Posted on 10/27/2002 4:55:59 AM PST by quidnunc
As I wrote in this space last week, "I bet my assistant a hundred bucks that the sniper would turn out to be a Middle Eastern terrorist." I had a similar bet with my wife. I've no desire to profit from the murder of innocents, so I'll be donating my winnings to a worthy cause, like the Pentagon R&D budget. But so far my assistant's taking it better than my spouse. "Technically, our bet was that he'd be an Islamic terrorist," she said. "He's Islamic, and he's terrorizing people. That's good enough for me." My wife, on the other hand, insists it doesn't count unless he's got an official membership card in al-Qaida.
That's not the way these fellows work, which, to give them the barest fig leaf of an excuse, may be why all those legions of TV experts clung to the approved "angry white male loner" cliches right up to the moment of arrest. But there's a difference between a reluctance to leap to conclusions and a bizarre determination to leap away from the facts. There's been something very weird about the networks' insistence on busing in armies of "psychological profilers" whose areas of alleged expertise might as well have been on Planet Zongo for all they had to do with what was going on in Maryland and Virginia. Regardless of whodunit, it was very obvious what he'd dun: The killer didn't kill blondes, he didn't kill fetching young men he picked up in bars, he didn't kill lonely spinsters from the personal ads. He killed Americans — male and female, young and old, black and white.
Now whose profile does that fit?
But the penny drops exceedingly slow. It turned out police were looking for a Muslim convert. A Muslim convert who last year had discarded the name "Williams" and adopted a new identity as "Muhammad." A Muslim convert called Muhammad who in the wake of Sept. 11 had expressed anti-American sentiments. Could even the most expert psychological profiler make sense of such confusing, contradictory clues? Apparently not. Even though the crime and the accused are a pretty good match, the network criminologists profess themselves perplexed by the apparent lack of motive, as if we'll shortly discover that Mr. Muhammad had been denied a promotion at Home Depot or he'd been abused as a child.
Radical Islamism is a highly decentralized operation. There's a fair degree of organized cooperation: for example, National Review's Michael Ledeen reports that the Indonesian group that killed hundreds in Bali used bombs delivered by Hezbollah operatives, who'd been trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. But there's also a lot of rinky-dink freelance terrorism by people who hold no rank or serial number — fellows like the Egyptian immigrant who chose to celebrate the Fourth of July by going to LAX and opening fire. After four months of insisting they've no idea why a radical Muslim male would observe America's national holiday by going Jew-killing, the FBI has cautiously decided to characterize the incident as "possible terrorism."
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/776687/posts
And did not shoot any muslims. Very damning profile, Mr. Steyn. You should be on television.
The twentieth century had HL Mencken and PJ O'Rourke.
Roll them both into one, and we have the best == Mark Steyn.
IT'S THE JIHAD, STUPID
Anyone else besides me find it interesting that the Caprice's co-owner, that Osborne guy, is a guy?
In my experience, the only people with whom folks co-own vehicles are spouses.
Myself, I'm barely literate.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.