“Is America Crazy?”: Just Another Manic Monday
Is America crazy?
Twelve people killed at a secure naval installation virtually on the front porch of the federal government, eight others hurt, the shooter shot to death, and it’s just another manic Monday, another day in the life of a nation under the gun. So yes, maybe it’s time we acknowledged that gorilla in the back seat, time we asked the painfully obvious.
Is America crazy?
You know, don’t you, that Muslims watched this unfold with a prayer on their lips: “Don’t let him be a Muslim. Don’t let him be a Muslim. Please don’t let him be a Muslim.” Because they know — the last 12 years have forcefully taught them — how the actions of a lone madman can be used to tar an entire cause, religion or people.
In the end, almost as if in refutation of our ready-made narratives and practiced outrage, the shooter turns out to be a black Buddhist from Texas. It is a uniquely American amalgam that defies our love of easy, simplistic categories.
As we are thus deprived of ready-made cultural blame, the story will likely fall now into a well-worn groove. Someone will disinter Wayne LaPierre of the NRA from whatever crypt they keep him in between tragedies and he will say what he always does about how this could have been avoided if only more people in this secure military facility had been armed. And we will have the argument we always have about a Constitutional amendment written in an era when muskets were state of the art and citizen militias guarded the frontier. And politicians will say the things they always say and nothing will change.
Is America crazy?
Infoplease.com, the online version of the old Information Please almanac, maintains a list of school shootings and mass shootings internationally since 1996. Peruse it and one thing leaps out. Though such tragedies have touched places as far-flung as Carmen de Patagones, Argentina, and Erfurt, Germany, the list is absolutely dominated by American towns: Tucson, Memphis, Cold Spring, Red Lake, Tacoma, Jacksonville, Aurora, Oakland, Newtown. No other country even comes close.
In 1968, when Robert Kennedy became the victim of the fifth political assassination in five years, the historian Arthur Schlesinger famously asked a question: “What sort of people are we, we Americans? Today, we are the most frightening people on this planet.”
Forty-five years later, we may or may not still be the most frightening. But we are surely among the most frightened.
Indeed, for all our historical courage, we are in many ways a terrified people. Scared of the face at the window, the rattle at the door, the Other who wants to take our stuff. Scared of the overthrow of one of the most stable governments on earth.
So we arm ourselves to the tune of a reported 300 million guns in a nation of 316 million souls — no other country has more guns per capita. Americans, you see, don’t just like and use guns. We worship guns, mythologize guns, fetishize guns. Cannot conceive of ourselves without guns.
Thus, the idea of restricting access to them threatens something fundamental. Apparently, we’d rather endure these tragedies that repeat themselves that repeat themselves that repeat themselves as if on some diabolical loop, than explore reasonable solutions.
Is that a quantifiable malady, a treatable disorder?
Is America crazy?
Last week, the Des Moines Register reported that the state of Iowa issues gun carry permits to blind people. And people began debating this on grounds of constitutionality and equal access as if the very idea were not absurd on its face.
Is America crazy?
Look at those people fleeing the Navy Yard, look at the Senate on lockdown, look at the blind man packing. Ask yourself:
Does that look like sanity to you?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, September 18, 2013
“Nativist Vigilantism”: The Media And The “Dark-Skinned” Men From Chechnya
Jake Tapper had been up all night covering the manhunt in Boston for CNN, so maybe that explains why he seemed to rush to judgment when he said of the bombing suspects: “It certainly seems these two are Islamic terrorists.”
“Yes, but those are two separate words,” Juliette Kayyem, a CNN contributor and former homeland security official, reminded Tapper. Technically, literally, he’s not inaccurate: The two brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in a shootout with police last night, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is apparently cornered by police as I post this, are Muslim and allegedly are terrorists. But all morning long, Kayyem had been cautioning viewers and fellow journalists not to jump to conclusions (as CNN’s John King so infamously did two days ago when he wrongly reported that a “dark-skinned male” had been arrested in connection with the bombing.) “The fact that they’re from Chechnya,” Kayyem said, “is not a motivation.”
The big question, of course, is what was the motivation. But even before the FBI made the Tsarnaevs’ photos public yesterday, and well before we knew their names or background (they’re from a region in Russia next to Chechnya, actually, and have lived in Boston about 10 years), we all have been trying to answer why by placing the two men somewhere on a racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological spectrum.
