A few months ago, when a clip aired revealing that current Arab Spring president of Egypt Morsi had, before he was elected, maintained that the Jewish people are “apes and swine”, it became apparent to any rational observer of the mainstream media that the mainstream media’s knowledge of Islam is an inverse limit approaching zero. Like one of those horrendous calculus strings as things go from bad to worse, the media either didn’t report Morsi’s sentiments because it is salaciously inconvenient, or chose to obfuscate by appeals to western ignorance of the nuances of the region, alleged Israeli atrocities, and its flagship ideology, Islam.
Obfuscation is the latest and only tactic left for the media in all matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a tactic not afforded to any other group. It has hallmarks of an affirmative action mindset, where everything is reduced to grievance and historical justification, and causes are deduced from those grievances. And in so being, it is highly incoherent. Tangentially, as an easily accessible example, the conclusion that is often nimbly deduced from this mindset is that nationalism is bad because nationalism is the cause of the abuse of which Muslims have been subjected; whether it be the French, the British, Israelis or the Russians, a nation and their xenophobic national pride or colonial avarice is to blame. But without an idea of a collective nation or culture, what use is the argument of collective grievance? And if it is of no use in regards to the French, but in fact a source of great self-deprecation, why is it used in respect to the Chechens, the Palestinians, or,Indoor Positioning System, the Tibetans?
We expect as much from Mr. Sirota. He seems to have a fetish with white men. He writes about them constantly. And if it weren’t for the tragic circumstances under which the article was written it would be amusing. But it is not. It is a prime of example of deductive impotence and a fine example of the lengths to which the left will go to construct the political skirmish on a battlefield of its own choosing. Sun Tzu once warned that you should never fight an enemy on the field of its choosing, but choose your place and time and you will be victorious. Like a good liberal, Sirota has heeded the advice of sun Tzu and created a controversy and thus a battle on the grounds on which he chooses to fight. This piece was a strategic offensive written before the bombing suspects were identified in order to turn the conversation away from where it should empirically go. It was strategic brilliance, but tactical error. He cannot be victorious.
He cannot be victorious because the turf on which he chooses to wage rhetorical war is highly deductive and therefore highly vulnerable. A deductive argument is one in which axioms flow to conclusions without hesitation and hindrances. Socrates being a man, and men being mortal, leads to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. The argument is entirely dependent on its premises, premises on inductive facts; Men are mortal is a conclusion only revealed by observation and induction. If one of these premises is suspect, the cards collapse and the conclusion becomes irrelevant. Having fired off the first salvos, we must respond to Sirota forthwith.
Sirota betrays his argument before the first sentence is even penned with the title itself. Let’s hope… the Marathon Bomber is a white American. There is no plurality here. The bomber is assumed to be a single white American bomber by the singular use of the verb “to be” and “bomber”. This elementary stuff, elementary stuff of which Sirota is ignorant. If he had wanted to make the argument that he advances, entitling the screed “Let’s hope the Marathon bomberS ARE white American neo-Nazis with intricate connections with a network of terror cells operating in the south,” would have been more effective. But in as much as it is elementary, it is also minutia, and merely serves to capitalize the fact that Sirota is an idiot.
The raw meat of his argument, however, is in this group of sentences: “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.”
Here Mr. Sirota conflates ethnicity with motive without as much as the bat of the eye in the case of “white dudes” while condemning the same mental movement in the case of minorities. Whiteness is implicitly the cause of the mass shootings and is also referenced as evidence of white male privilege in the collective response to those shootings, while the non-white ethnicities of “minorities,” a highly ambiguous term the definition of which shifts depending on which way the winds blow in the Arctic, are in his schema the reason for alleged profiling. Mr. Sirota just profiled the entire nation for profiling minorities, a circumstance that suggest that we are not dealing with an intellectual argument but an ideological smear. Considering the fact that, if we assume white male privilege, the motive of white males when shooting up a school or a movie theater is never entirely clear because if a white male is raging against a society intoxicated by white male privileged their violent outburst is something of a bizarre masochistic aberration, while minorities that do so are implicitly raging against a white male dominated society and are therefore absolved of serious criminality. In this way, the argument works to refute its own claim and justify minority terrorism. Either there is white male privilege, these crimes being an aberration, or society needs to profile white males as well. His argument does nothing to mitigate his concern about ethnic profiling, but actually expands it.
While a deductive refutation of Sirota is not going to get us to the conclusion “there is no such ephemeral quality of society as white male privilege as it regards terrorism,” neither is the conclusion “white male privilege accounts for why white males are not collectively denigrated as it regards terrorism.” An empirical procedure, however, will take us exactly to the former and refute definitively the latter.
The first empirical assessment that we need to make is to test the idea that white male terrorism has never been considered an existential threat. In 1871, Republican President Ulysseses S. Grant signed into law the Klu Klux Klan act. Unfortunately for Sirota, this was not a situation in which the former Commanding General of the Union forces was institutionalizing the ideology of the Klu Klux Klan, but specifically targeting as enemy combatants a group of white extremists racist terrorist, who happened to be citizens, on behalf of a minority recently set free by the sacrifice of nearly 300,000 union soldiers.
About a hundred years later, the FBI was tasked with finally crushing the Klan under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. In pursuit of this task, the FBI considered the Klan to be the utmost threat to the integrity of the nation and all manner of profiling, infiltration, unconstitutional wiretapping, serial violations of due process, and other schemes were brought to bear on the inveterate racial ideology and its patrons. David Sirota’s notion that we generally conceive of white male terrorists as lone wolves is wrong in any objective historical examination.
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