British Commentator: Where Exactly Are These Gibbering Mobs of Ravening Right-Wing Islamophobes the Liberals Are Forever Fretting About?

Salon's Joan Walsh discussed David Sirota's prayer that the bombers be White, Male, and Christian, and praised him for his foresight. She's exactly as restrained and thoughtful as you'd expect her to be.

SE CUPP: You both seem to suggest that there is a need for conservatives to pin these kinds of moments on non-whites, but surely – surely, Joan – you have to also admit that there is a need among liberals to pin these kinds of attacks on white right-wingers. Surely, you have to find equal problem with that as well.

Walsh: I don’t know if I find equal problem with it. If it’s a white America, whites are just not profiled the way, you know, the way other groups are. One of our many privileges is we’re just individuals. Those are crazy nuts over there, we don’t have to answer for them.

Walsh went on to claim that, when violent attacks are perpetrated by minorities, there is a, "wave of paranoia, and profiling, and prejudice" that doesn't happen when whites are responsible. However, she offered no real examples of "waves of paranoia, profiling and prejudice" directed at minority groups after violent attacks like the Boston Bombing. It doesn't matter, liberal journalists like Walsh and Sirota have just created the myth and it's somehow become something that "everybody knows."

Meanwhile, a British writer asks precisely where this "wave of paranoia, and profiling, and prejudice" is, exactly. Besides my fondest dreams, I mean.

Whenever a bomb goes off in America or Britain, some liberals’ first reaction is to wonder whether stupid white people will go crazy and attack Muslims. Even while the dust of said bomb is settling, a certain breed of heartless commentator will shift his attention from those who were hurt in the attack to those who might be driven mad with racially tinged fury upon observing the attack: that is, the allegedly Islamophobic mob, the unenlightened public, for whom every Islamo-bombing is apparently a sign that Muslims are evil and must therefore be shouted at, spat on, and possibly punched.

So just hours after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, even before we knew who was responsible, there was media handwringing over the masses’ potentially intolerant response. Part of the reason David Sirota of Salon infamously hoped the Boston bomber would turn out be a white American is because he was fearful of the “societal response” if the bomber were a Muslim, concerned there would be “collective slandering” of Muslims by Americans. Likewise, two days after the attack, the Guardian published a piece implying America is already a country where the ill-educated think “all Muslims are terrorists”, so things could get really hairy if “the perpetrator of the Boston bombings turns out to be a Muslim”. There was a tsunami of post-Boston commentary about “the damage that Islamophobia can cause”, about the “ignorance and prejudice [that emerge] in the aftermath of a terrorist attack”, about Americans undergoing a “collective freakout steeped in Islamophobia”.

Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves. But where is this Islamophobic mob? Where are these marauding Muslim-haters undergoing a post-Boston freakout? They are a figment of liberal observers’ imaginations.

Leftists (liberals are strongly infected by leftist thought, too) frequently claim that they stand heroically against witch-hunts and scapegoating.

That's not true. They simply have different witches and goats in mind for the reaping.

posted by Ace at 02:14 PM

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