I love Mark Steyn, he gets it.
“All jihad is local, but all “Islamophobia” is global. So, if a Muslim of Afghan origin shoots up a gay nightclub in Florida and kills 49 people, that’s just one crazed loner and no broader lessons can be discerned from his act. On the other hand, if a white guy shoots up two mosques in New Zealand and kills 50 people, that indicts us all, and we need to impose worldwide restraints on free speech to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
It is important to remember that on the proverbial scales that balance these things someone is placing their finger on them to cause them to give a false reading.
I’m not talking about some proverbial Muslim pressing down on one side of the scales: that is simply to be expected as Islam commends certain deceptions and we also have things like the OIC legally defining words not by their colloquial meaning but according to Sharia law ... so that, for instance, “terrorism” is the unjust killing of Muslims and not Muslims waging jihad.
No, instead the thumb on these proverbial scales is that of the political Left. On one level they simply let no tragedy go to waste but that alone is insufficient to explain why Islamic violence can be seen as local but violence against Muslims isn’t, as Mark writes.
I think a critical part of this is that the Left (for which nothing remains of the old extreme Left that is extreme to them anymore) has strongly brought into the ideas of collective guilt for some and collective suffering for others and that their myopia is rooted in seeing everything through the lens of imbalances of power between groups.
And as they are mindlessly focused on “the white man” as their ultimate bugaboo, that which haunts their Anxiety Closets and lurks under their beds at night, the impute to one sort of people, broadly defined by the color of their skin, power that makes them bigots, that makes the tyrants, that makes them just plain bad.
Conversely put near everyone else is a victim, is assumed to be without this power and the consequences are far reaching ... black people for instance are sometimes said to be unable to be racists because racism requires power.
When any white person doesn’t accept this premise on which so much of the Left is built we as Deplorables, even fascists.
But it isn’t just “white people” but those with the Western civilization, Christians in particular, that have this imputed power.
And so these numbskulls of the Left are able to completely ignore centuries of facts to also decide that Muslims too are victims.
It is here that the Left has their proverbial thumb on the scales of perception.
When a Muslim commits Jihad in the name of advancing Sharia the Left may see the tragedy of the death and suffering caused but since their ideology is poisoned at the root because of this Woke power-nonsense they can frequently disassociate the Jihad from Jihad.
Thus the very next day after 9/11 the media was able to find Ivy League nitwits who couldn’t bring themselves to say that the terrorists had been evil.
Why?
Well, as with racism if you are reputed to lack this special mythical power when you act out you may have justification because you lack it, and it’s always easy to find Numbskulls on the Left who cannot bring themselves to disallow that you had justification.
BUT if your group has this reputed power then whatever you do is reinforcing the boot of the white, European Christians pressing down on the necks of the poor, downtrodden rest of the world.
Thus if you’re white and some other white goes berserk YOU share in their guilt unless you are one of the really gooooood white person, who understand how bad white and European and Christian are, how privileged these facts about them make you by association, and if you evidence the correct attitudes (all ever more far Left Wing) rather that the bad attitudes (anything else).
But some Jihadi? Who knows, maybe they had some justification? Israel or Zionism or Iraq or ... anything. They aren’t Christians, they’re victims, who is to say that they weren’t just acting out on their oppression?
Global, Local ... and the Woke with their damn thumbs on the scales.