Under the extremely tasteful headline No Head, No Headlines (yuk, yuk), over at his Daily Terror blog, Tim Blair provides a link to a "domestic event of little consequence".
Click on it and there's Mark Steyn wanting full gory press and media coverage of a network exec because his business went bad and he hacked off the head of his partner in Buffalo, New York. The twist is that the exec was running a Muslim news service designed to show there's a gentle side to Islam.
Of course Steyn uses it as a springboard to launch into a tirade about hijabs, burqas, honor killings and genital mutilations, forced cousin marriages and the disproportionate number of Muslim wives in European battered women's shelters.
Funnily enough there was an increase in 2008 in murders in New York by 4%, with 516 people killed. Not a bad year, not as good as the previous year, but better than back in the nineties.
2% of New Yorkers attend mosques. Wow, that means those Islamic bastards must be real killing machines.
Come on Steyn, show us your fierce hatred and loathing. There's no doubt the increase in murders in New York is entirely due to the presence of Islamics in America. Better if Islamics were wiped off the face of the earth? Sure.
Over on the other side, there's the story of Jim David Adkisson, who killed two and wounded six with a sawed-off shotgun, of the more than 200 attending a children's musical at a Unitarian Church. I guess a cut down weapon is so much more sophisticated and American than wielding whatever the New York head chop man wielded.
Adkisson released a manifesto explaining how he was determined to wipe out democrats and liberals, calling them a pest like termites. He particularly likes Bernard Goldberg's book naming 100 liberal democrat traitors who deserved the worst, and he's a big fan of Bill Orally. Why he chose a Christian church to start his campaign, one he once attended, and which he claimed was full of secularists, will remain a looney tunes mystery.
What's a bigger looney tunes mystery is how the likes of Tim Blair, who reprints and links to Steyn with a religious fervor, somehow thinks that a couple of killings, Muslim or Christian, are litmus paper indications of behavior on a larger level, and a damning indictment of religions or societies.
I suppose doing a rigorous examination of the causes of homicides in New York city during 2008 would involve too much actual research, too much tedious data. Too little opportunity to exercise prejudice, berate liberals, hate Muslims and loathe the media.
String together all the killings managed by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and so on, and it's a fair bet they'd be a match for the doings of secularists like Mao and the ancient Romans. Oh but wait, Mao made a religion of himself, and the Romans borrowed all their religious ideas from the Greeks, until the Christians took over, and the whole thing collapsed under the weight of the barbarians. Surely you can't be thinking that when someone wants to kill someone else, any excuse will do?
Do these learned polemicists think the same about weather events? If that's the case, then yes Islamics and Christians are much more likely to kill themselves and others than dedicated secular humanists, who never kill because they're goody two shoes (except, actually non believers manage to murder people. I know, I know, Ripley's believe it or not and all that, but yes it's actually true).
I guess people kill people because they're insanely religious - or simply insane.
But if you follow the logic closely enough, it's clear cut. An Islamic kills his wife means all Islamics are pretty well likely to kill their wives at one time or another. It's in their nature, a nature rarely reported in the press. Similarly, a one off event natural event in nature - say a bushfire or a hurricane - must actually reflect a trend towards global warming. You can't have specific heat without a lot of general fire, or an ill wind blowing nobody any good.
You know, in exactly the same way a Muslim killing his wife is an indication that Islamics generally approve of beheadings as a way of sorting marital conflict, business problems and divorce proceedings.
And why doesn't the media report all this? Because it's a liberal plot and people are afraid of Islamics. Oh yes, and nothing to do with the thought that it might be a grubby, ugly little killing in a town where the New York Post has a little trouble staying up to date with the killing fields. The same way as a loon going mad in a church and killing old folk isn't necessarily part of a cultural or a religious war, and after a little flurry of excitement soon finds itself relegated to fish and chip wrappings.
You know it's strange, I googled Blair and Steyn, expecting to find a full blown, horrific detailing by them of Adkisson, his slayings and his bizarre anti-liberal state of mind, but I guess he didn't cut it. If he wants real recognition in right wing blogs, he should convert to Islam.
Ah well, so now the left and the right are exchanging murders as polemical points. Where exactly do Son of Sam or the Boston Strangler or Charles Whitman or John Wayne Gacy or Ed Gein or Ted Bundy stand in this epic ideological war? Why did Seven fail to mention Islam as a potent part of the derangement of serial killers?
I often wonder at what point hysteria and paranoia descends into irrational madness. And then I read the comments in Tim Blair's blog, and I know.
There's something profoundly disturbing about fundamentalist conservatism. It's as bad as fundie leftie thinking, which is as bad as fundie Islamic thinking, which is as bad as fundie Christian thinking. I think Frankie Goes to Hollywood got it right:
When two tribes to to war
A point is all you can score.
In other important news, Tim Blair reports that an Australian has qualified for the Daytona 500 and petrol head that he is, he'll be live blogging all the way to the finish, or until the Aussie stops.
Blair notes that only one cheese eating surrender monkey has ever driven in the 500, but I'm more worried one that someday one of those late breaking uppity Islamic drivers might manage to take the wheel in the Daytona.
An Islamic in the race? Be worse than a Jew or a woman. Say it will never happen Tim, anything but that. He might even win by wielding his scimitar on his rivals. You know how Islamics like to settle things on the sporting field with a good decapitation, between assorted bashings of their women folk. Not that you, me or Mark Steyn are in any way into stereotypes.
Bet Blair drinks shit beer like Coors while he watches the race. Or even worse Budweiser ... gee doesn't name calling make your day, make you feel you possess grand insights? Now must watch those toy cars go around and around and around and around and around in circles all day ... deep philosophical and theological insights to be gained ... around and around and ...
Dorothy is snoring
Bumped her head
And she went to bed
And she couldn't up in the morning.
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