Cruzing The Ghetto

The attack in Brussels is only happened a few days. That means there hasn’t been enough time for a serious investigation. But that isn’t stopping people from playing the blame game. Wild speculations are being thrown about everywhere but I think Ted Cruz managed to become king of the asshole mountain:

After repeating his standard campaign-trail assertion that Barack Obama has failed to confront – or even properly identify – “radical Islamic terrorists”, he called for the US to stop admitting refugees from areas with a so-called Islamic State or al-Qaeda presence.

He then turned his attention to the home front.

“We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods before they become radicalised,” he said.

Cruz is always looking to make government smaller and more efficient. Whereas Franklin Roosevelt built expensive concentration camps to hold American citizens of Japanese decent, Cruz wants to use the cheaper option of simply turning Muslim neighborhoods into little Warsaw Ghettos.

Since Cruz stylizes himself as an individualist his proposal is ironic. Collective punishment, as the name denotes, is an entirely collectivist ideal. By saying Muslim neighborhoods must be patrolled Cruz is stating that he believes all Muslims shared responsibility for the action of the bombers in Brussels. That’s the exact opposite of individualism, which only holds the individuals directly responsible for crimes responsible (because they were the only ones responsible).

If turning Muslim neighborhoods into ghettos isn’t the proper response to these attacks, what is? As much as people hate to hear it the only proper response is to have patients. Nothing can be accomplished until a thorough investigation has been performed and the evidence has been analyzed. Until the investigation has concluded anything we hear will be speculative or preliminary in nature. Once the investigation has concluded we can consider methods of mitigating future attacks like this. Unfortunately it will be impossible to bring those responsible for these attacks to justice since they killed themselves. But we can use the information gathered by investigators to make future attacks like this harder to pull off (of course, since the government will claim a monopoly on implementing countermeasures, we’ll probably just get an expansion of the police state instead of effective methods of guarding against these kinds of attacks).