Think-Israel

THINK-ISRAEL

HOME Jul-Aug.2005 Featured Stories Background Information News On The Web

HOW TO SPOT A TERRORIST

by Bernice Lipkin

Having examined many news stories of how Jews protesting the disengagement are arrested for standing on a public sidewalk or for wearing orange or for being related to someone already held without trial, I have come to a non-intuitive conclusion: In Israel they punish you with indefinite jail time if they think you are going to commit an act of terrorism. If you do actually kill people, they put you in the pokie for a bit and then send you home after you take the Boy Scout oath that you'll be nice forever more.

There's one problem with this observation: the maybe-someday but as-yet-not-terrorists are Jewish and the ones who have committed bombings and sniperkills are Arab, so maybe we really shouldn't draw any conclusions without controlling for the race factor. We need a random distribution of Jews to do real terror and we need Arabs who are strolling around looking suspicious but with nothing in their underpants except maybe the Koran. Then we can do a Chi-square statistical test on whether the race of the experimental subjects correlates with whether they are kept in jail indefinitely or let out after a short while.

Anybody know where I can get a grant for this study? If I am successful, I have some observations on housing I'd like to pursue. In Israel, the law does not allow you to destroy empty houses, only houses where large families live and work. This also needs careful study and parameter control. To date, I have only anecdotal data. The empty houses were used by Arab snipers who hid there and shot and killed Jewish motorists passing by on the highway. The courts refused to allow them to be demolished. The non-empty houses were full of Gazan Jews making the desert bloom. Again, we need to control for the race factor.

Another area for investigation: the difficulty in determining who is a terrorist. You would think that if a guy gets on a bus and blows it up together with the bus riders, it would prove he was a terrorist - it's a very practical sort of proof. But the news media and most diplomats are cautious and prefer to use milder terms. They describe the culprit as a freedom fighter, a militant or as a 2D'er - a dumb dupe. This is puzzling because a terrorist act requires a supporting cast of gophers and spotters and trainers and mullahs to psych up the 2D'er. And the freedom fighter's extended family almost immediately talk about how they contributed to his stardom.

On the other hand, the self-same media and politicians are immediately and absolutely certain a terrorist act is in the offing when they look at an extreme right-winger, who is very easy to identify by his kippah and tzitzis. In fact, it is becoming a state-supported certainty that if he looks like a right-winger, he must be a terrorist. This leads to another hypothesis ripe for the testing: all the terrorism in Israel has actually been committed by a couple of dozen Jewish terrorists, most of whom the state has providentially jailed without a trial. If we can prove this, we have an excellent test for determining who is a terrorist. Line up some putative terrorists - the Arabs caught wearing explosive belts and the Jews arrested while standing on the sidewalk blocking traffic. The ones with tzitzes are the dangerous one. You can release the others. And that definitely is race-related.

Thinking three grants down the pike - if it turns out that our preliminary conclusions are correct but race is the critical factor, we will design a study to determine why, when the Arabs have openly announced they plan on destroying the Jewish state, the Israeli judiciary and police consistently favor Arabs over Jews. I assure you I will not accept the obvious answers that (a) the Israeli state educational system has been run by pro-Palestinian marxists for decades; (b) that these proud secularists have been brought up to believe the ultimate enemy is the Jewish religion; (c) they are universalists and know if they love their Arab neighbors enough, eventually their neighbors will love them back; or (d) if they prove they hate religious Jews, the outside world will love them and accept them and give them pocket money. No sir, I will run a controlled multi-ordinal study of cohorts from birth to grave. That should last me until retirement.