This page was last updated on December 8, 2015.
DECONSTRUCTING WHAT SEEMS OBVIOUS; Carl Davidson; Facebook; December 5, 2015.
You can learn more about BCR’s leftster management here. “Leftster” is the combination of leftist and gangster, inspired by the left-originated “bankster.”
Carl Davidson (KD): “DECONSTRUCTING WHAT SEEMS OBVIOUS...in order to see how ‘racialized’ we are.”
The post links to “Roof, Dear and Tashfeen Malik: ‘Self-Radicalized,’ ‘Terrorism,’ ‘Lone Wolf’ and Double Standards” written by John Ricardo Cole, aka Juan Cole, a self-described “public intellectual.” When someone refers to himself as “a public intellectual,” that tells you most of what you need to know about Mr. Cole and anyone else who calls himself “a public intellectual.”
I found nothing to indicate it’s more than coincidence the female alleged killer (Tashfeen Malik) and Mr. Cole’s wife (Shahin Malik, married in Lahore, Pakistan to Mr. Cole in 1982) share the same maiden surname (Malik) and both are/were citizens of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Islam is the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and is about 96% Muslim.
In the database world, using a single field to contain multiple pieces of data is called overloading. For example, you concatenate month, day, and year into a date field instead of using separate fields for each component. Overloading is exactly what’s been done with the term “terrorism.” During his speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then-Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan said:
“Our enemy is not ‘terrorism’ because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not ‘terror’ because terror is a state of mind and as Americans we refuse to live in fear. Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenant [sic] of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.”
Though Mr. Brennan was correct, he took a lot of crap. One of our current language problems is too many of us overload the term terrorism to mean “Islamist terrorism.” Why? Too many lefty agitators and politicians want us to believe using the term “Islamist terrorism” will offend Muslims. As I wrote in another piece, “I just did a quick review of a handful of Middle and Far East news websites. Though it may not have been a statistically-correct sample size, it appears the Middle and Far East refers to ISIS and its ilk as Islamists, and they generally don’t use the ‘radical’ modifier to soften it.” This overloading of terrorism’s definition results in stuff like the subject piece.
Mr. Cole wrote, “Since Malik and her husband just shot up a meal for employees at a center for taking care of challenged folks, rather than choosing some more significant target with actual political implications, can their action be seen at the moment as primarily as terroristic?” Is Mr. Cole serious? Which would generate more terror, attacks on obvious targets or attacks on Christmas parties, bingo games, and so on all over the country, not just in population centers?
As a good lefty, Mr. Cole doesn’t worry about the facts. For example, Mr. Cole wrote the alleged killers “shot up a meal for employees at a center for taking care of challenged folks.” Not true. While the Inland Regional Center (IRC) is in the same group of buildings, the targets were not IRC employees. The targets were county employees in an adjacent building attending “admittedly dreary training sessions for workers from the San Bernardino Health Department — and an early holiday celebration.”
Mr. Cole wrote Tashfeen Malik became a radical “through [her] own reading and research rather than from having obvious organizational links” but doesn’t say how he knows. There’s a report “A $28,500 deposit was made to Syed Farook’s bank account from WebBank.com on or about Nov.18, some two weeks before he and his wife Tashfeen Malik carried out the San Bernardino massacre, a source close to the investigation told Fox News Monday.” A later report claims Mr. Farook “recently took out a $28,500 loan from an online lender” identified as Prosper, “a San Francisco-based online lender.”
Another piece on Mr. Cole’s “informed [but nevertheless ignorant] Comment” blog is “Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others.” Number Four is “The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.” Take a gander at “Family of Syed Farook in disbelief over his involvement in terror attack.” Oops.
Number Seven is “White terrorists are never called ‘white.’ But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.” It wasn’t a terrorism case, but do you remember George Zimmerman? As I noted in a previous critique, “Mr. Zimmerman presented lefties with a dilemma because he’s mixed race. Mr. Zimmerman’s father is white, his mother is a Peruvian immigrant, and his great-grandfather was black-skinned. Further, Mr. Zimmerman describes himself as Hispanic on his driver’s license and voter registration card.” The solution for the dilemma? Mr. Zimmerman became a “white Hispanic.” As long as lefties could use “white” as a modifier, “Hispanic” was irrelevant.
Here are a couple differences Mr. Cole forgot. Unless a suspect is white, his skin color is omitted until he’s captured. Most of us knew the guy who allegedly shot the Pittsburgh cabbie was not white because none of the pre-arrest stories mentioned skin color. After a person is in custody, I don’t care about his skin color unless it’s relevant to the case. While the guy’s on the loose, however, omitting the skin color from a description seems counterproductive.
The same is true for suspects with “non-white” names. Remember the Aurora, CO, killer? Though he admittedly didn’t know if it was the same guy, ABC’s Brian Ross not only told everyone the suspect’s name, he also suggested the shooter was a tea party member. Mr. Ross was wrong and ABC News eventually apologized. In the San Bernardino case, we knew the suspects didn’t have “western” names because some in the news media leaked they knew the names but didn’t identify them because someone thought releasing the names might cause trouble.
Finally, in the very early reporting when they really had no info, did you know various “news” outlets tried to link the massacre to a Planned Parenthood facility about a mile away?
In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity. <g>
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