Monday, October 05, 2015

This insane fear we have of offending Muslims is getting people killed—and raped


After reading more about the incident, I’m nearly certain that this kid knew exactly what he was doing
says Benny Huang of the Texas teenager who planned to bring a suspicious device to school as part of a deliberate self-victimization hoax.
What [Ahmed Mohamed] was doing, very likely with the help of CAIR, is called desensitization. It’s the processes of conditioning people to ignore what they know to be dangerous. Most people, when they encounter a briefcase with protruding wires will trust their instincts and report it to authorities. As the old saying goes, “If you see something, say something.” But if ordinary people can be made to keep mum out of fear that they will be called names—racist, Islamophobe, etc.—then terrorists can operate without nosy people flubbing up the operation.

Frontpage Magazine aptly coined a new adage for this era of tolerance and diversity: “If you see something, say something—unless the suspicious person is Muslim.” Yeah. Then shut up or you’re racist.

The classic desensitization operation is the “flying imams” incident of November 2006, in which a group of six Muslim clerics (imams) seemed to go out of their way to alarm passengers on a flight to Phoenix. Three of the imams also triggered “red flags” by buying only one-way tickets and not checking baggage. Several passengers quietly complained to flight attendants that they found the imams’ behavior suspicious.
The righteously indignant imams struck back with lawsuits against the airport, the airline and an anonymous passenger who passed a note to a flight attendant. The imams were represented by CAIR, of course. Eventually the suit against the passenger was dropped but the one against airline went to court. The case was eventually settled for an undisclosed amount through court-supervised mediation, which CAIR touted as a civil rights victory. The judge wrote that the imams had done nothing illegal and discarded as irrelevant the fact that reasonable people, lacking the benefit of hindsight, did what they thought prudent to keep people safe. Airlines were put on notice—if you see Muslims doing something that looks suspicious, you’d better be right.

Many observers, myself included, believed that the whole incident was a pre-meditated attempt to provoke exactly the reaction that they got—just like Ahmed Mohamed’s stunt. If you think that sounds crazy, consider for a moment that one of the imams worked for a Hamas front group before it was shuttered by the Treasury Department.

What CAIR will never admit is that people in western societies are socialized to treat Muslims with kiddy gloves. In their world, Muslims are given extra scrutiny. In reality, they are given less. In their world, the innocent actions of Muslims are interpreted as threatening by demented, Islamophobic minds. In reality, people pretend not to find their actions threatening even when they clearly are.
Can anyone dispute that the 2009 Fort Hood shooting could have been prevented if anyone had had the cajones to report Major Nidal Hassan before he started killing people? It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the Palestinian-American psychiatrist was hot for jihad. Major Hasan went off topic at a military psychiatry conference to deliver a lecture that many in the audience perceived as pro-radical Islam and anti-American, in which he approvingly quoted radical clerics and even Osama bin Laden. A classmate of his says that Hasan later mentioned his support for suicide bombers.

As someone who has served in the Army, I can tell you that career officers are some of the most risk-averse people you will ever meet because the worst fate they can imagine is having an Equal Opportunity (EO) complaint filed against them. There’s nothing worse than being accused of an “-ism” or a “-phobia.”

 … Our reluctance to identify Muslim malfeasance goes beyond terrorism. Try to imagine a society so paralyzed by fear of being labeled Islamophobic that people will look the other way while school-aged girls are raped. That nation really exists. It’s called England.

Between 1997 and 2013, a group of mostly Pakistani men in and around Rotherham, England were luring white English girls as young as eleven into what can only be called sex slavery. A conservative estimate of the victims is 1,400. The pervs managed to keep their little operation secret until 2001 when a Home Office worker named Jayne Senior began interviewing victims and compiling a report which she eventually turned over to authorities…who did nothing for fear of being perceived as racist. Ms. Senior was pressured to remain silent and even ordered to attend an “ethnicity and diversity course.”
 … This insane fear we have of offending Muslims is getting people killed—and raped. I don’t care for a moment if some kid in Texas feels bad because a teacher mistook his bomb-like object for a bomb. He was likely baiting the teacher, and even if he wasn’t, the teacher did nothing wrong. The madness has to stop.