The Wall Street Journal - 31.10.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Thursday, October 31, 2019 |A

A

bu Bakr al-Baghdadi is
dead, a few weeks after
Europe was racked by four
separate incidents classi-
fied as terrorism: a truck-
ramming in Limburg, Germany; a se-
ries of stabbings at a police station
in Paris; a shooting at a synagogue
in Halle, Germany; and another set
of stabbings at a shopping mall in
Manchester, England. While the in-
vestigations are still under way, at
this stage it doesn’t appear that any

of these attacks had any structured
link to a terrorist group like Bagh-
dadi’s Islamic State. Most of the per-
petrators displayed some awareness
of an extremist ideology, but we
don’t know that any of them were
directed to do what they did.
What relevance does the death of
Baghdadi have to any of these at-
tackers, or to the terror threat at
large? There is little historical evi-
dence that decapitating terrorist
groups destroys them. Leaders have
networks around them built on per-

ISIS provided a template

for attacks. Now isolated

people reproduce them as

meaningless spectacle.

After Baghdadi, Terrorism Without Ideology

sonal contacts, and their deaths

change those dynamics. Some partic-

ularly charismatic leaders drive

groups forward by force of personal-

ity or personal narrative. Their re-

moval can weaken the aura around

their organizations, but it can’t

promise eradication.

When leaders are abruptly lopped

off, terror groups tend to fragment

and become more radical. Pretend-

ers to the throne or anointed suc-

cessors want to establish their own

brands and often use a spectacular

attack to do it. One can look to Af-

ghanistan, where repeated strikes

against the Taliban’s leadership

have only made the group more vio-

lent, or to the Westgate shopping

mall in Nairobi, Kenya, attacked in

2013 by a rising al-Shabaab terrorist

leader stamping his imprint on the

world. Earlier that year, an attack

on the In Amenas gas plant in Alge-

ria followed a similar pattern. Dif-

ferent factions often will forge their

own paths away from the core or-

ganization, seizing the opportunity

to change directions and employ

new tactics.

But this tells us only about the

classical terror threat—the large-

scale plot, often directed from

abroad. Such conspiracies still exist,

and authorities are fighting them

with success. Where they have

found more difficulty, however, is in

stopping the smaller incidents, in

which attacks appear in sync with

terrorist ideologies while lacking

clear links to the groups propagat-

ing them. ISIS honed the art of di-

recting lost individual acolytes

around the globe to launch attacks

in their immediate environments

with whatever tools were at their

disposal. This group was supple-

mented by a further cadre who

launched attacks drawing on the

ISIS methodology and interpreting

its ideology without ever establish-

ing contact with the organization.

Then there is the terrorist with-

out an ideology, such as Salih

Khater. On Aug. 14, 2018, he drove

his car into pedestrians outside the

Houses of Parliament. Coming more

than a year after Khalid Masood

launched a similar attack near the

same location, the attack set London

on edge again.

In sentencing Mr. Khater, Justice

Maura McGowan concluded that he

had committed a terrorist act, but

she couldn’t identify a clear ideology

he was advancing: “You replicated

the acts of others who undoubtedly

have acted with terrorist motives.

You deliberately copied those others.

...Youhaveneverexplained your

actions and have not given any ac-

count, before or today, that is capa-

ble of dissuading me from drawing

the conclusion that this offending

had a terrorist connection.”

In a growing number of terrorism

cases, ideology is at best an append-

age to an act of planned, performa-

tive violence. These terrorists are

people driven by personal demons or

interactions on chat forums or on-

line communities, people with social

disorders or mental-health issues, or

people with a desire to make state-

ments in a world on which they have

failed to make an impression.

Where was Baghdadi in Mr.

Khater’s attempted car-ramming at-

tack and others like it? In this new

age of terror, ISIS provided only the

background idea by popularizing the

method of driving cars into pedes-

trians. The group generated the

meme, or at least helped it become

viral, making it easy for others to

replicate.

It is too early to dismiss the

structured terror of groups such as

al Qaeda and ISIS. Undoubtedly

other groups, leaders and followers

will emerge. But the West is moving

into an age of isolated and even

meaningless terrorism, an age when

leaders contribute more conceptu-

ally than tactically. Before long, we

may look back through rose-tinted

glasses to the time when terrorism

was made up of easily comprehensi-

ble networks and leaders.

Mr. Pantucci is senior associate

fellow at the London-based Royal

United Services Institute for Defence

and Security Studies.

By Raffaello Pantucci

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

After the knife attack in Paris, Oct. 3.

OPINION

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Another Smear Campaign From the American Bar Association

I

f Benjamin Franklin ever had a
bad idea, it was to trust lawyers
to pick federal judges. According
to James Madison’s notes from the
1787 Constitutional Convention,
Franklin suggested that an issue of
such “great moment” as judicial ap-
pointments deserved a little cre-
ative thinking. And so he de-
scribed—“in a brief and entertaining
manner”—the Scottish tradition, “in
which the nomination proceeded
from the lawyers.”
Franklin didn’t expect lawyers to
act altruistically in the public inter-
est but the opposite: They “always
selected the ablest of the profession,
in order to get rid of him, and share
his practice among themselves.”
Madison, George Washington, and
the rest of Franklin’s fellow Framers
declined the suggestion. They were
prudent and wise men. We can’t say
the same for those who want to give
the American Bar Association control
over the appointment of judges.
This week offered the latest exam-
ple. Lawrence VanDyke, a nominee to
the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Ap-
peals, has credentials any appellate
litigator would envy. He has served
as solicitor general (lead appellate
lawyer) of both Montana and Nevada.
He has argued dozens of appellate
cases, including 15 before the Ninth

Circuit; he clerked for Judge Janice

Rogers Brown of the U.S. Circuit

Court for the District of Columbia;

graduated magna cum laude from

Harvard Law School and edited the

law review. Today he serves in the

Justice Department’s Environmental

and Natural Resources Division.

