SocraticGadfly: Boston blasts show depths of #wingnut #racism

April 18, 2013

Boston blasts show depths of #wingnut #racism

There's no other way to put it, starting from when the wingnut New York Post made its claim a Saudi national was a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, something that was hugely wrong.

Two days later then, other wingnuts claimed said Saudi was facing deportation. But, a Saudi facing deportation is NOT the one who was interviewed as a witness at the hospital (who never was a "suspect"). In this case, the wingnuttery extended to at least one member of Congress.

That all didn't stop the New York Post from doubling down on anti-Mooslim racism with more non-suspects. (And Rupert Murdoch from lying about it.)

However, actual still photos and the video immediately below show one of the two actual potential suspects is pretty damned Caucasian looking.



Meanwhile, could be plenty of non-Mooslim angles as far as possible suspects.

An anti-abortion terrorist, like Eric Rudolph at the Atlanta Olympics?

Or a white supremacist like Tim McVeigh at Oklahoma City?

Or a lone nut like the Unabomber.

But, this isn't all about organized wingnuts. On the original non-suspect, a bystander tackled him because "he looked suspicious." Did he look suspicious? Or did he look foreign? Or Mooslim? 

And, sometimes, the wingnuttery is just focused on the Democratic party. But, did you know that Barack Obama, the Democratic president of the United States, is an African-American?

So, we also get stuff like this.

The doorknobs are out in full force on Kenneth Curtis's arrest for mailing the ricin letters.

Now some  wingnuts are asking if the mainstream media is going to "hide" the fact that an obviously mentally ill man who mailed the ricin letters is a Democrat. (So far, no pix of him in blackface.)

Yes, because one's political affiliation causes paranoid schizophrenia. If true, then Chris Mooney would have schizophrenia to add to a second book on Republican brains.

This is one issue where Obama himself should be singing Kumbaya.

But not all Democrats.

Only half-joking — why doesn't somebody liquor up JoePa Biden and get him to deliver a stemwinder about this? It's what's needed. 

And, now we know who the real suspects are.

As for the real suspects, let's not we the people jump to too many conclusions yet, either. Contra Boston's police commissioner, if by "came here," he meant they emigrated to the U.S., I doubt either of the brothers came here to commit terrorist acts a decade ago, when the younger was just 9 years old. Hardly "sleeper cell" material. Theoretically, big city police departments of modern America are a step or two advanced beyond "Untouchables" days, but sometimes, I still wonder.

Beyond that, I have used the word "anomie" about people like this. They become disillusioned, detached, and feel separate. Cults and sects of all sorts (Scientology, anybody) prey on people like this. Many of said sects, it's true, aren't violent. But they all operate on similar principles Scott Atran wrote a book in part about reaching out to people like this, before they become radicalized Muslims.

That said, in Chechnya, how much of the terrorism is Islamism, and how much of that is the Islamic equivalent of caesaropapism, Islam being used in the service of nationalist separatism? 

 And, related to that, isn't the word "terrorism" often politicized? Tea Partiers go ape shit when Boston Tea Party participants are described as being, in part, terrorists, even though it fits, at least from the British Crown's point of view.

At the same time, as Daily Kos reminds us, arguably, a neolib like Dear Leader could have gone nutbar with drones had he had a hankering. And claimed it was all legal.

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