Wearing Out the Panic Button

You can find prophecy in the most unlikely places, if you know where to look. For example, I found the following link and headline posted on Fark.com yesterday:

KSL.com: Wackjob Utah mall shooter was a Muslim. EVERYONE PANIC

This morning, listening to KSL radio here in Salt Lake City, I heard that certain radio hosts and other political commentators—almost all of them people I would consider right-wing wackjobs themselves—are castigating KSL and other news media outlets for not making a bigger deal of the fact that 18-year-old Sulejmen Talovic was, indeed, a Bosnian-born Muslim.

This makes me crazy. Slow down, people, and take a deep breath. It's not that big a deal. This was NOT an act of Islamic terrorism.

How do I know that? It's pretty simple, really. When Islamic fundamentalists decide to murder someone in the name of Allah, they can't get in line fast enough to take credit for it. And that hasn't happened.

The fact is that no person kills (or offers to die) in the name of their god without making damned sure that everyone knows what that name is. If Talovic's killing spree was in fact motivated by religion, he would have been shouting "DEATH TO THE INFIDELS!" at the top of his lungs as he made his way down the halls of Trolley Square. He would have left a suicide note. He would have had something on him to tell the surviving unbelievers that he'd just earned his way into paradise by killing half a dozen or so of them. He would have rejoiced in his glorious martyrdom. And that didn't happen.

We may never know why Talovic did the unspeakable things that he did. But it seems pretty clear to me that Islam wasn't the driving force behind it.

I'll admit, it's possible that I'm wrong about this. And if that ends up being the case, I will gladly post a retraction right here in the biggest, boldest font I can find. But before that happens, I'll need to see proof. Which brings me back to my original gripe: that certain people are critical of news media outlets for not making a bigger deal of the fact that the shooter was Muslim.

Let me say it again: the fact that he was Muslim isn't news, because it had NOTHING TO DO with his actions—any more than the fact that he was Caucasian or male or eighteen or a high school dropout seems to have had. The real news here is the knee-jerk reaction from the far Right on this one.

This is profiling at its very worst. It's scapegoatism and it's jumping to conclusions and it's playing the religion card from the bottom of the deck. It's a scare tactic, and it's downright irresponsible.

And you know what the worst part is? It's that there are millions of Americans who are so stupid, so scared, and/or so tied to a political agenda that they're going to fall for it, hook, line, and sinker, just because of who said it.

I thought we knew better than this.