Victims vs. Victimology
Linda Sarsour is a former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and a prominent Palestinian-American political activist. After news of the truck attack in New York had just broken, her first three tweets were all variations on the theme, “the terms terrorism and terrorist are only deployed when perceived Muslims are involved.”
By the fourth tweet, she got around to offering thoughts and prayers, but her drumbeat about Islamophobia and media double standards resumed after that.
Reza Aslan is an author, professor, and a regular consultant on cable news programs for all things Islamophobic. His Twitter page was, like Ms. Sarsour’s, brimming with grievances against the media for its selective application of the word “terrorist” (a brown Muslim man who mass murders is a “terrorist” but an old white man who does the same is just a “killer” or a “shooter.”). But that page contained almost nothing in the way of sympathy and solidarity.
Let’s think this through for a moment: The word “terrorism” refers to violence in the service of a political end or creed. Did the Las Vegas shooter have any political motive that we can discern? No? Thus, we don’t call it an act of terror. It has nothing to do with being brown or Muslim. It has everything to do with the presence or absence of a political or ideological cause.
Yet for all of its supposed anti-Muslim bias, much of the media eagerly buys into these activists’ narrative of widespread “Islamophobia” in the U.S. and in the West generally.
On the same day as Sayfullo Saipov’s rampage through lower Manhattan, NBC News ran a story titled, “Muslim Americans again Brace for Backlash after New York Attack.” Mic has since come out with a story (which quotes Mrs. Sarsour at the beginning), “Muslim New Yorkers are Bracing for Hate Crimes after Tuesday’s Attack.”
But there has never been significant anti-Muslim hate crime or “backlash.”
Hate crimes are a very rare offense. Eight people were killed in the U.S. due to hate crimes in 2015, according to FBI statistics.
Roughly 20 percent of hate crimes were directed at people based on their religion. And here’s the startling, instructive fact: Of these anti-religious hate crimes, crimes against Jews, based on anti-Semitism, outnumber the crimes against Muslims — five-to-one. And this is every year, even in 2002, the year after 9/11.
So why, when the media talk about anti-religious hate crimes, do we never hear mention of Jewish people?
One reason might be that the PC high priests in humanities departments in colleges across the country have not designated them one of society’s “oppressed” groups.
In any event, the victims of the New York attack were the eight people who died, including five who came together from Argentina for the “trip of a lifetime,” and more than a dozen people who were wounded. The victims in this, and all cases of terror, are the actual victims.
