Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I'm begging, as a fan. Shhh I really don't want to write this piece.
I have long worshipped Richard Dawkins and sort of wish I'd never started following him on Twitter because it's ruining all my happy memories of The Blind Watchmaker. But, I mean, come on. The government's silence over attacks on Muslims is worrying, and divisive. Last week, a nail bomb partially exploded at a mosque in the West Midlands – the fourth attack in two months on mosques in Britain during Friday prayers. A suspect in one of those attacks is also being questioned in connection with the killing of Mohammed Saleem, a Muslim pensioner in Birmingham, who was stabbed to death as he returned home from prayers.
The police response to these attacks has been heartening, but the silence from government, and the establishment in general, has been deeply worrisome. When Lee Rigby was murdered, politicians of every stripe scrambled to condemn and reassure. Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions? Over the last several days, numerous commentators have lamented the vastly different reactions in the US to the heinous shooting of children in Newtown, Connecticut as compared to the continuous killing of (far more) children and innocent adults by the US government in Pakistan and Yemen, among other places.
The blogger Atrios this week succinctly observed: "I do wish more people who manage to fully comprehend the broad trauma a mass shooting can have on our country would consider the consequences of a decade of war. " My Guardian colleague George Monbiot has a powerful and eloquent column this week provocatively entitled: "In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. If media covered America the way we cover foreign cultures - Eric Garland. You really need to be following the writing of Sarah Kendzior this week as she rips the major media outlets for their utter incompetence in understanding the role of race, ethnicity and nationality in the Boston Marathon bombing.
The fact is: we don’t know what motivated these men. There will be a trial – and then we will know more. Can attacks on a military base constitute “terrorism”? (updated below) The incomparably pernicious Joe Lieberman said yesterday on Fox News that he intends to launch an investigation into “the motives of [Nidal] Hasan in carrying out this brutal mass murder, if a terrorist attack, the worst terrorist attack since 9/11.”
Hasan’s attack was carried out on a military base, with his clear target being American soldiers, not civilians. No matter one’s views on how unjustified and evil this attack was, can an attack on soldiers — particularly ones in the process of deploying for a war — fall within any legitimate definition of “terrorism,” which generally refers to deliberate attacks on civilians? The obvious problem with answering that question is that, as even the U.S. Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word. (updated below) Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto.
Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with “the Left” (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices: I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything.
The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions. (updated below [Wed.])
There's not much to say about Monday's Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Surprising Study On Terrorism: Al-Qaida Kills Eight Times More Muslims Than Non-Muslims. In the battle against unbelievers, can one also kill Muslims?
Even the terror network al-Qaida is troubled by this question. A leading al-Qaida ideologue for the terror network, Abu Yahya al-Libi, has developed his own theologically-based theory of collateral damage that allows militants to kill Muslims when it is unavoidable. Even the Iraqi affiliates of Osama bin Laden's terror group, who are known to be particularly bloodthirsty, claim that they too consider this question. All Terrorists are Muslims...Except the 94% that Aren't. CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in U.S. exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “the terrorist threat posed by radicalized Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated.”
Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes. If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims.