Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats
As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.
This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.
I don't know if anyone has realized this, but this guy is a nobody writing in a extreme Left publication nobody reads. Could it be he is looking for attention just like Bill Mahar, Crissy Matthews and Piers Morgan who also have zero readership/viewership?
I saw this article this morning and spent a few minutes tracing the source of the so-called "FBI data" used to support the thesis that right-wing extremists were a greater threat than islamist extremists. The Slate article references an article from a sister publication, Think Progress, which uses this report from the Muslim Public Affairs Counsel as it's source document.
Keeping an open mind, I started to review the MPAC report only to learn that one of the "non-muslim" terrorists was none other than Johnny Mohamed, the DC Sniper. Another "non-muslim" terrorist was the late Dr. Bruce Ivens who was at one time suspected but never charged in the 2001 anthrax mail attacks.
While I did learn about a couple of disturbing cases where anti-government extremists were developing chemical weapons for unknown purpose, the MPAC report was clearly manipulated to overstate threat posed by non-muslims which was further manipulated by Slate to read white extremists and FBI data.