03/11/16 – Arun Kundnani – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scalhorten here for MPV Engineering.
This isn't for all of you, but for high-end contractors specializing in industrial construction and end-users who own and operate industrial equipment, MPV offers licensed professional consulting on chemical and mechanical engineering for your projects.
Tanks, pressure vessels, piping, heat exchangers, HVAC equipment, chemical reactors for oil companies or manufacturing facilities, as well as project management support and troubleshooting for those implementing designs, MPV will get your industrial project up and running.
Head over to mpvengineering.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
All right, I've been telling you all about this article for a week, finally got the author on the line here.
The article is at alternet.org, the FBI, oh, it's not the author, he's featured in it.
I'm sorry, I'm just so excited, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Alternet.org, the article is by Sarah Lazare.
The article is called, The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students Across the Country.
Our guest is Arundh Kondnani, I hope I said that close enough to correct, to not offend you.
Sir, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, and yeah, that was absolutely right, thank you.
Oh, good, good.
Okay, so it says here, you are author of The Muslims Are Coming, oh God, Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.
Well, good for you for writing such a thing, I'm sure it's absolutely great, and I know just from the title how important and necessary work like that is, so thank you for that.
Professor, adjunct professor at New York University.
Okay, so, please explain to us, first of all, what it is that we're talking about here in terms of this new FBI, National Police program in America's high schools.
Right, well, we have a document that's come out from the FBI that outlines a plan where the FBI is essentially trying to recruit high school educators to collect information about students, not about any potential criminal activity, which of course is entirely legitimate that you would want teachers to report that, but essentially to monitor Muslim students for their religious and political opinion, which is a very different thing.
And so this is part of the kind of broader picture that we've seen over the last, over a decade now, of the FBI being involved in very wide-ranging forms of surveillance of religious and political activism in the United States, especially with regards to Muslim populations here.
And then, so, and now, well, I mean, I want to go back one thing, and it's not, it was, you know, I understand your point, but I just wanted to clarify, and this still would be local police work unless somebody suspects that there's some international crime ring, or, pardon me, interstate crime ring of high schoolers, you know, transporting stolen goods or trafficking, you know, people across state lines or something like that.
It's hard to imagine what business the FBI would have in any high school unless there was a specific case that drew them to it.
Right.
I mean, you know, terrorism is a federal crime by and large.
FBI is appropriately involved in investigating terrorism where there is some kind of predicate, some kind of reasonable suspicion that a terrorist plot is occurring.
But this is something very different.
This is, we want to know what students are saying about the U.S. government, what students are saying about their religious beliefs.
It's crossed the line by quite a way into First Amendment protected activities.
And now, are they even claiming, yeah, because that one time a Muslim high school kid did something or anything, they don't even have an excuse for this, do they?
Well, this program has been imported from Britain, actually, and the thinking in counterterrorism circles on both sides of the Atlantic is that, you know, that the threat comes from teenagers.
There's not really any evidence for that, but that's the kind of growing assumption made in the counterterrorism world.
And so in Britain, you know, which is a few years ahead of the game on this particular trend, we have seen this happen for a while now where high school students, even very young children, come under government surveillance.
We've had a situation in Britain where even nursery schools have been recruited to be the kind of eyes and ears of the counterterrorism surveillance.
So that's dealing with children who are four years old.
I once interviewed a police officer in Britain and asked him, well, what would be the sign that a four year old is being radicalized, which is what they were supposedly looking out for.
And the police officer said, well, they might draw pictures of bombs in their notebook.
And, you know, of course, I think I certainly drew pictures of bombs when I was four years old.
It's not an indicator of radicalization, it's an indicator that you're four.
That's the first thing I ever learned how to draw was little army men shooting each other.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
And actually, just in the news today in Britain, there's a story about a five or six year old kid who was reported to the police because he drew a picture of a bomb in his school.
That's that's the kind of thing that we're dealing with here.
Yeah.
Well, and so and I'm sorry, because it's a little bit off or not.
It's not off topic, but it's not exactly the point here.
But I have to point out when it comes to police work in America, when it comes to entrapping some idiot into saying he loves Osama or when it comes to investigating children to find out whether they're about to become Al-Qaeda or whatever it is, it's always politics, politics, politics, politics.
What's the U.S. Army doing?
What are they saying about what the U.S. Army is doing, et cetera, like that?
And yet they tell us all day they hate us because of how extreme their religious beliefs are.
So you would think that when they're going to entrap some guy, they would say, don't you believe in Islam real bad?
And doesn't that make you want to blow yourself up and kill an innocent person because of how strong your beliefs are?
They don't even try that because that's stupid.
That's not what this is about.
That was never what this is about.
And they're not asking teachers to say, hey, we want to know which Muslims in your class seem like they're the most devout, which ones are praying five times a day because that's the leading indicator of whether they're terrorists.
No.
The question is, what are they saying about what the government is doing?
