EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Victimization and Misinformation

I know there are many moderate, fair, open-minded Muslims (including several of my all-time favourite students). This is not directed to or at them. The quotation below is from "In their own words : how [some] Canadian Muslims are responding to the London bombings". Please, even if you don't follow the link(s) back to the original(s), take the time to read these two paragraphs:

Conclusion

From the quoted statements by Canadian Islamic organizations transpires non factual victimology. The announced wave of anti-Muslim violence in the aftermath of 9-11 and other Islamist terrorist attacks has failed to materialize. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, Canadian Jews remain the population group most likely to be targeted by hate crimes, antisemitic crimes accounting for 25% of reported hate crimes in 2001 and 2002. Anti-black crimes rank in second place at 17%, while anti-Muslim crimes hover around 10% along with homophobic crimes. Anti-Muslim backlash this is not. Yet Canadian Islamic organizations go to great lengths in order to instill a climate of fear and suspicion towards Canadian authorities and society at large among Muslims by publishing, for example, thoroughly unscientific reports on alleged abuse by RCMP officers’ interrogations of Muslims who might have valuable information on terror suspects or terror suspects themselves. The climate of fear some Islamic organizations create among Muslims serves the purpose of legitimizing their role as self-proclaimed representatives of the Muslim community, while alienating Muslims from society at large, thus opening the door to inwardness and possibly a radicalization of the minds.

The disinformation carried by Canadian Islamic and Arab websites goes a step further with the use of Quid bono (who stands to gain), a poor analytical tool for understanding a complex world. The Quid bono mentality exemplified here is typical of societies where information is state-controlled and thus distrusted. This, however, not being the case in a country such as Canada or Britain, one can only conclude that the quoted writers and their publishers are willfully spreading lies about "staged" terrorist attacks allegedly conceived in order to justify the "Muslim holocaust in the making" as one writer put it. Paradoxically, while denying Islamic involvement in the London bombings, some of these writers offer a rationale for it. This attitude bears resemblance to the contradictory responses to 9-11 in the Middle East, where people jumped for joy at the news of the attacks, while claiming no Muslim was sophisticated enough to carry out such an attack. Hence, the Quid bono rationalization which cast blame on Israel and the USA for perpetrating the 9-11 attacks in order to allegedly justify military action against Muslim countries. Such literature, written in part by radical Islamists themselves, serves to alienate and radicalize its readers by leading them to believe a huge, diabolical conspiracy is being implemented to wipe them off the face of the earth, which, no doubt, is what partially motivated the four Britain-born Muslims to turn against their fellow countrymen on July 7 2005.

The quotations and citations from the article leading up to this quotation are very disturbing.

[I would like to thank whoever sent me this link, but I've lost the original message. It might have been MA]
 
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