyond the stereotype are probably attached to someone within the stereotype.

We also don’t know what changes a regular Muslim into a radicalized Islamist (defined as enforcing Islam as the only power in the world, subjugating or killing all others, including moderate Muslims). Farook was born and raised in America. He had all the benefits of other citizens. The mosques where he worshipped, at least according to what we know so far, are made up of people who are horrified by his terrorist attack.

What we need is an omniscient way of reading minds, to clear the innocent and watch those who are wavering or turning bad. That is a power God has, but that I do not trust government officials to do. So, we need government, which we have tasked with the responsibility of our protection, to be diligent in noticing patterns, listening to sources, and following those with suspicious connections and suspicious behaviors.

What we do not need is a government that fails to admit that radical Islamist terrorism exists—anywhere in the world, but especially not on our shores. We do not need a government that uses the tragedy to assert power over innocent American citizens, claiming that we just need stricter gun laws.

Does it even need to be pointed out that AK-47s and pipe bombs are already against the law in California, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Because reports are still sketchy, maybe we can’t be certain AK-47s were involved, but any fully automatic rifle (machine gun) and most semi-automatic weapons are illegal in California.

Here is what the president said in his response to the attack: "We're going to have to, I think, search ourselves as a society to make sure that we can take basic steps that would make it harder—not impossible, but harder--for individuals to get access to weapons.”

So let me rephrase what our president is saying: Even though the right to bear arms has been greatly infringed already, especially where this attack just happened, we are sure that further infringing on those rights for law-abiding citizens will make people safer from the lawless killers who use already outlawed weapons to kill innocent people.

In looking at things through the Spherical Model lens, we can see that radical Islamist terrorism is savage. It is deep down in the southern hemisphere where you find tyranny and savagery, and in the southwest quadrant of chaos. Tyranny intended to control politically, as Islamists intend, is in the southeast quadrant of statist oppression, so they are offering up a choice: continued terrorist attacks until you submit to tyrannical rule.

There may be, at least for now, a difference of depth, but tyranny that infringes on innocent citizens’ right to protect themselves is also southeastern statist tyranny. For those who only see the southern hemisphere, offering relief from the chaos is a common response of those vying for power.

But the better way to get away from both chaotic and statist tyrannies is to move north to the freedom that guarantees God-given rights of life, liberty and property. It takes a civilized, self-governing people—religious people with strong families—to get there and stay there. The northern hemisphere ideas beat every flavor of tyranny every time.