That’s the mental straitjacket we’ve put ourselves into.
Someone has to come up with a Latin word for ”fear of being called a racist”. That’s the world we now live in, evil is allowed to flourish because we’re afraid to call it by name lest we be labeled as ”Islamofauxbe, racist or bigot. The case is constantly made that we can’t name a racial, ethnic or religious group as containing some dangerous elements, for in doing so we smear the group as a whole.
If that’s the case, then for an example, radical white supremacists (Ayran Brothers, KKK), radical black supremacists (Black Panthers, Nation of Islam) shouldn’t be mentioned either, for fear of stigmatizing those racial groups. All this tip toeing through the tulips comes at a cost, if you can’t name your enemy, you’ve just increased the likelihood of their eventual success.
NOTE: Read the entire piece by Lowenthal Marcus, she quotes Barry Rubin extensively.
Rubin was talking about the reluctance to name Islam – Rubin calls this the “mysterious motivation,” and he refuses to be cowed into playing that avoidance game.
Rubin wrote a very important article about this after he watched the mainstream media and western politicos twist themselves into pretzels in an effort to avoid the obvious. Rubin explains that the West seems to believe that if we admit radical ideological Islam threatens Western society, that will have radical implications for our worldview.
As a result, Rubin points out, most current policy makers and opinion shapers prefer to avoid any policy that considering Islam as the motive for terrorism would necessitate. The fear of short term pain is indulged at the expense of preventing the real danger that will follow. And we are being lied to – “albeit for virtuous reasons” – by the politicians and the mainstream press.
What is the fear that is so great “doing nothing has become better than doing anything”? The fear is that speaking the truth: that the Tsarnaev brothers acted in accordance with their (or at least the older brother’s) understanding of what Islam requires, will lead to disaster. It will cause widespread hatred of Muslims to be unleashed, the specter of Islamophobia to spread, racism will again become rampant, and all the things that a hoped-for post-racist America tried to put behind it will again spread throughout the land.
But the failure to take Islam into consideration might be the very reason why, despite the warning the U.S. was given by Russia that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a radical Muslim and a strong believer” the U.S. nonetheless watched Tsarnaev leave the country for Russia and allowed the case file on him to expire during the time Tsarnaev was in a heavily radicalized Muslim territory of Russia.
In a telephone interview from his home in Tel Aviv, The Jewish Pressspoke with Rubin, the director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. Rubin is the author of more than a dozen books on topics including terrorism, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, the PLO, Israel, the Middle East and Islam, which have been published by the most esteemed publishing houses including the Oxford, Yale and Harvard University presses.
First Rubin lists off and explains the many ways the Tsarnaev brothers’ “mysterious motive” to maim and murder Americans has been and continues to be aggressively obfuscated. The list includes fingers pointed at a troubled youth; the Chechen code of honor; immigrants’ malaise; and unemployment. Read his article, it is well worth seeing how he lays it out.
