Despite clown show at the top, local FBI still ‘very good at what they do’

The graduation ceremony for the FBI Citizens Academy takes place at the bureau’s North Chicago Regional Firearms Training Facility, a fun outing where we saw bomb disposal demonstration and the boys got to fire a Thompson submachine gun. 

     When the FBI called, I hesitated.
     Their request was simple enough. They wanted to bring me into headquarters, for briefings, once a week, for a couple months. Something called the FBI Citizens Academy.
     Why me? Agents in the Chicago office were readers. Flattering, though, the way my mind works, I instantly saw that this wasn’t necessarily a compliment — it was entirely possible that my perspective was seen as so woefully ignorant of the world of law enforcement, they felt duty bound to help me get a clue.
     Or maybe they just wanted to get me in their clutches. I’d end up handcuffed to a metal chair in a basement, a bright light shining in my face.
     One evening a week, for a couple hours, at their Roosevelt Road field office, learning the ins and outs of the department, the problems they face. Battling international terrorism, tracking cybercriminals and bank robbers.
     “It sounds like traffic school,” I told my wife.
     But I have a personal rule: if you don’t go, you never find out. Plus they would feed us — dinner from a different restaurant each week. Being fed always helps. I signed up.
     This was in 2010, so the specific program details do not pop out in mind. There were guest lecturers, short films, tours of their facility. I knew several of the attendees, and the academy was pretty much the entirety of my social life for a while.
      What’s strongest is the sense I took away about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were good people, working hard, battling bad guys. I’m sure that was the point. Not that the bureau’s often checkered history was whitewashed. Anyone who read Jonathan Eig’s recent Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Martin Luther King knows how the FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, using the transcripts to try to blackmail him into silence, to urge him to kill himself, generating dirt they fed to his enemies. Knows that the FBI often strayed from protecting America to protecting a narrow right wing racist image of America.

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Those spewing hate often dribble on themselves

     Hateful speech is so pervasive online and generally consequence-free — try getting Facebook to suspend an account — that it can be almost shocking to realize that it can be otherwise in the living world of flesh and shadow.
     I can't be the only person mildly surprised to see a Niles man, Shahid Hussain, 43, sentenced to seven years in prison for spray painting swastikas around Northwestern's campus. Not the slap on the wrist most often seen in such cases.
    Particularly because he pleaded guilty — typically that involves a lower of sentence, and one wonders what he might have gotten had he gone to trial.
     The reason he got the book thrown at him, I imagine, is that Hussain was sentenced to two years in prison in 2022 for defacing a Jewish day school, bakery and several synagogues with hateful messages. He's a two-time loser.
     I can't speak for you, but for myself, the 2022 trip to the slammer would been a subtle hint that maybe I need a new hobby. But haters are not the brightest bulbs in the box. And there is an addictive quality to it — they're locked in the thrall of an obsession. This is worth remembering, since some Jews seem to think they're auditioning for haters, that their words and actions, or those of fellow Jews, somehow provoke antisemitism, so we need to be on our best behavior. When in reality, antisemitism isn't about us; rather, it is someone else's problem that sadly involves us, such as this Niles man caught scratching an itch that just won't go away.

     I almost felt sorry for him — maybe he thought that Northwestern was a safe space for expressing antisemitism. It certainly has seemed that way in the past. If only he'd stuck to the safer forms of hating Jews, respected the accepted etiquette, the specifics of which hardly need to be spelled out.

     The story shouldn't be buried in the Tribune, as it reminds all those keen to make their private urges into bold public statements that, depending on the time and place, tone and exact language, sometimes it blows back on you in spectacular fashion. It makes a lot more sense — safer, smart and morally right to boot — not to hate anybody. I wish more people would give it a try.