In other words, what violence the U.S. government is unleashing upon other Muslims in the world?
That's what this is about.
And they know it.
Yeah.
I think that's precisely the point.
This is the violence that we see is driven by political causes, not by religious causes.
And a lot of the time, when you look at the actual practices of government agencies, there is an implicit understanding of that.
But the rhetoric coming from government and from politicians always tells a different story.
I mean, we saw that again in the last few days from Donald Trump when he's talking about Islam has a problem of hatred of the United States.
Well, no, the problem is not that Islam has a hatred of the United States.
The problem is that there's a fair number of people who are quite angry with the United States because of our foreign policy, not because of anything to do with Sharia law or anything.
I think we would be doing a better job in reducing this problem if we understood that dynamic and stepped out of this comfort zone where we can blame the whole problem on an alien, a religion that is perceived to be alien from us.
We are in a cycle of violence with various groups around the world, and if we're interested in peace, we're interested in reducing violence around the world, including terrorism, then the first step is to recognize our own role in that conflict.
Yeah.
Well, it's also a shame that it's got to be said that, you know, if people can't really respect others' rights, at least reflect that if their rights are forfeit, then yours are too at the hands of the very same surveillance state.
So don't think like you're protected just because now they're picking on someone who's Arab or Muslim or something like that.
Anyway, I'm sorry we've got to stop and take this break, but we'll find out more about this absolutely outrageous project and this story at Alternet.org about the FBI monitoring your kid's politics at Alternet.org.
Back in a sec.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles, plus you get your own publishing site and there are classes, shows, books, and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire with Liberty.me's Chief Liberty Officer Jeffrey Tucker every other Tuesday, and The Future of Freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there, scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
Hey, Al Scott here.
The Ciceronian Society is an interdisciplinary group devoted to the timeless themes of place, tradition, and things divine.
You are invited to their sixth annual conference to hear two days of papers on important thinkers from Plato and Saint Benedict to John Locke, Hayek, and Henry David Thoreau.
The conference is March 10th through 12th in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, less than two hours from DC and Baltimore.
Register at ciceroniansociety.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
So the article is by Sarah Lazare, but the expert in the article and on the show right now is Arun Kundnani.
He is the author of The Muslims Are Coming, Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror, adjunct professor at New York University.
The article, again, is by Sarah Lazare at Alternet, and it is entitled The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students Across the Country.
And you know, I was kind of going off there about the whole thing about they're asking the teachers here to focus on politics, not radical Islam or any of that nonsense.
But that shouldn't obscure the fact that having teachers focus on kids' politics is no way to find terrorists anyway.
I mean, this is completely ridiculous.
All kinds of nonviolent people have very radical politics, and there's no algorithm or data mining formula in the world that's going to root out somebody who's going to actually commit a terrorist act based on political beliefs, especially in this country, where such a thing is virtually unheard of, you know, compared to a lot of places in the world.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And you know, the other thing that is worth pointing out in this discussion is if you look at the actual data on terrorist violence since 9-11 in the United States, more people have been killed by far-right extremists than by Muslims, and that's data from the New America Foundation.
So, you know, our perceptions of the nature of the terrorist threat and where it comes from are completely out of touch with reality.
We have hugely inflated the threat to U.S. society from terrorism, and we have misunderstood its source.
It comes from a number of different ideologies, not just from Muslims.
Right.
Well, and that goes to what I was saying before the break, too, about, you know, if people aren't concerned about this happening to the others, think about it happening to themselves.
So-called right-wing domestic terrorism, as you say, there have been more incidents committed by people under that description than Muslims since September 11th, and yet think of how many people are right-wing, redneck, mullet-headed, gun-owning non-terrorists in America who would never be terrorists under any circumstance, who would never attack a civilian target over some political anything, right?
How many anti-abortion activists could never, all of them, right, with the slightest single-digit exceptions, would ever commit, you know, attack an abortion clinic or something like that?
So just think about what happens, what could happen if that broad brush is applied to your side of the political argument, the way that they can do with Muslims, because after all, you know, most Americans, I think I read a poll that said most Americans, as far as they know, have never met a Muslim, especially people who live in rural areas.
They may never have come across one in their life, so their only idea of Muslims is what they've learned on TV, and that's a pretty skewed picture, you know?
I think the interesting thing here is most people in America think they haven't met a Muslim, but they probably have.
Well, yeah, that's a good point, too.
It's just that their idea of what a Muslim is doesn't correspond to, you know, the doctor that's treated them, the cab driver that's driven them around, because those people just seem like regular people, and the idea in their head of what a Muslim is, you know, the turban-wearing, crazy extremists that they've seen on TV.
So, you know, there's over 2 million Muslims in the United States.
They don't all live in New York, they live across the country, and they've been in the United States for as long as the United States existed.
About a third of Muslims in the United States are African-American Muslims, and you wouldn't know from meeting one that they're necessarily Muslim, so, you know, I think there's a kind of hidden presence that isn't necessarily visible.