Media coverage is fraught with that tension: Were they “self-radicalized” and acting on their own or were they part of a larger network? Were they praying to Allah or praising Jesus? Was their nefariousness domestic- or international-based? (The word international keeps popping up superfluously: Fox & Friends’ Gretchen Carlson remarked that “they saw their photos on international television.” Well, unless they were watching CNN International, they saw themselves on good ol’ American TV, like Fox News.)
In other words, were they the kind of white Christian Americans that society has a hard time calling terrorists, or were they the kind of foreign-looking, “dark-skinned” suspects that we have a hard time not calling terrorists?
Much of the media today have been careful not to assign motivations, at least not yet. As Savannah Guthrie said, “There are facts that cut both ways.”
She, Kayyem, and other reporters, including a few on Fox, have laid out reasons that the two suspects might not be big-time Islamic terrorists: No one claimed responsibility for the carnage, as jihadist groups tend to; if they were part of a politically radical network, they probably wouldn’t have been so stupid as to rob a 7/11; high-school friends describe the younger brother as a normal teenager who partied, drank, and smoked.
The estimable Richard Engle of NBC allowed that while they could have been acting alone, there’s a good chance they’re connected to a militant group, specifically, he said, the Islamic Jihadist Union, which is “an Al Qaeda faction for all the non-Arabic speakers.”
An uncle of the two, Raslan Tsarni, surrounded by a mob of reporters outside his Maryland home, fervently denied any political motivations. “What I think was behind it: Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves,” Tsarni said. “These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, is a fake.”
If he’d suspected anything, he’d be first to turn them in, he added. They brought shame on the family and “shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity.”
One reporter asked a question that, I thought, brought embarrassment to his profession. Reminiscent of how the political establishment demands that Obama say the magic word “terrorist” or else lose patriotism points, the reporter asked Tsarni point blank: What do you think of America?
“I respect this country. I love this country,” he said. “This country, which gives chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being. That’s what I feel about this country.”
Right after the marathon, the right tried to make it seem as if Muslims, preferably the Arab kind, had practically planned the attack on “Obamaphones.” When a Saudi man was mistakenly identified as a person of interest, Glenn Beck and some rightwing blogs spun a conspiracy story in which the U.S. swiftly deported the man because Obama wanted “to cover up Saudi Arabian and Al Qaeda ties to the attack.”
Then, the New York Post stooped to phone-hacking levels by publishing a cover photo of two young men, one of them a Moroccan-American high-school athlete, who were simply watching the marathon, under the headline “BAG MEN.”
It was in hopes of avoiding just this sort of nativist vigilantism that Salon’s David Sirota wrote a piece titled Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” It was still before we had any idea of who they were, when he added:
I hoped (though certainly never assumed) the Boston bomber ends up being a white non-Muslim American because in a country where white people are never collectively profiled, surveilled or targeted by law enforcement, that would best guarantee a measured — rather than a hysterical, civil-liberties-trampling — reaction to the atrocity. For this, I was lambasted by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Bill O’Reilly to their thousands of followers for being “race obsessed” (O’Reilly, in fact, took a step into straight-up slander by subsequently claiming that I am hoping Americans kill other Americans in terrorist attacks).
I, too, hoped the bomber was a non-Muslim white American. Last night, after the shootout, a taped loop showed a young blond man lying on the street, with his arms splayed out, surrounded by police with drawn weapons. We don’t know who he was, and he may have been an innocent bystander. But for a moment, I actually hoped that the “white cap” guy in the FBI photos was wearing a dark wig and that underneath he was a blond “domestic terrorist” trying to frame Muslims.
Yesterday, after the FBI put out their photos but before we knew the suspects’ names or background, a lot of people didn’t know what to make of them: Were they white, Muslim, Italian, what? Erin Burnett sounded authentically perplexed, saying, “These two kids look like they’re very, very from here.” Most people figured them for college students, which in fact they were.
Now that they’ve been ID’ed, that relatively innocent moment is gone. We know they’re Chechen, and Chechen is not something we’ve processed racially. Or as The Onion put it: “Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens.”
