Via NRO:
Tim McVeigh was God’s gift to the Left, and the Left will forever keep his memory alive, tending it like a kind of sacred flame.
Al-Qaeda attacks the United States on September 11, 2001? Yes, but don’t forget about McVeigh. Omar Mateen lets loose an “Allahu akbar!” before massacring 49 people at a gay bar in Orlando? Yes, but remember McVeigh. Salman Abedi and his pack of “lone” wolves get a jump on Ramadan by nail-bombing a bunch of little girls and their grandmothers at a concert in Manchester? Terrible, of course, but let us not forget about the real threat: right-wing terrorism on the McVeigh model.
The more you know about McVeigh, the less he fits the mold of right-ring extremist. He was an agnostic who declared “science is my religion,” who held views on U.S. foreign policy that fell somewhere between those of Noam Chomsky and those of Oliver Stone, and who had a weakness for adolescent Nietzschean posturing, whose final statement was William Ernest Henley’s poem “Sol Invictus,” with its romantic conclusion: “I am the captain of my soul.” But there was also the militia stuff and the Waco obsession and other aspects of his worldview that had more than a whiff of right-wingery about them. Jared Lee Loughner was obsessed with monetary policy, as was John Salvi, who feared that the Vatican was planning to issue its own currency. Lots of loons are sui generis.[…]
In the case of many terrorist incidents in the West, immigration and travel to and from Islamist hot spots abroad is a part of the equation: San Bernardino, Manchester, 9/11, Orlando, 7/7. The Trump administration is trying, in its habitually incompetent way, to take that fact into consideration, twice failing to impose travel restrictions that fall well within the president’s statutory powers under U.S. immigration law. If anything, the administration does not go far enough. Anti-terrorism considerations should be a substantial part of our public policy not only where visitors’ visas and the like are concerned, but especially in the matter of immigration. The responsibility of the American government is to the American people, as sympathetic as many of those Syrian refugees might be. We do not seem to have much of a well-developed policy on them at the moment, but the most intelligent and decent one would be seeing to it that they are reasonably well looked after — in Syria, or in one of the bordering countries.