David Sirota and Salon Are Progressive Xenophobes!

After two days of media stupidity (blaming the terrorist attack on tax-hating right-wingers) and congressional stupidity (blaming the attack on the sequester) we now have a winner in the most idiotic statement about the Boston Marathon tragedy.  The winner is the liberal website Salon, and the post by David Sirota is called "Lets Hope The Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American." 


It is Mr. Sirota's contention that when an Islamist conducts an act of terror people always blame crazy radical Islamist, but when white guys commit an act of terror people always say its a lone wolf.

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.

Apparently Mr. Sirota lives in a cave without access to the rest of the liberal media.  In most cases when a "White Guy" commits a mass shooting, the liberals find a way to blame conservatives.  When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, they blamed Sarah Palin's use of a bullseye on a map of the US.  The media said the nut job who did the shooting was a right-winger even though all evidence showed that Jared Loughner was a socialist. Michael Page who shot up the Sikh Temple was a Socialist (a Nazi but right-wingers were named).

Mass shootings and attacks by Islamists and "White Guys" have been described as Lone Wolf including  Theodore Kaczynski, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet (who shot up the EL Al ticket counter in 2002, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar (who drove his Jeep into a crowd of people in North Carolina 2006), even Nidal Malik Hasan who shot and killed people at Fort Hood was called a lone wolf.

When people (like Hasan) scream Allahu Akbar  as they commit their act of terror, it is blamed on their radical Islamist ideology because it happens to be the truth. That certainly doesn't mean ALL Muslims are radical Islamists.

Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”

 And we don't bomb the Vatican because Pope Francis as well as Benedict and John Paul before him are not state sponsors of terrorism.

Here's the real issue with David Sirota and progressives like him---he is a racist. Racism is part of the progressive philosophy is to throw everybody into neat little categories.  All women are the same, so are all Jews, Latinos, etc. 

When someone is described as an illegal immigrant the progressive will say that is an example of hate against Latinos (even though all illegal immigrants are not Latino-but all illegal immigrants are breaking the law by coming/staying in this country without permission).

When a terrorist is described as a radical Islamist they cannot segregate that individual from all Muslims so they believe it is Xenophobia.  But the real Xenophobes are the progressives who can't tell the difference between a radical philosophy and all Muslims.