Wednesday, Apr 17, 2013 4:56 PM UTC
I still hope the bomber is a white American
The identity of the person behind the Boston bombings will strongly affect our response -- even O'Reilly agrees!
Topics: Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Marathon explosion, boston marathon bombing suspect, 9/11, Terrorism, patriot act, Life News, Politics News
I’m not the kind of person who hopes to ever find conservative Fox News host Bill O’Reilly agreeing with me. But with my Salon piece on the Boston bomber now on the front page of Drudge, I think it is worth pointing out that last night O’Reilly effectively agreed with my piece by confirming the very simple self-evident truth that the Boston bomber’s demographic profile will, indeed, dictate how America responds to the atrocity.
O’Reilly starts out by stating something every American almost certainly agrees with: We should all be first and foremost hoping that the perpetrator — whoever he or she is — is apprehended as quickly as possible. Then he moves into an analysis of the future reaction. As O’Reilly put it, “If this is an international terror attack, the repercussions will be severe,” but, he added, “if it’s home-grown” that will just “be another stain on American history.”
In stating such an obvious truth, O’Reilly has (inadvertently) spotlighted the double standard that drives so much of our public policymaking and our cultural attitudes toward national security.
As he said, if the bomber ends up being a foreigner there will be a “severe” response — and if history is any guide, that means potentially a full-scale mobilization of military assets, passage of draconian civil liberties legislation, police surveillance of entire demographic groups and even perhaps a scuttling of the pending immigration bill. By contrast, if the bomber is one of the many “home-grown” — read: white domestic terrorist — attacks we’ve seen in recent years, it will merely be chalked up as “another stain on American history,” but will not necessarily prompt any kind of societal mobilization against any one particular group.
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