Profiling - the Dry Bones Blog
As Michael Gurfinkiel tells the story of the recent Jihadist murders in France:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-jihad-in-france/?singlepage=trueAccording to French Interior Minister Claude Guéant, the similarities between the assassination of soldiers in Toulouse and Montauban and the eerie butchery at Ozar Hatora were “compelling.” Moreover, investigators established that the criminal used the same weapon, a World War II 11.43 gun, in all three instances. What remained unclear, according to police, was the number of killers and whether they had received support from a larger criminal network. Motive also remained a mystery.
For 48 hours, many speculated about a neo-Nazi psychopath, some sort of French Tim McVeigh or Anders Breivik. What seemed to encourage this view was the fact that the shooter targeted only non-Caucasian soldiers and Jews and that a neo-Nazi network had been investigated and prosecuted among the Montauban military four years ago.
In fact, the police already knew their suspect: one single killer, a jihadist. The man — Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin — was not even hiding. Confident that police sought a neo-Nazi, he stayed at his unassuming home in Toulouse. Tuesday evening, the Raid huntsmen and dozens of other police personnel circled the building. At 3:00 AM they tried to apprehend him alive. He fired on them, wounding two. By 6:00 PM local time, the police expect him to surrender soon.
Profiling, of course, is the essence of all police and security work. That profiling is, today, definitely not PC is just another sign that political correctness is about destroying the basis for any real society, in favor of some Utopian fantasy, i.e. bloodshed. Ironically, however, in this case PC may have helped the French police get their man. The early consensus that the murderer was some kind of "Nazi", the all-purpose, or only allowable, profile of evil for an age that otherwise refuses to profile, may have led Mohammed Merah to think he was not being followed, so he could let his guard down.
Does murderer Merah's mind now race through the possibility that if only the liberal elite in the media and political class had been more forthcoming that the more likely profile for the killer in this case was some kind of Islamist who wouldn't, as most of his kind don't, have qualms about killing "Muslims" (i.e. apostates, because French soldiers, in the Jihadist's eyes), as well as Jews, he might have gotten away with more murder? One could argue the point about the most likely profile in various ways, but the basic point is that Jihadist murder and criminality in today's world outnumbers "neo-Nazi" murder somewhat exponentially. Instead, the media and the French political class wished to point a finger at "neo-Nazis" and continued in their normal condescending refusal to consider seriously the ethical claims of Islam, i.e. to see Muslims as moral agents who have to come to terms with holy texts and daily rituals that obsessively divide the world into true Believers (who are also ideally warriors) and infidels. As Jonathan Narvey asks, Why Not Blame Islam? If we are to blame murderers and their motivations, as a general principle, the only alternative is to blame the Jews or white supremacists (if that isn't redundant in the thinking of much of today's left) for somehow setting the stage for Mohammed Merah's emotional outburst. No one can seriously think these killings are just the sign of one uniquely-corrupted mental universe. But many will no doubt say as much.
As Barry Rubin puts it:
What is needed is not more hypocrisy or professions of innocence — or expensive conferences where long speeches are made about the evils of antisemitism by those who do nothing but get free plane tickets and nice hotel rooms — but a real change in the behavior of the mass media that pours out lies, the academics who slander and distort, and the governments that cannot even stand with a country and people beset by terrorism and once again by the world’s oldest hatred.
Oh, and one more thing is needed: the admission that the greatest threat of hatred, “racism,” dehumanization of the “other,” and threat of persecution today — as the statistics for Europe and North America show — is not “Islamophobia” but antisemitism.
And none of those things are going to happen because the liars, haters, apologists, and enablers will not acknowledge their own behavior while those who are supposed to supervise them will not act. Hating and lying about Israel and the Jewish people is too useful politically and too entwined with the version of left-wing ideology, not to mention Islamism and the dominant interpretation of Islam, currently so powerful in the world.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Europe is no longer a safe place for Jews to live. Yet it is accurate to say that it is becoming an unsafe place for Jews to live, and certainly for those who wish to express mainstream Jewish views and to practice their religion openly. Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America.
Thus, Jewish children are deliberately murdered by a terrorist in the midst of France. In response come get the formal statements and the crocodile tears. Yet at the exact same time as the bullets are entering the children’s bodies, as the victims fall to the ground, as the ambulance sirens sound, the incitement and the lies and the slanders continue, laying the groundwork for more hatred and more murder.
