Terrorism’s coming to town: Understand the enemy because you’ll never keep them out

Someone followed Santa into my old neighborhood.
But instead of toys, he carried high-powered explosives with the intention of blowing up a plane and killing innocent people.
The 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, tried detonating the explosives hidden in his underwear on a plane in my neck of the woods.
Detroit Metro Airport is a straight 10-mile shot down Merriman Road from the neighborhood where my grandma, my parents and my brother, his wife and two young children all live. I grew up with the roar of the incoming and outgoing flights sounding overhead in the sky while shooting hoops in my backyard or riding my bike down the streets.
I was in that same neighborhood on Christmas Day two weeks ago and probably heard Flight 253 mixed in with the sound of the radio playing Christmas carols at my grandma’s house, where we gathered with family and friends for the holiday.
It’s with horror that I imagine that plane splitting apart and pieces falling through the sky.
Terrorism was in my own backyard. On Christmas, no less.
Making the story even a little more personal, was the fact that I’d been on that very same flight from Amsterdam to Detroit four years ago when I visited my ancestral lands in Greece. I, too, have passed through security at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport (it seemed necessarily tight) and sat on that long, long flight over the pond. I commend the passengers who acted quickly after such a journey; I think I may have been too groggy had I been up there.
We all personalize stories of large scale catastrophes. Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Kennedy’s assassination was the same with my parents’ generation. Expressing our personal stories helps us understand the larger catastrophe a little better. It makes us feel closer to a situation we can’t control.
I just wish this situation wasn’t so close to home. How would I explain it to my five-year-old niece if AbdulMutallab had succeeded in igniting his device?
“A piece of fuselage fell on your house,” I would say.
“Why, Uncle John?”
“Because a man blew up the plane.”
“Why did he do that, Uncle John?”
“Because he is allied with a radical Islamic group who think the Western world is a militant, perverse force that needs to be destroyed through a religious war called jihad.”
“You’re silly, Uncle John.”
I wish I could explain to her that the ideas on both sides are, in fact, pretty silly; that hatred is usually born from fear; that people in the adult world don’t act much different than fighting kids do on the playground.
When she is old enough, I will tell her that if people would only recognize the basic humanity of everyone else, and not only sympathize, but empathize with them, kids like AbdulMutallab might not be sucked into violence, and instead use his youthful enthusiasm to better his Nigerian community. Making your community a better place for you and your family is what all our energies should be used for, after all.
We in the Western world can strip search every single person at gunpoint before they get on an airplane flying into our hometowns. We can pluck anyone with a foreign name whose skin is some kind of shade of brown out of line, but that doesn’t solve a thing.
Searches infringe our privacy rights and racial and ethnic profiling only exacerbates the problem with the enemy. Al Qaeda is shrewd at the public relations game (Flight 253 as evidence. It sure ‘terrorized’ the bejeezus out of us on Christmas). Taking on the enemy with all we’ve got only leads to new recruits like Abdulmutallab, who, like many young men, yearn to do something meaningful, something heroic with their lives. Al Qaeda and other terror groups prey on this. They convince them America is a giant enemy. Dying to combat them means their life had some sort of purpose.
The usual questioning of our security and intelligence procedures started soon after the incident. I’m sorry, America and the rest of the West, but we cannot control everything. It’ s impossible. We can only do our best. There is no foolproof system for anything. That may not make us sleep easier at night, but it’s the truth.
For every wall and barrier we put up at airports, or anywhere else, there are groups like Al Qaeda who devote all their time finding the weaknesses in the systems. And there will always be weaknesses.
That’s why the best thing both sides can do is understand the enemy.
Because when you empathize with the kid who becomes a terrorist, or when the would-be terrorist tries to see the world through the eyes of my five-year-old niece, it’s not the enemy you hate and want to kill, it’s your neighbor or friend.
And even though Flight 253 happened to be in my old backyard, it’s really in all our backyards.