Leftist Solutions and “Constructive Engagement”

One argument after another, one “but why one place and not another” after another, one demand to talk with your enemies from a position of weakness after another: that’s what the emotionally insulated global left, the ones stuck somewhere between the denialists of the “Truther” movement and those with some common sense would say.

But with whom and how? There are an abundance of precedents that showed that French, German, and Italian leniency with the Red terrorists of the 70’s and 80’s didn’t do anything other that lower the threshold of decency, and allowed the RAF, Red Brigades, the Bader-Meinhof types and their sympathists in the street deepen and widen their connections with Mideast terror and the intelligence operations of the Communist block.

However, most everything is forgiven when it comes to lefty violence, because even the natives let themselves believe the fairy-tale villain narrative about capitalism.

That it provided cover for murderers and people who wanted to tear western society apart didn’t seem to matter a great deal.

Now, almost two decades later, German police, prosecutors and other security officials have focused on a new suspect: the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Long fodder for spy novelists like John le Carré, the shadowy Stasi controlled every aspect of East German life through imprisonment, intimidation and the use of informants -- even placing a spy at one point in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
According to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the murders of Mr. Herrhausen and others attributed to the Red Army Faction bear striking resemblance to methods and tactics pioneered by a special unit of the Stasi. The unit reported to Stasi boss Erich Mielke and actively sought in the waning years of the communist regime to imitate the Red Army Faction to mask their own attacks against prominent people in Western Germany and destabilize the country.

It’s relevance to today? It’s the cookbook that the Syrians have been operating under for a decade as the Libyans did before they were contained, and on a much larger scale, how the Iranians have been operating in large parts of the near-east.

Police acknowledge that part of the reason for their focus on possible Stasi involvement was that all other leads had dried up. But they say they also knew that over the years the Stasi had worked with and given explosives to other terrorists, including "Carlos the Jackal" and the Basque group ETA in Spain. And in 2001 to 2003, an undercover police officer met with a man who claimed he had been a killer for the Stasi operating in Western Germany, although police were never able to tie him to specific murders.

When a bomb goes off in Beirut, or in a western city for that matter, and there is no evidence, you don’t just need to ask yourself where the technology, techniques, and money came from, but wonder why they nebulously show signs of being somewhat attributable to “a few people,” “just a cell,” or “a few malcontents,” and not imagine that there aren’t state actors involved in it somehow.

Worse still, when the people who want to combat terror with talk, or police-work, or by negotiating silently by sending signals through the leniency of the defenders, what are they really doing that hasn’t been done before and failed? All it does is prove to an enemy that not only would our magnanimity offer them new opportunities, but prove to the potential victim that in a Politically Correct War on Terror, that the blood of the innocent is cheap.

Unlike the chants of the pot-banging idiots (no different than the 68ers,) that truly is the state letting it happen on purpose (LIHOP), and creating a climate of fear.