As I mentioned previously, NRO's Corner is going through a full scale meltdown over the news of a bipartisan deal on immigration reform. After several commenters posted suggestions of a potential linksbetween illegal immigrants and terrorism, KLo approvingly posted this Newsweek headline:
Three of the Fort Dix suspects entered the United States illegally more than two decades ago. How tighter immigration enforcement might have prevented the possible plot before it was ever dreamt up.
I'm guessing from the way it was posted that we're supposed to extrapolate from this to a wider illegal immigrant terrorist threat. Why we're supposed to do that I have no idea.
Think about it. By this logic we should also be able to derive some sort of public policy problem and solution from the following:
Timothy McVeigh, the man behind the Oklahoma City bombing, was both a native-born US citizen, a decorated veteran of the US Army, and a cathollic.
Eric Rudolph, the man behind a series of domestic terrorist attacks (including attacks on abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympic Games), was a native-born US citizen and an active member of several fundamentalist christian groups.
James Kopp, the man who assassinated Dr. Barnett Slepian, an OBGYN who performed abortions, was also a home-grown member of a fundamentalist Christian conservative group
That's three spectacularly successful domestic terrorists, all of whom are native-born US citizens. Where the illegal immigrants failed, these three succeeded. Two of them have connections to hard-core conservative Christian groups. I'd love to hear what sort of policies these three suggest.
UPDATE: Amazing. After I wrote and published this post, I continued to scroll down through the Corner. And wouldn't you know it, the very next post (i.e. the one posted just before KLo's anecdote), was about how the violent tactics used by Muslim extremists might or might not spread to other groups. Apparently some of the readers over there don't believe such tactics could spread to Christian groups. Or rather, apparently some of them don't realize they already have.
Rudolph and Kopp both explicitly claimed that their Biblically-inspired opposition to abortion motivated their acts of terrorism. They killed because that's what God's word demanded of them. Sound familiar?
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