Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

The enemy within

Last week's horrific shooting in a Holocaust Museum in Washington DC proved - if we needed proof - that people who might terrorise and slaughter in the United States are very often folk with white supremacist leanings.

Rumbold at Pickled Politics points out that the shooting has led to attempts to ascribe one far-right racist wingnut's actions to Muslims. Yes, you read right, Muslims. Apparently a racist would commit a crime against a Jewish target - though let's not forget (and so many people have) that the murdered security guard was black - because of Muslims somehow. You don't believe that anyone would be that thick? Think again.

Fact is, some people are racist. Give a racist a gun and you've got problems. Give an extremist of any kind - yes, including extremist Muslims - a gun and you've got trouble. But please, this wasn't a crime committed because of the left, or because of multiculturalism, or because of Muslims, or because of antisemitism - it was a crime committed through hatred, pure and simple. Not just hatred of Jews, but hatred of black people too, which is why the security guard was murdered. And this is one guy, acting alone, and the motives for the crime seem fairly self-evident. Sure, he may have believed in NWO and 'truther' wingnuttery but that doesn't make him a leftie; it merely was another way of reinforcing his racism, as it is for a lot of people, I'm afraid.

Now comes news of another crime - a gang has been arrested after the murder of an immigrant following a shooting at his home in Arizona. Our friends at the Daily Mail have covered this story in a rather interesting way:

A female vigilante from an anti-illegal immigration group led a raid on a house where a man and his nine-year-old daughter were shot dead, it emerged today.

All this 'female' business is quite weird. Is that the most interesting bit of the story? Not that a child has been murdered, but because there was a woman involved?

What I'm interested in is the word 'vigilante' because this crime appears not to have been committed on the basis of killing a drug dealer, but rather stealing his money and killing all the witnesses:

He said: 'The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs.

So that's not vigilantism, that's pure and simple cold-blooded crime, if true. So this woman may or may not have had links to a so-called vigilante group, but it emerges she was kicked out at some stage anyway and went to plough her own furrow. Now she's accused of this crime, is it anti-immigration motivation? Or is it just greed? Let's not jump to conclusions, or it would make us just as bad as those who were so quick to ascribe all sorts of incorrect motivations to the Holocaust Museum shooter.

It might be worth monitoring the comments at the bottom of that Mail story to see what the Brains Trust come up with, though.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related posts:

1. Is my enemy’s enemy always my friend?