Liberals and the left attacked Congressman Peter King’s hearing yesterday on the radicalization of American Muslims and the alleged growing threat of domestic terrorism on the following ground alone: “It is bigoted to focus the hearing exclusively on Muslims. The inquiry should be broadened out to include terror threats from other groups, such as, [I kid you not], Christian-inspired terrorism.” Calling the hearing a witch hunt, the left’s solution was to bring in a more diverse group of witches.
So goes the narrow range of discourse about terrorism in this country. The left was not willing to say: Maybe we should ratchet down our terrorism concerns across the board. Maybe the problem with the hearings is not that they will be focused exclusively on Muslims, but that they are being held at all. To call for broadening the hearings out to include more sources of terror threats is to fight one form of delusion with an even crazier one. Once you grant the premise that the country faces a large domestic terrorism threat, the decision to focus on Muslims is unimpeachable; no other group, religious or political, contains so active or large a subpopulation cranking out justifications for attacks on civilians. But the premise itself is not unimpeachable. The evidence that radicalization is growing is slim, and even if it were growing, it is starting from such a minute base that it’s going to take a large increase to rise above the background noise of attacks on innocent civilians from disgruntled employees, nutcases like Loughner, and criminals. Not to mention car crashes, floods, hurricanes, and other Acts of God.
The left likes to flatter itself for standing up to evil Republicans, but on terror porn, it is in lock-step with the right.
The left likes to flatter itself for standing up to evil Republicans, but on terror porn, it is in lock-step with the right.
amen! power to the people?
This is 100% true. After the Arizona shooting the left was up in arms about this sort of thing. (And of course seeing it all as a problem of the right) Don’t get me wrong. The KKK and neo-nazis scare the crap out of me. But nothing I see indicates it’s a growing problem but rather it’s less of a problem than it was in the 90’s.
Pants-peeing over “terrorism” has the effect of justifying further power grabs by the government. So it should not be surprising that the Left is quite comfortable with this enterprise on a generalized level, although it may reject the precise targeting adopted by hysterics like Congressman King.
Terrorism is just a politically correct guise for what Republicans are not allowed to say – that they’re concerned about the spread of Islam and its institutions in America including Sharia due to continued Muslim immigration. If it was worded like that, the Rs would be hounded out of town. So you must forgive this guise. And the problem is Islam is absolutely relevant and important – witness whats happening in Europe.