Weiye Loh's Library tagged Terrorism →  View Popular, Search in Google

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.

They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"

It's a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy.

What the Religious Right, including the Religious Right's Roman Catholic and Protestant enablers, did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government--is questioned as part of religious faith itself.

It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, "The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control."

Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father's 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, or for that matter a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party or those by Michele Bachmann, or Robert George or his follower Glenn Beck.

In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany.

In an op-ed at Jadaliyya, Shiva Balaghi calls the events a "Tragic Day for Norway; Shameful Day for Journalism." She summarizes her own view of the reports:

 

  I read a story in the New York Times that squarely pointed to jihadi groups angered at the war in Afghanistan...The Financial Times was no better. From the start, it reported allegations of Islamic terrorism, continuing with this view well into its evening reporting by which time an arrest had already been made in the case... Judy Woodruff’s interview with a Norwegian journalist that aired on PBS’s Newshour followed a similar scenario.

 

  In this 24/7 news cycle driven even more mad by terror experts who conduct research using google and tweet a mile a minute, journalists should exercise caution... Perhaps today the neo-Nazis in Europe count Muslims among the problems that drive their madness. But to a large degree, these right wing extremist views shaped twentieth century Europe.

Ibrahim Hewitt writes an editoral at Al-Jazeera, where he observes that once media outlets noted that the suspect was not Muslim, they disassociated connections between the suspect's beliefs and his alleged violent actions.

 

  ...the perpetrator was a "blond, blue-eyed Norwegian" with "political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views." Not surprisingly, the man's intentions were neither linked to these "traits," nor to his postings on "websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies." Any influence "remains to be seen"; echoes of Oklahoma 1995. Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a "madman."

These motives provide followers of far right and fundamentalist groups with a compelling and convincing rationale for getting actively involved. Foremost, these citizens perceive that a wider community is under threat, whether from al-Quaida, supranational organisations such as the EU or UN, immigration or the growth of settled Muslim communities.

Furthermore, they also contend that this threat is cultural rather than economic. It is not simply about jobs or social housing. It is a profound sense of concern that a set of values, way of life and wider community are under threat, and that only the most radical forms of action can remove this threat.

"We should be able to have banter," he concluded. "We should be able to speak freely without the threat of legal coercion."

Chambers - who now lives in Northern Ireland but lived in Balby, Doncaster, at the time - sent the message to his 600 followers in the early hours of 6 January 2010. He claimed it was in a moment of frustration after Robin Hood Airport in South Yorkshire was closed by snow.

He was found guilty in May 2010 and fined £385 and told to pay £600 costs.

His appeal is likely to go before the High Court later this year.

Square-root sampling, though, still represents a kind of profiling, and, Press adds, not one that could be realistically implemented at airports today. Square-root sampling only works if the profile probabilities are accurate in the first place — if we are able to say with mathematical certainty that some types of people are “nine times as likely to be the terrorist” compared to others. TSA agents in a crowded holiday terminal making snap judgments about facial hair would be far from this standard.

“The nice thing about uniform sampling is there’s nothing to be inaccurate about, you don’t need any data, it never can be worse than you expect,” Press said. “As soon as you use profile probabilities, if the profile probabilities are just wrong, then the strong profiling just does worse than the random sampling.”

And it’s not just an Islamic problem. Listen to the words of the current Pope, who when he said them in August 2000 was Cardinal Ratzinger: “With the coming of the Saviour Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by Him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity. This truth of faith … rules out, in a radical way…the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’” (Quoted in Kristof, cited above.)

Yes, some religions are better than others, and some are worse. How can we tell the difference? Here’s a test: if I am not a member of your religion, or if I don’t believe in your God—indeed if I don’t belong to any religion or believe in any gods—will my liberties or my life be taken away from me? If your answer is “no,” then your religion is better than any religion who encourages or insists that it’s members deprive nonbelievers of life or liberty.

Better according to what standard? Is there a moral standard that stands above all the world’s religions that is based on some transcendent source? There is. And it isn’t supernatural.