Ben Shapiro
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Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty
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On Tuesday, an apparent
Islamist terrorist rammed a truck into dozens of Americans on a bike path in
New York City, killing eight and injuring over ten. He popped out of the truck
shouting “Allahu Akhbar” before being captured by police.
Imagine that a white
supremacist had driven a truck onto a bike path filled with minority innocents,
killing eight of them. Imagine that the white supremacist had emerged from his
truck carrying aloft a Confederate flag.
Imagine that the media had
leapt to the defense of those flying the Confederate flag, explaining that only
a tiny minority of those who did so had engaged in any sort of racist violence.
Imagine that all of America’s major political leaders said the same, and told
those who connected the terrorism with the Confederate flag that their
viewpoints represented bigotry. Imagine, too, that CNN ran a chyron reading
“WITNESSES: SUSPECT WAS CARRYING SOUTHERN VERSION OF AMERICAN FLAG,” and then
hosted panels assuring audiences that the Confederate flag was simply a symbol
of Southern pride.
Hard to imagine, isn’t it?
Yet that was precisely the
chain of events that took place after yet another Islamist terror attack on
American soil. Leftist media darling and terrorist-sympathizer Linda Sarsour
tweeted, “Every believing Muslim says Allahu Akbar every day during prayers. We
cannot criminalize ‘God is great.’ Prosecute the criminal not a faith.” The
media did its typical rush to prevent cruel Americans from engaging in
“Islamophobia,” expressing that radical Islamic terrorism had no connection to
actual Islam. Most of America’s political leaders quickly agreed. CNN ran a
chyron reading, “WITNESSES: SUSPECT WAS YELLING ‘GOD IS GREAT’ IN ARABIC.”
Precisely the reverse takes
place after white supremacist terror attacks, of course. When white supremacist
Dylann Storm Roof committed a massive terror attack on a black church, the
media quickly uncovered photos of him with a Confederate flag, and led a
month-long discussion on whether the Confederate flag ought to be banned from
public places. When a white supremacist in Charlottesville murdered an innocent
woman, the media held a month-long discussion on whether Confederate statues
ought to be removed. This week, a Latino interest group ran an ad attempting to
connect a Republican gubernatorial candidate with a white supremacist march he
had openly condemned, and created an ad showing a Confederate flag-flying white
supremacist with that candidate’s bumper sticker attempting to run down
minority children.
Now, we can have solid
discussions about Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag. Those
discussions are worthwhile. But why is that we leap to discuss those issues
when a white supremacist terrorist kills innocents, but we leap to defend Islam
when an Islamist kills innocents? Why the difference? Isn’t radical Islam just
as horrifying as white supremacism? And isn’t white supremacism just as
statistically non-representative of Confederate flag-owners throughout the
South as radical Islam is of observant Muslims across the country?
The answer lies in a serious
problem of bias. The media believe that Americans, by and large, are racist
Islamophobes. They are the problem. They’re the problem if perpetrators are
Muslim, in which case the backlash from non-Muslim Americans must be pre-emptively
curbed; they’re the problem if the perpetrators are white supremacists, in
which case Americans must answer for their supposed connections to white
supremacism.
That’s nonsense. If we’re
going to start attributing terrorist ideologies to broader movements, we’re
going to have to abide by that rule across the board; if, by contrast, we’re
going to distinguish terrorist ideologies from other ideologies, let’s do that
across the board. But you can’t connect white supremacism to Ed Gillespie and
Confederate flag-owners while adamantly disconnecting Islamism from Islam.
That’s intellectually dishonest. Actually, it's disparaging of non-Muslim
Americans more generally, unless there’s a deeper connection between white
supremacism and Confederate flag-owning or conservative voting than there is
between Islamism and Islam. Which there isn’t.
Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire, 1-11-2017
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