Shortly after inept terrorist Umar Abdulmutallab tried to set off a bomb in his underpants on a flight bound for Detroit, only to nearly burn himself alive and find himself subdued by a group of unarmed civilians, Fareed Zakaria made an important observation. "Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers," Zakaria said. "If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well." With terrorism, killing people is the means, not the end. The end is to force a strategic error on the part of the target that will further the extremist cause.
It's hard to see the furor over the Park 51 project as anything other than an unqualified terrorist success. That's clear when you see videos like this one, where a black man wearing a Puerto Rican flag necklace appears to have made the mistake of, as John Cole put it, "looking Muslimish" at an anti-Muslim rally against the Park 51 project in New York City. Despite his protest that “All y’all dumb motherfuckers don’t even know my opinion on shit," he is harassed by those surrounding him.
This is kind of par for the course with these rallies. A few months ago, two Egyptian Coptic Christians showed up to protest the proposed Islamic community center, and they were mistaken for Muslims by the other protesters, at which point the police intervened because they were worried about their safety.
This is in part, the wages of Republicans spending the past two years trumpeting even failed terrorist attacks as monumental al-Qaeda victories and inflating the threat of terrorism to the point of arguing that every American Muslim is a potential national-security threat. When you see frightened Americans turning on brown-skinned people they see as potential "Muslims," that is terrorism working. When the kind of Imam who will say Judaism's holiest prayer in solidarity with Jewish victims of Islamic extremist terrorism and who tells Muslim audiences that the way to have a government more in line with the Islamic ideal is to be more like the United States is treated as a terrorist sympathizer, terrorism is working. Of course, whether or not terrorism ultimately "works" is completely within our control.
