{"id":1716,"date":"2011-07-27T11:22:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T03:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muzlimbuzz.sg\/?p=1716"},"modified":"2011-07-27T11:22:53","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T03:22:53","slug":"the-rush-to-blame-muslims-and-the-meaningless-term-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/the-rush-to-blame-muslims-and-the-meaningless-term-terrorism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rush to Blame Muslims and the Meaningless Term “Terrorism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below is a post<\/a> from Loonwatch.com<\/a> which contains lots of links to critical reading material with regards to the bombing and shooting at Oslo.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For much of the day yesterday, the\u00a0featured headline on\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times<\/em> online front page<\/a>strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to\u00a0definitive statements on the\u00a0BBC<\/em><\/a> and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.\u00a0\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u2018s Jennifer Rubin wrote\u00a0a whole column<\/a> based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as\u00a0James Fallows notes<\/a>, remains at the\u00a0Post<\/em> with no corrections or updates.\u00a0 The\u00a0morning statement issued by\u00a0President Obama<\/a> \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring\u201d and \u201cwe have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks\u201d \u2014 appeared to assume, though (to its credit) did not overtly state, that the perpetrator was an international terrorist group.<\/p>\n

But now it turns out that the alleged perpetrator wasn\u2019t from an international Muslim extremist group at all, but was rather a\u00a0right-wing\u00a0Norwegian nationalist<\/a> with a history of anti-Muslim commentary and\u00a0an affection for Muslim-hating blogs such as Pam Geller\u2019s Atlas Shrugged, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer\u2019s Jihad Watch<\/a>.\u00a0 Despite that,The New\u00a0York Times<\/em> is still working hard<\/a> to pin some form of blame, even ultimate blame, on Muslim radicals\u00a0(h\/t\u00a0sysprog<\/a>):<\/p>\n

So if this is somehow not considered \u201cterrorism\u201d, are we admitting that whether something is \u201cterrorism\u201d is solely a function of who did it?<\/p>\n

That Terrorism means nothing more than\u00a0violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes<\/em>has been proven repeatedly. \u00a0When an airplane was flown into an IRS\u00a0building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism,\u00a0until it was revealed<\/a> that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances.\u00a0 The\u00a0U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit\u00a0Terrorism even when it is\u00a0beyond question<\/a> that the purpose of their violence is to\u00a0terrorize civilian populations into submission<\/a>.\u00a0 Conversely, Muslims who\u00a0attack purely military targets<\/a> \u2014 even if the\u00a0target is an invading army in their own countries<\/a> \u2014 are, by definition, Terrorists.\u00a0 That is why, as\u00a0NYU\u2019s Remi Brulin has extensively documented<\/a>, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore\u00a0the most manipulated<\/a>, word in the English language. \u00a0Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.<\/p>\n

One last question:\u00a0if,\u00a0as preliminary<\/a> evidence<\/a> suggests<\/a>, it turns out that Breivik was \u201cinspired\u201d by the extremist hatemongering rantings of Geller, Pipes and friends, will their groups be deemed Terrorist organizations such that any involvement with them could constitute the criminal offense of material support to Terrorism?\u00a0\u00a0Will those extremist polemicists inspiring Terrorist violence receive the Anwar Awlaki treatment of being put on an assassination hit list without due process?\u00a0 Will tall, blond, Nordic-looking males now receive extra scrutiny at airports and other locales, and will those having any involvement with those right-wing, Muslim-hating groups be secretly placed on no-fly lists?\u00a0\u00a0Or are those oppressive, extremist, lawless measures \u2014 like the word Terrorism \u2014 also reserved exclusively for Muslims?<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0The original version of the\u00a0NYT<\/em> article was even worse in this regard.\u00a0 As\u00a0several<\/a>people\u00a0noted<\/a>, here is what the article originally said\u00a0(papers that carry\u00a0NYT<\/em> articles\u00a0still have the original version<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Terrorism specialists said that\u00a0even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday\u2019s assaults<\/strong>, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida\u2019s signature brutality and multiple attacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from al-Qaida,\u201d said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus:\u00a0if it turns out that the perpetrators weren\u2019t Muslim\u00a0(but rather \u201csomeone with more political motivations\u201d \u2014 whatever that means: it presumably rests on the\u00a0inane notion<\/a> that Islamic radicals are motivated by religion, not political grievances), then it means that Terrorism, by definition, would be \u201cruled out\u201d\u00a0(one might think that the more politically-motivated an act of violence is, the\u00a0more<\/strong>deserving it is of the Terrorism label, but this just proves that the defining feature of the word Terrorism is\u00a0Muslim<\/strong> violence). \u00a0The final version of the\u00a0NYT<\/em>article inserted the word \u201cIslamic\u201d before \u201cterrorism\u201d\u00a0(\u201ceven if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause\u201d), but \u2014 as demonstrated above \u2014 still preserved the necessary inference that only Muslims can be Terrorists.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in the world of reality, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU,\u00a0a grand total of one \u2014 1 out of 294 \u2014 was perpetrated by \u201cIslamists<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

UPDATE\u00a0II<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0This article<\/a> expertly traces and sets forth exactly how the \u201cMuslims-did-it\u201d myth was manufactured and then disseminated yesterday to the worldwide media, which predictably repeated it with little skepticism.\u00a0\u00a0What makes the article so valuable is that it names names:\u00a0it points to the incestuous, self-regarding network of self-proclaimed U.S. Terrorism and foreign policy \u201cexperts\u201d \u2014 what the article accurately describes as \u201calmost always white men and very often with military or government backgrounds,\u201d in this instance driven by \u201ca case of an elite fanboy wanting to be the first to pass on leaked gadget specs\u201d \u2014 who so often shape these media stories and are uncritically presented as experts, even though they\u2019re drowning in bias, nationalism, ignorance, and shallow credentialism.<\/p>\n

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The above post appeared at Loonwatch.com on 23 July 2011, and reposted here on Muzlimbuzz.sg on 27 July 2011. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below is a post from Loonwatch.com which contains lots of links to critical reading material with regards to the bombing and shooting at Oslo. _____ For much of the day yesterday, the\u00a0featured headline on\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times online front pagestrongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to\u00a0definitive statements on the\u00a0BBC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[672,676,10,522,674,675,678,677,679,673],"class_list":["post-1716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blamethemuslims","tag-extremism","tag-featured","tag-islamophobia","tag-norway-bombing","tag-norway-shooting","tag-pamela-geller","tag-radicalization","tag-robert-spencer","tag-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1716"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1719,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions\/1719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplyislam.sg\/muslimbuzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}