Unfortunately, in the end, what will matter most to our national political narrative is that they’re both Muslim and terrorists. “Islamic terrorists.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, April 19, 2013
“Substituting Identity For Motivation”: How To Understand Things When You Don’t Want To Think Too Much
Let’s be honest and admit that everyone had a hope about who the Boston bomber would out to be. Conservatives hoped it would be some swarthy Middle Easterner, which would validate their belief that the existential threat from Islam is ongoing and that their preferred policies are the best way to deal with that threat. Liberals hoped it would be a Timothy McVeigh-like character, some radical right-winger or white supremacist, which would perhaps make us all think more broadly about terrorism and what the threats really are. The truth turned out to be … well, we don’t really know yet. Assuming these two brothers are indeed the bombers, they’re literally Caucasian, but they’re also Muslim. Most importantly, as of yet we know absolutely nothing about what motivated them. Nothing. Keep that in mind.
But for many people, their motivations are of no concern; all that matters is their identity. The sentiment coming from a lot of people on the right today runs to, “See! See! Mooslems!!!” Some of them are using the suspects’ identity as a reason why we shouldn’t pass immigration reform, and the increasingly unhinged Glenn Beck is insisting even today that the government is protecting a Saudi man who was involved in the bombing, I guess because the Obama administration is in league with Al Qaeda or something. Whether this has anything to do with the receiver the CIA implanted in Beck’s brain to exert its mind control over him through satellite transmissions could not be confirmed.
We should note that there are people on the right being restrained and responsible; not everyone is like the repellent Pamela Geller, already referring to the “Boston Jihad Bomber” (and no, I’m not going to link to her oozing pustule of a web site). But here is an editorial from the upcoming issue of the Weekly Standard titled “Civilization and Barbarism,” in which William Kristol labors to remind his readers that in the world there is us, the civilized folk, and our enemies, the barbarians. He casts a wide net (barbarism can apparently be found not only in terrorist attacks but also in Roe v. Wade), but it’s a plea to simplify your thinking, to make sure that in matters of foreign or domestic policy the only question is who is Us and who is Them. Once you’ve established that and you know that Them aren’t human at all but just barbarians, all the solutions become clear. The foreign barbarians must simply be crushed, in the most violent way possible (though it will not be Bill Kristol or his children with their lives at risk; they have people for that). As for the domestic barbarians who reside in the opposite party, well, we don’t want to kill them, but you certainly wouldn’t compromise with a barbarian, would you?
To this way of thinking, when you’re dealing with barbarians, understanding their motivations just muddies your thinking and saps your will. Identity is all that matters. Maybe that’s because it can be so hard to understand other people’s motivations. For instance, I get how someone could become enraged over the death and suffering that have been the collateral consequences of all America’s various foreign adventures. But I can’t understand how a person could decide that blowing up a bunch of innocent people could possibly be a morally defensible or even practically effective response. Does the attacker in these kinds of cases say to themselves, “This is really going to make a difference”? It’s hard to get inside their head in a way that makes any sense.
So it’s easier to say, “They did it because that’s just how those people are.” It’s an answer that means you don’t have to ask any more questions.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 19, 2013
“Hot GOP Source”: Tabloids Become Reputable When They Provide An Opportunity To Link A Mass Murderer To Islam
There’s a hot new meme blowing up on the conservative blogosphere: James Holmes, the alleged Aurora, Colo., theater shooter, has become a devout Muslim. But where did it come from?
The Washington Times wrote a short report, which was quickly picked up by Fox Nation, conservative blogs and, naturally, the trifecta of the Islamophobic blogosphere: Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs, Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, and David Horowitz’ Front Page.
“There are enough Muslims engaging in mass killings. Having a non-Muslim mass killer convert is like shipping coals to Newcastle or murderers to Islam,” Front Page’s Daniel Greenfield quipped. “Actually, if Holmes’ conversion was initiated post-massacre, it does lend to the canard that violence in Islam is perpetrated only by the extreme, misguided,” Jihad Watch tweeted.
All of the posts are based on the Washington Times report, which is in turn based on a report from the Daily Mail, the irreverent and often erroneous British tabloid.
The Daily Mail’s sourcing? An even more disreputable outfit: One unnamed “prison source” quoted by the National Enquirer. The Enquirer hasn’t posted its story online, but here’s the Daily Mail writeup:
The source said Holmes has turned to Islam as a way of justifying his horrific murder spree… “He has brainwashed himself into believing he was on his own personal jihad and that his victims were infidels,” a prison source told the National Enquirer. He now prays five times a day, sticks to a strict Muslim diet and spends hours each day studying the Qur’an, the source said. But his new routine has upset Muslim inmates.
