I looked through the press yesterday and today and was able to find one shooting in the western world that was not caused by Muslims, and it was caused by American black males in Florida.
Nothing to do with Islam – Muslims attack Norman church service and slit the throat of the priest.
Nothing to do with Islam – Muslim kills nine in German department store
Nothing to do with Islam – Syrian asylum seeker blows himself up in Germany after pledging allegiance to ISIL leader.
Leonid Bershidsky, writing in the National Post, now a branch of the New York Times Bloomberg News, says:
A casual racist would assume any multiple murder committed by someone with a Muslim name would be an act of Islamist terrorism, but Somboly’s case was different. Chubby, awkward, bullied at school, he would often threaten to kill his classmates. The threat was more serious than the classmates believed: Somboly was studying a German edition of Peter Langman’s “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters,” a book written using American material. On Friday, as he fired on random people at and around a Munich shopping center, he acted in full accordance with a passage in the book.
Notice the drive-by shooting embedded in Bershidsky’s comment – “a casual racist”. Islam is not a race, Mr. Bershidsky. It is a religious/social/political totalitarianism. I could be a Muslim, Bershidsky could be a Muslim, you dear reader could be a Muslim, and we could each belong to a different race. To oppose Islam is to oppose an ideology, an ideal of society (however dismal), and an idea of a demented God that governs every molecule of the universe directly by His will.
Passing over the thought-stopping “casual racist” claim, it might be possible to argue that when Muslims have a personal crisis these days, of any kind, they are empowered and authorized by their religion, by their families, and by their societies, to slaughter non-Muslims. There is a very deep sickness in Islam.
None of this bothers Bershidsky:
The recent attacks are grouped together because of the origin and religion of the perpetrators. They have little in common, however, and they do not represent a spike in crime by the most numerous group of immigrants to arrive in Germany lately. The media frenzy will eventually quiet down if there are no major incidents and the government does a good job explaining its strategy to combat terrorism as well as be vigilant against the random acts of madness that Germany has witnessed recently. Germans seem willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt; polls suggest that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition government would still have a majority in parliament if elections took place now, not in 2017 as scheduled.
When I spoke of the imperturbable smugness yesterday, I did not realize that I would find it so neatly expressed so soon. All is well, nothing is statistically abnormal, Muslims are committing crimes proportionate to their population in Germany, move on, nothing to see here. Why are the centres of European cities turning into rape zones against white women? Why is the peace and security of societies declining everywhere that Muslim immigration is significant?
These are forbidden questions. To ask them is to be “casually racist”. Leonid Bershidsky knows better than to write such drivel. I will give him one free pass, for he is an otherwise astute observer.