Gangs are Domestic Terrorists
Published Apr 23rd, 2010
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–After 9-11, state and federal government officials scrambled to create the public perception that something was being done to protect citizens. Under the Homeland Security Act, an entirely new federal department was created to protect us all from terrorists. It was box cutters that were used by terrorists to bring down the planes that destroyed both World Trade Center buildings, a wing of the Pentagon and United flight 93–which crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Yet even today, nine years later, air travelers are still subject to intense body and luggage searches for all types of weapons–from finger nail clippers to golf drivers to plastic swords purchased at the Disney theme parks. (13 million items were taken in 2006 alone) Shoes must come off thanks to Richard Reid’s sneaker-lighting foible. On August 10, 2006 Homeland Security banned liquids in passenger carry-ons due to a “plot discovered by British agents to blow up planes from England to the U.S.” So far as I can tell, all this ban did was force people to surrender hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic and hygiene products to TSA agents, who will undoubtedly not have to go to Walgreens for a long, long time.
So, for almost a decade, we’ve been standing in long lines at the airport, to be poked and prodded, scanned and patted, questioned and searched under the EXTREMELY unlikely (some figures suggest the odds are 1 in 10,000,000) of dying in a terrorism-related airline incident. The search procedures are sometimes humiliating. The TSA officials are definitely condescending. The hassle is undeniable. Nine years out, notwithstanding the total absence of any act of terrorism, the terror alert color is still at orange, which is the second-highest level. Are we safer? The jury is still out on that.
While just thirteen miles out at O’Hare airport, I can count on being frisked up and down, as I and every other passenger is presumed to be one of the next plane-downing terrorists, hundreds of thousands of Chicago residents live in daily fear of gang violence. As I relinquish a new bottle of shampoo to a TSA agent, so everyone can get to Orlando safely, a child is being shot to death in a Chicago neighborhood. While my hands are being swabbed for explosives residue, thousands of Chicago families live in daily fear of gang activity, gang threats, gang recruitment of their pre-teen and teen children. How is this not “terrorism?”
Here is the Federal guideline for determining whether an activity is terrorism:
Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85)
Gangs indeed use unlawful force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce the civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives. Are they trying to establish a new nation or institutionalize a religious doctrine? No. But they are a structured, hierarchical group that strives to exist as an extra-governmental entity for the purpose of furthering their own agenda of controlling certain geographic areas and extracting revenue from the residents of those areas. They certainly have social objectives–commanding respect, staking out “territories,” posturing themselves economically and achieving a certain status that influences the young to join their groups and coerces others to overlook their illegal activity. Isn’t this enough to qualify as terrorism? Wasn’t the whole driving premise behind our national outrage against Muslim terrorists that we would not be intimidated by violence to alter our culture of democracy and freedom? Are the residents of these gang-ridden areas of Chicago enjoying democracy and freedom? They live in curious pockets of our nation where a fair share of public money does not get to them. Their schools are slighted, their police protection is slighted and as a result, the economic environment, normally made favorable by a stable government, does not exist where they live. This absence of state, federal or local government oversight is replaced by pseudo-governmental gangs run with every bit of cruelty as we imagine an Al-Qaeda based government would run.
Gang members even kill police. How much more anti-government, how much more armed, how much more lethal or threatening do you have to be to qualify as a “terrorist?” These gangs persist with their illegal, unregistered weapons, their blatant threats and intimidation, their unrelenting homicidal behavior, their arrogant indifference to our laws or civil rights and suffer only the occasional police inquiry to punctuate their reign of terror. Yet I doubt if you took a group of them and registered them for a Delta flight to Europe that they would even get through the security checkpoint. If they behaved on a plane or in Lake Forest the way they behave in Englewood, military force against them would be swift.
As I meekly bare myself in screening machines and suppress my self-respect to placate the scolding, brooding TSA agents at O’Hare, so that I can achieve the “privilege” of riding on an airplane, Americans in urban pockets throughout this country are being victimized every day by domestic terrorists in the form of gangs, who kill their friends, family, storekeepers, toddlers, infants, honor students and police–all without ever being classified by our government as “terrorists.”
But that is assuredly what they are. How sad to live in a country that takes tax money from undefended people, who live in daily terror, in order to fight the allegedly ever-present, but never-defined specter of external “terrorism.” This federally-declared terrorism rarely manifests as the potent fear, violence and death that has become a weekly reality for Americans in the gang-governed territories of our country that the U.S. government has chosen to ignore. The national safety priority is apparently limited to the prevention of planes being taken over and crashed into things, but domestic terrorism in the form of daily assassinations of the young and innocent, within America is not even on Homeland Security’s radar screen.
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