We are creating/imagining ever more restrictive anti-terrorism laws with each year that passes.
The objective is to target a tiny minority [often a few hundred] in the name of security, however these laws apply to all citizens and as we have seen can be used indiscriminately and illegally by our own governments well beyond the limits of the stated objectives/reasoning. These laws remain on the books until repealed, how many have actually been repealed?
This installs a level of insecurity and sense of discrimination within the target populations.
We also have radicalization of our own to deal with, when members of these target groups are killed. You only need to look around the comments sections in many journals and newspapers to see the outpouring of hatred.
Kill them all. Deport them all. Send them back. Remove their rights. They are not one of us.These once again can be taken by the target minorities as further ostracization and this can then be used to feed in radicalization.
Now it all depends upon your definition of "them", and our own radicals have an ever widening view of who "them" might be.
We have some strange idea of "them". We have seen this recently in the USA with police shootings whole minorities branded with the same brush as being essentially guilty until proven otherwise.
We see our own hate filled radicals blaming specific minorities for all the ills that befall the nation.
Every time we surrender something of ourselves to our baser instincts we help the radicals recruit, as there now becomes a sense of them and us. Essentially the more we take minorities freedoms away for the greater good and our own sense of security, the more we take our own freedoms away. After all who is to say that these same laws will not be used against "us"? I think the answer has been pretty clear up to now.
Not only are the war drums sounding once again, the hate filled rhetoric is being disseminated and often applauded. It's a viscous circle, fighting fire with fire.
My real worry is that one day soon we might elect our own hate filled radicals to power and they would make the neoconservatives seem positively friendly. Both in Europe and in the US there is a strong rise in the radical right wing with all the fear and loathing that that entails.
Perhaps we have to treat the root causes and not just the symptoms? I might even suggest that violence begets violence, how many of "them" must be killed, and who is "them", as "them" seems to be defined along the lines of any given meaning of "us".