The War of the Worlds, Part XXV
by digby
Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury received a fair trial when he was convicted of four terror-related charges and three charges of lying to authorities, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found. Mehanna was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in federal prison, which the court also upheld.
“Terrorism is the modern-day equivalent of the bubonic plague: It is an existential threat,” the court said, adding that the case required the trial court “to patrol a fine line between national security concerns and forbidden encroachments on constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and association.”
What are the terrorists going to do, invade us on millions of life rafts? Recruit the Pentagon to blow up the US Congress and the president? Are they going to march into Washington and take over the government at gun point or are they going to run for office and win democratically? Because I can’t see any way in hell that “terrorism” is an existential threat unless they are able to somehow take over our government and turn the US into a Caliphate, something which some fundamentalists may dream of in their messianic fever but which has the same chance of actually happening as an invasion from the Moon.
And here’s what the bubonic plague did to Europe, via Wikipedia:
The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1348–50 CE. Although there were several competing theories as to the etiology of the Black Death, analysis of DNA from victims in northern and southern Europe published in 2010 and 2011 indicates that the pathogen responsible was the Yersinia pestis bacterium, probably causing several forms of plague.
The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching the Crimea by 1346. From there, it was most likely carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe’s total population. All in all, the plague reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.
Al Qaeda killed 3000 people on 9/11 and hundreds more in other terrorist attacks around the world.
What sophistry from a federal appeals court. What total unadulterated bullshit.
Honestly, until I heard Lara Logan going on like a lunatic about the “dark forces” who want to take us back centuries and now this, I had thought we had evolved past the looney tunes, panic artist nonsense of the post 9/11 period. (What’s Victor Davis Hanson been up to lately anyway?)
Also too: We might just want to be a little bit more skeptical of claims that terrorism is the modern equivalent of the bubonic plague and is going to kill us all in our beds and a little bit less skeptical of the real modern equivalent of the bubonic plague — an actual plague that will kill us all in our beds.
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