I watched the talking heads on Sunday. Needless to say, much of the chatter was about terrorism and mass shootings.
I have no problem with people’s opinions being based on facts, whether or not I believe with their opinions or the conclusions they arrived at based on those facts, but I do have a problem, as I did Sunday, when the people pontificating began statements with “I know we don’t have the facts yet, but…”, “We don’t have all the information, but…”, and, “I don’t know what the president is going to say, but I think he will say…..”.
If a person admits they do not have the facts, they should stop their statement immediately.
I saw this statement-based-on-speculation approach in the past, and people were harassed both verbally and physically. Some were even threatened.
And the speculation was all wrong, but the reaction to it was all too real.
These are statements made immediately after a terrorist attack. I have removed all references to the location to remove the possibility of the “yeah, but” attempts to justify things way after the fact based on future events, but to deal with what happened then.
No prize, but see at what point you can identify the event and its location.
“The fact that it was such a powerful bomb immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,” ABC‘s John McWethy.
“It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,” syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer.
“Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,” declared the New York Times‘ A.M. Rosenthal.
“Knowing that the car bomb indicates Middle Eastern terrorists at work, it’s safe to assume that their goal is to promote free-floating fear and a measure of anarchy, thereby disrupting American life. In due course, we’ll learn which particular faction the terrorists identified with—Hamas? Hezbollah? the Islamic Jihad?—and whether or not the perpetrators leveled specific demands,” the New York Post editorialized
According to an op-ed in New York Newsday by Jeff Kamen, officials had ignored “a sizable community of Islamic fundamentalist militants in [the city]”, and urged that military special forces be used against “potential terrorists”: “Shoot them now, before they get us,”
Syndicated columnist Mike Royko wrote, “I would have no objection if we picked out a country that is a likely suspect and bombed some oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways, industrial complexes. . . . If it happens to be the wrong country, well, too bad, but it’s likely it did something to deserve it anyway.”
“The tragedy [there] must remind Americans of the obvious but insufficiently stressed reality that the end of the Cold War did not end the dangers that Americans face from their collective involvement in the world,” columnist Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post.
ABC‘s McWethy lamely tried to explain why reporters like himself had jumped on the Arab bomber bandwagon with, “I would say that the evidence has led the journalists to certain preliminary conclusions and then that the evidence has led us to additional conclusions that are away from the direction that the FBI was headed, at least in the first 24 hours.”
“The possibility of Middle East terrorism is still high on many lists,” CBS‘s Stewart reported after the sketches of he actual suspects were released.
“It is easy to perform such attacks on America.” CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer insisted. “There is still a possibility that there could have been some sort of connection to Middle East terrorism. One law-enforcement source tells me that there’s a possibility that they may have been contracted out as freelancers to go out and rent this truck that was used in this bombing and perhaps may not even have known what was involved.”
John McLaughlin insisted on his McLaughlin Group, “Even if [it] proves to be wholly the work of domestic terrorists, will it become a wake-up call for the need to focus on international terrorism, conventional and possibly nuclear?”
“According to a government source, it has Middle East terrorism written all over it,” said CBS‘s Connie Chung.
Anthony Mason reported, “Sources tell CBS News that unofficially the FBI is treating this as a Middle East-related incident.”
“It does appear to have, once again, according to an official, the signature of a Middle East kind of car-bombing,” Wolfe Blitzer said on CNN.
The “sources” were professional cold warriors and groups like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Rand Corporation, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Strategy Information Center.
One such expert, former CIA official Donald dedclared, “It’s clear, I think, that there must almost certainly to have been a foreign origin to this, and probably one in the Middle East, although, of course, I have no facts to confirm that yet”
Notice the last line at the end of his certainty
The New York Times explained the likely international terrorism this way, “Some Middle Eastern groups have held meetings there, and the city is home to at least three mosques.”
CNN’s Charles Bierbauer cimed in, “You do have a sizable Arab population [there]. You have most unpredictable pockets. . . . Things you would not expect but you should be alert to.”
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NPR‘s Daniel Zwerdling suggested demonizing a whole ethnic and religious group was acceptable because, “Aren’t some of the public’s fears of people from some ethnic groups grounded, to at least a certain extent, in some social realities? For instance, isn’t it true that many terrorist incidents in recent years have been associated with people from Middle Eastern political and religious groups?”