He is more than well-qualified to

be a federal judge. Yet this week the

ABA declared him to be “Not Quali-

fied.” The Association deemed that

“Mr. VanDyke’s accomplishments”

must be “offset” by anonymous crit-

ics’ assertions that he is “arrogant,

lazy, an ideologue,” that he “lacks

humility,” that he “does not have an

open mind,” and other similarly

vague attacks.

I’ve known Mr. VanDyke for nearly

20 years, and that doesn’t sound like

my friend. To be sure, I’m biased. But

that’s precisely the problem with the

ABA’s black-box review system: We

have no basis on which to evaluate

any of the broad-brush descriptions

of Mr. VanDyke. We don’t know what

basis, if any, his critics have for these

judgments, or even who they are.

We’re expected to take the ABA’s dis-

paragement at face value.

For years, the ABA’s assessment of

judicial nominees has tracked clear

ideological lines. In 2012 a Political

Research Quarterly study of all ABA

formal ratings from 1977 to 2008

found statistical support for “the

proposition that the ABA ratings re-

flect a bias in favor of Democratic

nominees.”

Political bias is pervasive in much

of the ABA’s work. Its governing

body, the house of delegates, regu-

larly endorses stridently progressive

policies, including on abortion, gen-

der identity and economic rights—

policy issues on which an association

of lawyers has no special expertise.

The ABA’s aggressive politiciza-

tion is especially frustrating for

someone like me, an active member

of the ABA—more specifically, of its

Administrative Law Section, a well-

respected institution that advances

the study and development of the

law on a resolutely nonpartisan ba-

sis. I have been active in the section

for years, and I was honored to serve

for three years on its leadership

council, a body that has been led

over the years by men and women of

widely diverse perspectives, includ-

ing Antonin Scalia and Sally Katzen,

who served in the Clinton White

House.

The ABA’s political biases hurt not

only good judicial nominations, but

also the ABA itself. In 2016 the asso-

ciation’s executive director warned

that “our number of dues-paying

members has gone down every year

for the last 10 years.”

An institution built to educate

and improve the legal community

has become another progressive po-

litical lobby. The ABA’s leaders are

wasting the institution’s money, and

its reputation, on their own ideologi-

cal causes. Its members deserve

much better. So does the American

judiciary.

“Arrogant, lazy, an ideologue.”

Those words don’t describe Law-

rence VanDyke. They describe today’s

American Bar Association.

Mr. White is a resident scholar at

the American Enterprise Institute and

an assistant professor of law at

George Mason University.

By Adam J. White

The lawyers group declares

Lawrence VanDyke ‘not

qualified’ based on claims

from anonymous critics.

From “Harvard Admits Its Prefer-
ences” by Heather Mac Donald in the
New Criterion’s November issue:

On September 30, a federal dis-
trict court judge in Boston upheld
Harvard’s use of racial preferences in
undergraduate admissions against
the challenge that they discriminate
against Asian-Americans....Asian
applicants receive lower personal
ratings than whites with otherwise
similar rankings....
This personal ratings debate ulti-
mately proved a sideshow. But it did
provide one of the more hilarious in-
stances of Harvard’s hypocrisy, in a
trial filled with such hypocrisy. [Stu-
dents for Fair Admissions, the plain-
tiff] had suggested that perhaps Har-
vard was implicitly (i.e.,
unconsciously) biased against Asians,
whatever its conscious intent. Har-
vard professed to be outraged at such
a suggestion. SFFA “makes the ex-
traordinary suggestion that Harvard
must prove it ‘has uniquely escaped
[the] infiltration’ of societal preju-

dice,” Harvard wrote in its final brief.

To invoke the specter of implicit bias

simply demonstrates that SFFA lacks

all evidence for bias, the righteous

defendant sniffed.

Harvard’s contempt for the im-

plicit bias concept was rich, to say

the least. Harvard hosts the Project

Implicit website, which offers free

computer tests of the test-taker’s im-

plicit biases against people of color

and other allegedly disfavored

groups. One of the two developers of

that test, known as the Implicit Asso-

ciation Test, Mahzarin Banaji, is a

professor of social ethics in Harvard’s

psychology department; Banaji con-

sults with corporations and govern-

ments around the country, teaching

them how to overcome their employ-

ees’ deep-seated prejudices. In every

other context, Harvard embraces the

idea animating Project Implicit: that

nearly all members of our bigoted so-

ciety are infected by unconscious

bias. Faced on the stand with such an

accusation itself, however, the college

declares the concept ludicrous.

Notable & Quotable: Bias