Jim Geraghty: OSU Jihadi Proves That the Progressives' Victim Mentality Kills

Excellent column by Jim Geraghy hitting on a theme I've hit on dozens of times myself:

The media is always fretting that ginning up "white rage" will produce "backlash" -- violence -- against minority communities.

Okay, let's say I accept that's a possibility.

Is it not also a possibility that ginning up minority rage over agrievements, both those that can be characterized as possibly real as well of those of the #FakeNews contrived paranoia variety, can spur non-whites into their own "backlash" mode?

If not, why not? Are whites singularly evil in this world? Are they alone the only race capable of being whipped up into a hateful, violent lather by racial paranoia and racial grievances?

Geraghty notes that the OSU Killer had a lot of "fears" of "The Other" -- and he acted on them.

I don't hear the media talking about this kind of "whitelash."

Take a good look at the Facebook post of the Ohio State University attacker.

Sure, there’s plenty of that familiar jihadist rhetoric. "America, stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah. We are not weak… By Allah, we will not let you sleep unless you give peace to the Muslims. You will not celebrate or enjoy any holiday."

But what comes through most is this whining sense of victimhood, that he’s forced to commit these atrocious, barbaric attacks on innocent people out of a righteous sense of self-defense to protect his feelings.

"I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE. Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point."

See, Muslims aren’t being killed and tortured everywhere. It would be nice if someone close to him had told him that, and if fewer people helped fuel that rage-inducing falsehood. If he ever bothered to read a book or the news about places like Syria and Iraq, he would have learned that Muslims are mostly being killed and tortured by fellow Muslims.

If it's dangerous for a strain of white identity politics to nurture a fear and hatred of "The Other" -- different races -- and that such a strain of grievance-mongering and paranoia may result in the murders or assaults of minorities, why is it (as the media and mediating institutions seem to believe) not dangerous at all for minority ethnic groups to gin up their own fear, paranoia, and hatred against whites or society in general?

Will the media or any government official ever address this, given the weekly assassinations of police, and the newest barbarism committed against OSU students due to one lunatic steeping in the hatreds of identity politics?

Or does the media simply believe that White Lives Don't Matter, especially when compared against the Democrats' keep to make Identity Politics Grievances and Hatreds Against Whites the central organizing principle of their party?

(By the way: Cops are widely considered "White By Association" by many of the people ginning up racial resentments, no matter what their actual ethnicity. So blue lives are essentially white lives, and no, they don't seem to matter.

As Kurt Schlicter noted, media interest in the OSU story dried up immediately upon discovering the attack did not involve 1, a gun or 2, a white perpetrator who could be characterized as "Trump voter" harassing minority victims.)

posted by Ace at 02:32 PM

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