As the media was pushing the Middle East angle, the Los Angeles Times ran a chart that indicated that of the 171 people indicted in the U.S. for “terrorism and related activities” in the 1980s, only 11 were connected to Arab groups—6% of the total- while 77% were U.S.-based. But it also mentioned that during that time four organizations involved were Arab groups, and that is what experts settled on.
Even though car bombs had been a standard terrorist tool around the world used by Colombian drug cartels, the IRA, Basque separatists, and even U.S. and Israeli covert operations, when the car bomb was used in this case, the experts only mentioned it as a Middle Eastern method.
In the aftermath of the bombing, there were almost 250 incidents of harassment, discrimination and actual violence against local American Muslims or those perceived to be Middle Eastern.
Among them were rocks thrown at homes, picketers standing on their neighbors’ lawns, an arson attack on a mosque, drive-by shootings at Islamic centers, assaults on Muslim students, phoned bomb threats, and a fake bomb thrown at a Muslim day care facility.
Because of the harassment experienced due to the expert’s spreading the word that the terrorist act was one most likely of a Muslim, individual Muslims reported a great increase in harassment by co-workers and in public which led to an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in the Muslim community.
But when the perpetrator was apprehended, because of something as simple as a missing license plate on his get-away car, and he turned out to be a native-born white American, there was little comment from the experts about their errors. They just quietly slunk away.
They based these Middle Eastern terrorist theories on unreliable sources and experts like was later done with the Boston Marathon bombing.
There was neither an apology to those who had faced harassment and physical attack, nor any word on how the experts could have been so wrong
The monitoring group Klanwatch has shown just how dangerous far-right paramilitary groups have become “In 1993 alone . . . law-enforcement agencies discovered six weapons arsenals and 13 explosives arsenals tied to right-wing groups that apparently were planning bombings.”
But this was all ignored in favor of the experts’ chosen stereotype.
And when it turned out the bomber in Oklahoma City (did you guess that?) was a native born white American with a connection to militia groups, the experts slunk away quietly with the New York times editorializing that “The early theory that the bombing might be the work of terrorists from abroad, possibly Islamic radicals bent on punishing or frightening the Great Satan, is thus fading.”
In a bit of irony, within days of the event, the Christian Science Monitor had wondered out loud, “Who would have thought that terrorism would reach so far into the nation’s heartland?”
It hadn’t reached, it had come from there.
When John McLaughlin asked on his McLaughlin Group, “Has the level of anarchy in this country reached such a point that it’s equitable to the anarchy and the willingness to perpetrate it of Islamic radicals?”, panelist Morton Kondracke responded, “In the first place, these right-wing radicals are not as well-organized, they’re not as numerous, they have not up to now been as sophisticated. They’ve been isolated on the fringe. You know, the Islamic terrorists have been conducting active terror all over the world. . . . They’re active in Paris and London and, you know, wherever.”
But even as he claimed knowledge, Morton Kondracke’s statement made it known how uninformed he was or was pretending to be,
Yet while someone connected to this fringe committed the greatest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. History, the experts were desperate to hold that even with the facts the real menace was still only from Arabs.
The worst of this was that with so much immediate indoctrination and jingoistic “ U.S.A ! U.S.A!” patriotism, students were comfortable in the verbal and physical attacks against Muslim students who three day before they had been friends with; neighbors, who had gotten along, suddenly turned on people with whom they had interacted and with whose children their own had played; and women in stores, who normally went about their business, began to sneer at or refuse to wait on people they had seen on a regular basis.
Yet in spite of this powerful lesson from which people should have learned, and as if they needed to justify their previous wrongful acts, when the next terrorist act happened, disregarding the identity of the perpetrator within their own city, the people immediately repeated their anti-Muslim statements and behaviors.
This is why the race to be the first to lay blame on someone without waiting for facts bothers me, as does the jubilation of the network that is found to have guessed correctly.
People are encouraged to believe the guesses, and are excused when they act according to them.
Even after the facts come out, people will hold to their original beliefs and actions, and will parrot the experts, ignoring the facts when revealed.
And, politicians feed into this.
Although I may tune into the ‘breaking news” report of a terrorist attack, I immediately turn to another station even to watch old reruns the moment the anchor intones, “and here with his analysis….”.
I can get the same amount of facts watching an old Bewitched, and could probably arrive at the same uninformed conclusion if I were asked to guess.
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