In response to “A grim pattern in European attacks: Missed chances to pinpoint terrorism suspects beforehand,” published in the LA Times June 11.
Thank you for your well explicated article in Sunday’s Times regarding the apparent inability of police watch lists to prevent the kind of attacks that recently occurred in London. To be fair, what we can’t know is just how many similar attacks may have been prevented by those very same surveillance mechanisms.
At the end of the day, one imagines it’s all about just how deep and broad police state democratic societies will be willing to tolerate — and fund. In this, London itself stands preeminent in the roster of Western capitals for its vast CCTV active surveillance system, and we’ve seen these continuing terrible incidents. None of this is to mention, of course, just how much that same CCTV system reminds us how close certain Western brethren are coming to fulfilling Orwell’s nightmarish vision.
No small irony that Kurtis Lee’s fine coverage of the weekend’s anti-Sharia rallies across the USA should appear in the same Sunday issue. One imagines a society whose underpinnings derive from Sharia law will tolerate little of the brand of extreme anti-social behavior we’ve witnessed in London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm and the USA. But then, as Lee and his journalistic team so sagely note, much in those same laws is incompatible with our core democratic values and cherished ideals — not to mention our ever- growing list of “human rights.”
And herein lies the West’s present dilemma. We want to be remain free and yet the level of security we also demand of our governments may only be possible through vastly more authoritarian regimes, in the manner of — perish the thought — Donald J. Trump.
No worries. We shall likely continue on our path of reeducating our police in the ways of gentleness and kindness and, perhaps more importantly, rendering them less visible, while at the same time creating as our shield a vastly more egalitarian society constructed upon the high-minded principles of love, fairness, sharing and selfless generosity.
One wonders if it’s possible that in their sincere but perhaps ill-advised desire to recreate the Garden of Eden here on Earth, Western democratic societies have forgot the existence of its central tree — that of the knowledge of good and evil.
Jeff Denker