‘Lone Wolf,’ ‘Self-Radicalized': Islamophobic Buzzwords never applied to White Terrorists
http://www.juancole.com/2015/02/radicalized-islamophobic-terrorists.html‘Lone Wolf,’ ‘Self-Radicalized': Islamophobic Buzzwords never applied to White Terrorists
By Juan Cole | Feb. 12, 2015
Did a self-radicalized lone wolf white terrorist kill three young Muslim students in cold blood in Chapel Hill? It is a kind of a stupid question, but its stupidity is just more apparent when asked of someone with an English last name. What does self-radicalized or lone wolf even mean?
Craig Hicks constantly shared anti-Muslim and anti-Christian links on social media and proclaimed to believers, ““I have every right to insult a religion that goes out of its way to insult, to judge, and to condemn me as an inadequate human being — which your religion does with self-righteous gusto…” I think we may conclude that he didn’t like Muslims, and one of the victims told her father that before her death. While he may have been provoked to his rage by a parking incident and while he clearly is one egg short of an omelette, the “new atheist” discourse of believers as oppressive and coercive per se is part of his problem.
“Terrorism” has been racialized in the American press and law enforcement community, marked as having to do with Muslims but almost never used to refer to people of northern European background. A few years ago, when a police spokesman said that “We have concluded that event was not terrorism,” likely what he meant is that no Muslims were involved or that no cell or organization was.
Racializing dissent has an old genealogy in American politics. In the early twentieth century, Jewish-American immigrants were suspected of socialism and Italian-Americans of anarchism. In the Red Scare of 1917-1920, workers who joined labor actions were falsely accused of Communism and were targeted for mob violence, especially if they had “foreign names.” African-Americans who had come north to work in factories during the war, filling a domestic labor shortage, were likewise tagged as subversive. Somehow persons of English ancestry with names like Worthington — even if they were blue collar workers– were not assumed to be Communists or foreign agents or radicals. Russian-Americans were deported. In Illinois after the war, a mob attacked Italian-Americans and razed their homes.
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Where are the new atheists advocating killing the religious for being religious? Please provide the documentation for that implication.
Where is the new atheist leader who issued a call to murder an author, for example, for writing a book critical of atheism?
Craig Hicks was an atheist. Craig Hicks disliked religion and described himself as an anti-theist - a person opposed to religion. What he didn't do is describe himself as a person who "hated all muslims" or thought that people should be killed because of their beliefs. Terrorism is violence for political motivation against civilians. You can use the word to mean lots of other things, and it is frequently misused that way. Until the evidence appears demonstrating that Hicks was in fact acting against these people explicitly for their religious beliefs and in order to promote his agenda of a world free of religion, terrorism does not apply to the horrible crimes he committed.
The rush to ascribe Hicks actions as caused by "new atheism" is amazing. Again - where are the atheist leaders arguing for violence against those opposed to atheism?
Actually it isn't amazing. Given the endless stream of explicitly religiously motivated terrorism by groups and individuals, and the endless apologies about how none of it has anything to do with religion, it is quite understandable that the religious would jump at the opportunity to pin this awful crime on "new atheism'. Shameless, opportunistic, but understandable.
Michael Nam points to a parking space in the Finley Forest condominium complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It doesn't look like much - a stretch of pavement and a stone marker with the word "reserved" in faded white letters. Two squashed pinecones are lying on the ground.
It meant something to Craig Stephen Hicks, though. Once when Nam parked his car there, Hicks came out of his apartment with a gun holstered on his hip. It was at about four on a November afternoon.
"I was like, 'Is this for real?'" Nam says. "I'm not afraid of your gun, but why the hell did you bring it out?"
They argued over the parking space. Hicks, who is 46, took out his mobile phone and showed him a map of the condominium complex, pointing to the places where people are allowed to park - and which places are reserved.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31395467
Michale Nam, not a muslim.
