NRO
Ethan Epstein
December 6, 2010 5:00 P.M.Bigots and Terrorists in Portland
The city’s liberal establishment worries more about biased Americans than
about would-be mass murderers.
Portland — On the night of November 26, a 19-year-old Oregon State
University engineering student named Mohamed Mohamud drove a van packed with
what
he believed to be explosives to Pioneer Courthouse Square, a downtown plaza
known to locals as “Portland’s Living Room.” There, thousands of
residents had gathered to light Portland’s Christmas tree as part of an annual
holiday celebration.
Fortunately, the bomb Mohamud carried was a dummy: The supposed jihadist
sympathizers from whom he had procured the weapon were in fact undercover
FBI agents. When he tried to detonate the bomb, Mohamud was promptly arrested
and charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
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- - - - - - - - - - - -Many Portlanders like to see their city as a place
somewhat apart from the rest of America: a “greener,” more tolerant, more
progressive burg, a city untouched by some of the uglier trends in global
politics. Indeed, Portland withdrew from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force
some five years ago over civil-liberties concerns. Thus, the revelation
that Portland was the target of a murderous jihadi has come as a profound
shock to many residents.
Yet perhaps equally shocking has been the reaction of Portland’s ruling
liberal establishment to this attempted mass murder.
It began the morning after Mohamud’s plot unraveled, when Portland’s
mayor, Sam Adams, took to his blog to issue a stern warning to the citizens he
governs. “I trust in Portlanders’ sense of fairness,” he wrote, before
demonstrating the exact opposite. “Bad actions by one member of any group does
[sic] not and should not be generalized or applied more widely to other
members of that same group,” he lectured. “Otherwise, as part of the biggest
racial group in Portland, European-Americans, producing many crimes daily,
would be in deep trouble.” A day later, Adams fretted publicly about the
danger of “knuckle-headed retribution.”
But it was not only Portland’s mayor who focused more on Oregonians’
supposed bigotry than on the fact that a terrorist had tried to murder
thousands. Elisabeth Gern, a social-services coordinator at Catholic
Charities,
said publicly that she thought Somalis would be “attacked.” The Willamette
Week, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Portland-based newspaper, worried about the “
disconcerting effect on the Somali community.” Imam Mikal Shabazz, the
president of the Oregon Islamic Chaplains Organization and Portland’s most
prominent Muslim spokesman, said that “innocent Muslim-Americans are exposed
to
retaliation.”
Yet there has been only one apparently anti-Muslim crime: A fire was set
in the middle of the night in the office of a mosque where Mohamud sometimes
prayed as a student. (The FBI is investigating this act of vandalism and
offering a cash reward for assistance.) Otherwise, Oregonians have shown
marked support for the Muslim and Somali communities here. Hundreds of
Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists marched in solidarity with Oregon’s
Islamic community after the mosque was vandalized. Hundreds more held a vigil
on
the campus of Oregon State University to show support for Muslim students
there in the wake of Mohamud’s arrest. So far, despite the histrionics, this
has proved to be the backlash that wasn’t.
Other political and media elites here have taken to attacking the terror
sting operation, the very foundation of the case against Mohamud. In the
Portland Mercury, a popular weekly newspaper, journalist Denis C. Theriault
_asked_ (http://www.po
rtlandmercury.com/portland/no-one-was-going-to-die/Content?oid=3109991) , “Is
it really a terrorist plot if no one was ever in
danger and the men you’re plotting with — the handlers giving you cash,
driving you around, and even building your bomb — are all (whoops!) government
agents?” (The article was headlined “No One Was Going to Die.”) On a blog on
the paper’s website, the same writer _said_
(http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2010/11/27/familiar-script-emerges-in-stories-abou
t-terror-stings?oid=3093519&show=comments&sort=desc&display=) that “we
have to wonder how else [terror stings] might be used — and what other kinds
of crimes government agents will be asked to encourage Americans to try to
commit before arresting them.” Pat Birmingham, a prominent local defense
attorney, said, “There’s a big question whether he had the mental makeup to
do it on his own.” This line of argument has been picked up by some in the
national media, most notably Glenn Greenwald of Salon.
Of course, the question of whether the FBI’s involvement crossed the line
of entrapment will need to be examined during the trial. Yet arguments like
the Mercury’s veer too far into the territory of exonerating the
perpetrator.
According to the FBI’s affidavit on the case, Mohamud was once cautioned
by an undercover agent that “a lot of children” would be attending the
Christmas-tree lighting. “Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’m looking for,” he
replied. Regardless of whether his bomb went off, Mohamud wanted to kill
thousands.
But when faced with this man, the city’s liberal establishment worried
mainly about vilifying Oregonians and perhaps exculpating the would-be bomber.
Portland’s public officials and media figures do its residents a
disservice by acting this way, especially now that it’s clear the city is not
immune
to the threat of terrorism.
--
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