Jonathan Zimmerman wrote a bizarre article. It is of the
kind that says these people have reached the end of the run with their current
approach, and were groping in search for a way to create another approach they
hope will serve them in the era they see forming ahead.
The article came under the title: “The double standard on
terrorism justifications” and the subtitle: “Why do we go out of our way to
explain the causes of Islamist terrorism and never do the same for white
right-wing domestic terrorism?” It was published on March 28, 2016 in the New
York Daily News.
As bizarre as this piece of work may sound, we can begin to
understand what the author is trying to accomplish with it. But for this to
happen, we need to recall how the current approach was constructed in the first
place. What follows is a brief history of that.
Year after year, we heard the social engineers who had put
themselves in charge of the culture, repeat the same refrain: it is a relief to
know that the crime which resulted in a number of dead people was a senseless
act of destruction committed by an assailant that had no political motive or
anything like that.
When asked why a potential victim should prefer to die a
motive-free death than die at the hand of someone that's motivated by a belief
of some kind, those in charge answered that a senseless act rewards only the
assailant who gets pleasure committing a crime, whereas the act that's
motivated by ideology, hands a victory to the perpetrator who then grows in
stature and spreads his hateful ideology widely.
And then the New Conservatives rose to prominence in America and
counseled the captains of the ship of state they should adopt their Neocon
ideology and turn the country into the policeman of the world. Foolishly, the
captains said it was good idea, and went ahead implementing it. But the locals
everywhere in the world didn't like the idea whereupon the young among them
became so incensed, they banded into groups and fought against what they saw as
American intruders masquerading as policemen.
In fact, the locals did not consider the foreign intruders
to be policemen doing police work; they considered them invaders that came to
wage war on their way of life and their religion. The clashes between the
American military and the local Arab and Muslim populations escalated, the
destruction became widespread, and all sorts of people, each having a different
agenda, joined the resistance fighting the Americans.
This is the point at which the Neocons borrowed the Israeli
approach, and came up with the idea of calling “terrorists” the locals who
fought against the American intruders. They painted a picture in which American
soldiers such as those responsible for Abu Ghraib as being outstanding young
men and women who were over there fighting a noble war against Arab and Muslim
terrorists that hated America not for what it was doing to their homeland but
because America was free and they hated freedom.
The Neocon propaganda machine came up with another
distinction by which to contrast the two sides in the conflict. They described
the Americans as being so human, they were deeply affected by the war and
became susceptible to going berserk. If and when they committed infractions,
they did so because they were human, after all, which meant they were not
responsible for their actions.
By contrast, the Arabs who saw their homes blown up by bombs
falling from the sky, and saw their families turned into piles of dismembered
body parts … well, these people could never have gone berserk. If and when they
responded to the horror that came to them from abroad, they did so deliberately
and were therefore responsible for their actions. Which is why they were
described as hated characters that must be treated as such.
The bizarre nature of Zimmerman's dissertation begins at
this point: “We view Muslims who kill as products of a toxic environment, which
helps explain their poisonous acts. But we're less likely to account for white
terrorism in that fashion because, well, whites are more privileged … Never
mind that suicides and drug overdoses among middle-aged white Americans have
been climbing”.
In other words, young Muslims are bad because they commit
deliberate poisonous acts in self defense, whereas Middle-aged white Americans
should be excused because they get stoned, and don't know what they are doing.