Today’s Brussels attack made me realize what a cocoon we all live in. Malibu is so far removed from the reality of our world and the European world that we almost take it for granted. This is a town where I have seen billionaires walking around without any security. Movie stars, who would normally be mobbed world over, can go outside with their children to the local shopping center or the chili cook-off without fear, except for occasional paparazzi. Security and the feeling of safety it produces are rapidly becoming more rare in our world and it’s one of the great attractions of Malibu, worldwide.
Americans sometimes have a very strange take on what’s going on in the world. When I hear people bitching about illegal immigrants and Mexicans or Central Americans, I think to myself, “I’ve never heard of a Mexican strapping a bomb around his body and blowing himself up because he didn’t like our immigration policy.” We are very fortunate in that we have very sane neighbors, Canada to the north of us, and Mexico and Central America to the south of us. All that most of them who come here, either legally or illegally, want is an opportunity to work and create a better, safer life for themselves and their families. Most ultimately want to become Americans.
As an American, it’s difficult to understand what would make young — and judging from the airport photographs the bombers were young — man be willing to sacrifice their lives the way they do. They are going out there, to a public place, to randomly kill themselves and people they don’t know, in the belief that somehow this will make a better world for people they care about. It makes no sense to us. It obviously makes sense to them or they wouldn’t be willing to give up their lives.
Someone who is looking for young men who feel they have no future has probably recruited them. These young men must feel vulnerable and believe people with all the power have victimized them and this is their chance to strike back. To volunteer and to be chosen to be a suicide bomber, I suspect, confers immediate status on the volunteer. Within their group, people proudly point them out and young women seek them out and young men who never had respect in their lives suddenly have respect. It must be heady stuff, if short-lived.
So what can we do about this? Short-term, we have to identify the recruiters and their networks, which requires good intelligence. Good intelligence means you have to have sources within the Muslim communities, intelligence on the ground, or it won’t work. We have to give them an opportunity to cooperate and that is not an easy thing to do. We are asking them to identify young men or women who have become radicalized, or have had major changes in behavior or isolated themselves from their families or friends. It may be their sons or their daughters, or a cousin or an uncle. In a society where family is very important, pointing out one of your own would be terribly difficult, but if they don’t, they put their family and their entire community at risk and sadly that risk has never been greater than it is today. We have to assure them that many have been identified but only a few have turned out to be terrorists. Turning someone in doesn’t automatically mean they’re finished, but in some cases they may turn out to actually be terrorists
Today, the American electorate is angry, rightly or wrongly feels victimized and is actively looking for someone to blame. A couple of new terrorist incidents like San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon bombing or a Brussels-type attack here in America could change the country practically overnight. In my entire life, I’ve never seen the country feel this angry and vulnerable, and it could change the course of the presidential election, just that quickly. We know this and the terrorists also know this, so I’m assuming sometime between now and November we can expect a major terrorist incident.
How it will play out, how our country will handle it and what it will do is just about anyone’s guess.