Well, it sure is plenty of people for cops to have make-work programs around, you know, if they just want to go around surveilling and persecuting people, there are plenty of targets.
I guess when they start running out, they can prey on the kids, you know, like 21 Jump Street, let's go see if we can trick a kid into buying a bag of pot so we can put him in jail, you know, and go ahead and start preying on the kids now.
And you mention in here, too, that they say that, you know, left-wing kids, I guess white kids with dreadlocks, you know, left-wing environmental activist types, oh, they're all very suspicious, too.
I heard that one time somewhere somebody broke a Starbucks window or set an SUV on fire, and therefore anybody with an earth-first bent is automatically suspect as well.
It won't be long before, you know, right-wing kids who talk about guns will be on the same list.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's already happened.
The, you know, the environmental movement, the animal rights movement, those are kind of already being considered by the FBI to be kind of precursors to terrorism.
An incident like a kid breaking a window in Starbucks on a demonstration or something like that, you know, that's vandalism, politically motivated vandalism.
But as far as the FBI is concerned, that counts as terrorism.
Damaged property of that kind will count as terrorism in their kind of definitional system.
And some people who've been involved in that kind of activity have been prosecuted as terrorists.
So we've, you know, the way we use this word terrorism is part of the problem here.
And so, yeah, I think, you know, I think there's all kinds of different forms of political activism that get criminalized in this way.
And of course, this is not new.
You know, this is what we saw in the Hoover era of the FBI in the 1960s with things like a program called COINTELPRO, which was designed by the FBI to criminalize left-wing activism from, you know, from the Communist Party to Martin Luther King.
It wasn't very distinguishing in what it defined as a threat.
Now, at the peak of the Hoover era FBI, the FBI was running 1,500 informants in the United States gathering information about left-wing activists, civil rights movement activists, etc.
Today in the United States, we have 15,000 paid informants working for the FBI doing similar kinds of work.
And so that indicates, you know, the kind of scale of surveillance that we currently have running from the government.
We like to think that, you know, the Hoover era of the FBI was in the past, but actually we are on those numbers exceeding anything Hoover would have done.
All right.
Now, there have been, I guess, one or maybe two circumstances where political correctness from the left and the right has actually been useful in curbing some of this stuff.
The right-wing outrage over the Homeland Security report about right-wing terrorism where anybody with a Ron Paul bumper sticker is, you know, suspect according to the DHS.
They had to back down from that.
And there have been training materials that have been exposed by journalists that the FBI and domestic, I guess, city police, NYPD types have been using about all the dangers of Islam and all this kind of thing that they have had to, you know, because they're embarrassed, basically publicly embarrassed by the journalism they've had to withdraw.
And I wonder if there's anything, any kind of pressure like that going on.
I know the ACLU is mentioned in this article, but is there any real pushback trying to force the FBI to stop this?
I mean, is there a law passed by Congress that says that they can do this by any stretch or what?
I mean, I don't think this is driven by any kind of congressional legislation.
I think it falls under the existing powers that the FBI has.
The certainly, you know, there are activists on the left, like myself, who are trying to take this stuff on.
We speak out about it.
We, you know, work with organizations like the ACLU and others to try and challenge this.
And, you know, I think if people who are libertarians, conservative, anyone else in the United States who believes that this is not what government should be doing, you know, I think if those different constituencies can come together, then there is a real chance to push back against this stuff.
Well, we sure like to hope so.
I think we had our chance, but it was eight and four years ago with Ron Paul, he wanted to repeal the 21st century and get back to the Bill of Rights and everybody said, boo.
And so here we are.
And now our choices are between worse than the guy we have now and worse than that.
Right.
Well, maybe some of you guys need to come over to Bernie Sanders.
He's saying some of the same thing.
Well, you know what?
I mean, as long as you mention it, on off chance, you know, somebody knows somebody.
He didn't even have to attack her in order to promise to be better on war.
And he would do so much better if he would just talk about the wars, but he won't.
And so it's his own self-sabotage, if you ask me.
I'm sorry, we're out of time.
Thank you so much for your time, Arundh.
It's Arundh Kundanani from New York University.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Arundh.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarsstate.com.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new e-book by long-time future freedom author Scott McPherson, Freedom and Security, The Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional.
Here the people come first, and we refuse to allow the state a monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
This is Scott McPherson's Freedom and Security, The Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms on Kindle at Amazon.com today.
Hey, Al.
Scott here.
The thing is, I need you guys to help me to get these download numbers up.
So do me a favor and sign up for the podcast feeds of this show.
You can choose the whole show or just the interviews at iTunes and Stitcher.
All the buttons you need are at the top of the right margin at scotthorton.org.
The more subscribers I have, the more iTunes and Stitcher will help promote the show to new listeners.
If you're a hardcore fan, brand new or from way back, please leave them customer ratings and reviews too.
I'm trying to get these wars ended.