There’s also the new thick beard Holmes recently started sporting in court — “a symbol of his new-found faith,” according to the Daily Mail. (We didn’t realize one could brainwash themselves.)
Now, it’s entirely possible that Holmes has converted to Islam, and even that he brainwashed himself into ex-post-facto justifying his killing with Islam or anything else as Holmes is severely disturbed, by all accounts, and could delude himself into thinking anything.
But does that say anything about Islam? Of course not. It says something about mental illness. If Holmes suddenly became a devout Pentecostal or Hindu in prison, would these bloggers be connecting the religion to the shooting in the way they are doing now?
It’s also funny to see conservative blogs suddenly cite the National Enquirer as a reputable source when the tabloid publishes something that conforms to a narrative they’re seeking to push. While the tabloid has broken news that the mainstream media missed in the past (thanks to their willingness to pay sources), and the Washington Times has been kind to them, the right bashed the rag for its series of scandalous Mitt Romney “scoops” during the election. Oh, and did we mention that it’s the National Enquirer?
It’s only a matter of time before Michele Bachmann or Louie Gohmert pick up the tabloid baton and carry it across the finish line on the floor of Congress and into the Congressional Record, where it will live forever.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, March 21, 2013
“The New Peter King”: New House Homeland Security Chair May Not Be A Whole Lot Better.
Good news for people who are uneasy with New York Republican Rep. Peter King’s leadership of the House Homeland Security Committee: He’s stepping down thanks to term limits. But there’s some potential bad news: His replacement may not be a whole lot better.
Texas Republican Rep. Mike McCaul edged out Michigan Rep. Candice Miller — who was the GOP’s best hope of getting a female major committee head — and Mike Rodgers in a close private vote this week. King’s tenure as chairman drew controversy for the series of hearings he held on the radicalization of Muslims in America. Critics didn’t discount the threat of homegrown terror but said King should have expanded the hearings to include all kinds of violent radicalism, including right-wing extremism.
But McCaul has been a big booster of those hearings. “I want to thank you for demonstrating the political courage to hold these hearings,” he said to King during one last year. “I must say, I am mystified by the controversy that has followed from this. It was said by one of the members that we are investigating Muslims. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are investigating the radicalization of Muslim youth in the United States.”
McCaul is a former federal prosecutor who headed the counterterrorism division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Texas, so his resume lends him credibility on the subject. His rhetoric is generally more mild than King’s, but some advocates in the Muslim-American community are concerned.
“In the past two years, there have been 27 terror plots, and each of them involved extreme radicalization of the Muslim faith,” he said at radicalization hearing this year. What counts as a “terror plot” is obviously subject to semantic debate, but right-wing extremists account for a good portion, if not most, of domestic terrorism under most definitions of the term.
In another hearing, he defended himself when a witness criticized him for connecting Islam and terror. “I would argue that we have to look at the obvious – that there is a religious component to this,” he said. Though he’s always careful to add that terror “doesn’t reflect the vast majority of Muslims.”
McCaul’s district is just south of Fort Hood, and he joined other Republicans in their insistence in labeling as a terrorist Maj. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people on the base in 2009. Hasan had corresponded with Anwar Al-Awlaki and shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire, which is enough to convince McCaul that it was a “planned terror attack.” He also introduced a bill to designate victims of the attack as combatants in a combat zone.
McCaul appeared once on the radio show hosted by Frank Gaffney, the controversial activist behind Rep. Michele Bachmann’s Muslim witch hunts. Gaffney said of the congressman: “He is, in a number of capacities, a go-to guy for the sorts of things we’re interested in here at Secure Freedom Radio.” On the show, McCaul discussed one of his hobby horses, the apparent threat of Hezbollah teaming up with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. via the southern border. McCaul has authored two reports on the subject, both titled, “A Line in the Sand: Countering Crime, Violence, and Terror at the Southwest Border.”
He has also sent a number of “dear colleague” letters to other members of Congress asking them to support his bills to crack down on foreign terror networks. One sent in September called attention to a news article alleging the Iran’s elite Quds Force was operating in Syria and asked colleagues to support a bill to designate the unit as a terrorist organization. Others would cut off aid to Egypt and Pakistan.
None of this is particularly unusual for a conservative Republican today, but it doesn’t bode well for those who hoped that King’s departure would turn a new leaf at the Homeland Security Committee.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, December 1, 2012
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