Remote Control Terrorism – The “Professional” Anti-Muslim Pundits
Every gas station in town had long lines that stretched down the street as people scurried to fill their tanks. Grocery stores had their shelves cleared of bottled water, flashlights, and canned goods. Gun and ammunition sales skyrocketed as a heavy fog of uncertainty, fear, and anger gripped the land. “Who were these people? Would they strike again? Are there terrorists living next door?” This was the general social climate in the weeks and months following that fateful eleventh day in September, 2011. At the time, and under such stress, all of this was quite natural and appropriate in light of the shocking and devastating travesty.
Most Americans had little understanding of Islam prior to 9-11, and the desire to know and understand the nature of our enemy opened the door for a new career opportunity – the professional anti-Muslim pundits. Unfortunately, many of these “professionals” knew little more than the average person, and were in the learning process themselves. Often times the information that was being reported reflected their lack of true understanding, personal religious bias, and political agenda.
Several of these people became nationally known, such as Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and most recently Pamela Geller. To one degree or another, these professional anti-Muslim pundits have attempted to maintain the crisis mode that permeated America, and the world, in the weeks and months after the terror attacks in New York, Washington, and in the fields of Pennsylvania. According to these “professionals,” no Muslim could ever be trusted, for all Muslims have malicious intent, with Sharia law poised to overtake an unsuspecting and sleepy nation.
This constant cadence of paranoia has been broadcast both by mainstream media outlets, such as FOX news, as well as independent political bloggers such as Spencer and Geller here in America, and their counterparts on the other side of the pond, The Gates of Vienna and Lionheart. Programs such as the Glenn Beck show pander exclusively to their right-wing base, rather than attempting to win people over to the “conservative” side of the political aisle (Beck compared the Norwegian campers to ‘the Hitler youth’). Obviously, shows like Beck’s are designed specifically to rile emotions, increase fear, and incite anger in their audience. That’s what all the weeping, wailing, ranting, and boiling frogs were all about – this is what sells well to their conspiracy theory, end-times Theo-con base.
There is a heavy price to pay however for keeping the political temperature raging at the boiling point for extended periods of time. The continued heat is bound to set off the less than emotionally stable among their audience. Bloggers such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, and yours truly here at StreetWisePundit, have been on the front line in continually calling out the dangers in propagating such ludicrous and irresponsible paranoid rhetoric – like screaming fire in a crowded theater, free speech has its price.
Flash forward to July 22, 2011: breaking news of a car bomb outside the Norwegian government offices flashes across computer monitors and TV screens around the world. The “professionals” are out in front of the breaking story with great anticipation that they will be shown to have been right all along – Islam is evil, evil, evil.
But wait, what’s this? As things began to unfold throughout the day, we all learned that rather than this being an attack by international Islamic terrorists; low and behold it turned out that the evildoer was a right-wing anti-Muslim Christian white guy. Not only that, but a right-wing anti-Muslim Christian white guy who was no lone wolf that mysteriously “came out of nowhere,” as FOX news reported, but rather a frequent visitor, admirer, and commenter on many of the very same extremist blogs who had been propagating their overreaching theory for years.
This disrupted the standard narrative, and the right-wing theoreticians began circling their wagons, as both Pam Geller and Robert Spencer (both of whom were heavily cited in the killer’s manifesto) formulated their denial responses. Robert Spencer, in a radio interview this week explained that to connect him with influencing the Norway bomber is like holding Paul McCartney responsible for the Charles Manson murders. Pam Geller, who also gave a radio interview this week, used the same exact analogy as Spencer, but added that the manifesto also included citations from people such as John Locke, and that to insinuate that she had any influence on the bomber, made her the victim of a left-wing media conspiracy.
You may remember that Charles Manson interpreted the song Helter Skelter, that appeared on the famous Beatles album know as the “White Album,” as a call to action on the impending race war.
Using the above analogy is problematic; for neither the Beatles, nor John Locke, made their living as professional anti-Muslim crusaders. What is oddly similar, however, is that Charles Manson never actually killed anyone himself. He only “suggested” to others, after a long period of mind manipulation, that they should take up “the cause” by killing Sharon Tate and making it look as if African Americans were the culprits. This, in Charlie’s mind, would help bring about the much needed race war.
Charles Manson used emotional and psychological remote control by capitalizing on the instability of his young “family” members to carry out his dirty deeds. In a remotely similar way, Spencer and Geller stir the boiling pot with emotional rhetoric, profound distortions, and outright propaganda, which feed into the unstable minds of their readers. Then, once someone responds to their incitement, they have the cover of plausible deniability, and stand back and say, “What? Me? I didn’t do anything. Who could have known someone would have interpreted my message in such a distorted manner?”
These professional anti-Muslim pundits will continue to influence potential bad apples, like the Norway bomber, by providing a bad barrel in which these apples can become fully rotten.