American Muslims, White Cops, and Jumping to Conclusions

On July 18th, 2015 a twenty-four year old man in Chattanooga, Tennessee named Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire, shooting seven people, including four Marines who died that day.  A navy recruiter later died. Five people were slain and two more injured by a guy who just happened to be named Mohammad, and, who just happened to have spent seven months last year in Jordan, and who, according to Reuters and the New York Times, just happened to have sent a text the night before the killings to a friend linking to a passage of Islamic text - Hadith 38 - containing the verse: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, I will indeed declare war against him.”

From CNN: “Authorities in the U.S. and abroad are working to figure out what might have motivated the 24-year-old to shoot up a recruiting center in a strip mall in Chattanooga and then drive to a Navy operations support center about 7 miles away and stage another attack. He died in a gunfight with law enforcement.” Hmmm … yes … the illusive motive. What could it possibly be? Not even a hint?  The “authorities”, of course, will leave no stone unturned until as CNN so cautiously puts it, they “figure [it] out”. Most people may have already a good idea, but the White House and the mainstream media all must exercise infinite patience. No conclusions are to be jumped at because someone somewhere might conclude that not all manifestations of Islam show it to be a “religion of peace.”

Some months earlier in Ferguson, Missouri a white policeman named Daren Wilson shot and killed a black 18 year old named Michael Brown.  No caution or forbearance from the White House or the mainstream press about Daren Wilson’s motive. Jumped at immediately was this conclusion: Michael Brown, unarmed, hands up in surrender was gunned down execution-style by a white cop who hated blacks. It was obvious. Months later, after mobs looted and burned down portions of Ferguson, with the President of the United States, the Justice Department, and the mainstream press all doggedly insisting that Michael Brown was an  innocent victim of white racist policing, a grand jury declined to prosecute Daren Wilson since the facts showed this conclusion was, well, a little off the mark. Michael Brown, having just robbed a convenience store and assaulted the store clerk, was shot after attacking a policeman half his size and attempting to get his weapon.  Obama sent three White House officials to Michael Brown’s funeral, the funeral of a criminal. No White House representatives will likely be seen at the funerals for the Chattanooga victims, Marines who served their country. 

The contrast in the way the aftermaths of these two events with intense national media coverage happened to unfold points to something quite ugly that has taken hold in America. It is the work of ideologues preoccupied with the politics of grievances and their efforts to portray American institutions and their history as nothing but sundry modes of exploitation and domination.  Their ideology is shaped and animated by a false and pernicious doctrine that the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell long ago and fittingly called, “the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed” (DSVO).  Simply put: membership in a group of people (Group A) oppressed by a different group of people (Group B) means that people in Group A are  morally superior to those in Group B. Why? Group B-people are responsible for the suffering of the Group A-people and thus eternally culpable and forever morally deficient. The suffering of the oppressed group coupled with the depravity of the oppressor group means that the moral and legal comportment of any member of Group A must be judged differently (always more leniently or favorably) than that of any member of Group B. It is important to note that the culpability of the oppressor group is passed down from generation to generation. The grievances and the guilt are eternal. President Obama recently said that racism “is in our DNA” and “White Privilege”, a corollary of DSVO, is rapidly being embedded as an essential element of civic education.

The current boundaries for use of N-word illustrate perfectly how the DSVO works. The N-word used by anyone from the White-oppressor group is completely verboten. There is no word in the English language for a White person more poisonous, and the social and career penalties for speaking it are severe.  For Blacks?  Just watch an episode or so of the popular cable show “The Wire” set in urban Baltimore and highly touted for its gritty realism to grasp just how reliant upon, and fond the historically oppressed group represented in this series, are of this six-letter word.  President Obama in a recent interview uttered this racial slur eliciting shock and incredulity from white commentators. The black commentators were favorably impressed. Would they have been so if it came from George W. Bush, not that it ever would have, or even the “first Black President,” Bill Clinton?  Of course not. President Obama deployment of the N-word simply reinforces his status as the most illustrious member of an oppressed group and, of course, is justified by his possession of that unique virtue bequeathed by his membership.

  

The elites who govern us, mediate our news events and who shape the curricula of the schools and universities are also in large part the ideologues devoted to the “truth” of DSVO.  They invariably filter through the prism of their grievance-centered ideology events of violence and conflict, such as the two noted above. The interpretation must always be consistent with a DSVO story line. That is, the moral and legal culpability, the motivation and the damage that ensues from any given conflict between an oppressed-group individual (e.g., Black, Muslim) and an oppressor-group individual (e.g., White, Christian) must always reflect the historical picture of domination and exploitation no matter how much history may have changed the status of two groups or what the particular facts of the case might be.  Ideology trumps both historical change and facts. Racism and Imperialism remain the two crosses of guilt permanently reserved upon which to nail those of European-Christian heritage.

When the facts don’t fit the ideologically correct story line, they are either ignored or “adjusted” so that the “oppressor-oppressed” motif remains fully intact.  Thus, in November of 2009 after U.S. Army Major, Nidal Malik Hasan, known and feared for his Islamic zealotry, shot and killed thirteen military personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, the Department of Defense classified the massacre as “workplace violence” and the Army did not charge Hasan with terrorism.  Here then is one of the most egregious examples of reality sacrificed to ideology and the inviolateness of DSVO.  Muslims are a historically oppressed group, victims of Western imperialism. The thirteen people Hasan murdered and the thirty or so he injured, oppressor-group members, cannot be victims of a Muslim (an oppressed group member) acting in anyway remotely as a Muslim, even as a Muslim fanatic.  They must be “just some random folks”, as President Obama likes to express it, in the wrong place at the wrong time.   Reality is not allowed to interfere with ideology.                  

The fact that many more Black Americans are assaulted and murdered by other Black Americans than by White Americans is a fact the President, his Race-Professional associates like Al Sharpton, and the “Black Lives Matter” people seem to have little concern with and no interest in talking about.  Why?  For them it provides no political leverage and contradicts the ideologically scripted version of American race-relations that always requires an oppressor/group-oppressed/group story line.

The fact that cities such as Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta where huge numbers of Black Americans die violent deaths and endure the very worst public school systems have for decades been ruled exclusively by Black Democrats is another fact that seems to arouse no ire or warrant serious scrutiny by the ideologues who incessantly call for a “national conversation on race.” Because this nasty reality conflicts with the required DSVO story line it is ignored. The strenuous efforts of Democrat politicians to perpetuate the DSVO perhaps can help us penetrate what perhaps may be the greatest enigma in contemporary American politics: why do Black Americans so consistently and overwhelming vote for the political party that takes them for granted and does so little for them?

When ideology and reality conflict the ideologues typically do what they always do to camouflage the contradiction.  They lie, abuse their critics, assassinate their characters and when they can silence them.  Democrats now reflexively slander Republicans as racial bigots, an irony in that the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and the KKK (West Virginia Senator, Robert Byrd).   In the 2012 Presidential campaign Vice President Joe Biden told a largely Black audience in Virginia that Republican candidate Mitt Romney was “going to put ya’all back in chains.” In the magnitude of its vituperation, dishonesty and audacity, Joseph Biden puts himself in the company of that master of vile propaganda, another Joe, Joseph Goebbels.  No Democrat stepped up to dispute the Vice President or profess embarrassment for such a contemptible slander.  

In the 2016 Presidential election Americans will witness new lows in the efforts of the ideologues to paint America as a place of the worst racial hostility – irredeemable. Get ready.