The Brett Kimberlin Saga:

Follow this link to my BLOCKBUSTER STORY of how Brett Kimberlin, a convicted terrorist and perjurer, attempted to frame me for a crime, and then got me arrested for blogging when I exposed that misconduct to the world. That sounds like an incredible claim, but I provide primary documents and video evidence proving that he did this. And if you are moved by this story to provide a little help to myself and other victims of Mr. Kimberlin’s intimidation, such as Robert Stacy McCain, you can donate at the PayPal buttons on the right. And I thank everyone who has done so, and will do so.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

David Sirota’s “Mafia” Defense of Islamofacsism

I know, I know, it is over a week old, but the guy is continuing to defend the article on terms that are either 1) clueless or 2) dishonest.

The title of the article is the first sign something is deeply wrong: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”  The subtitle clarifies it and for the first time makes it clear how deeply racist (and religiously bigoted) the article is: “There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats.”

This was of course written on April 16, when we had no proper idea who the person or persons who bombed the Boston Marathon were.  So it was ironic when we had the shootouts and finally we had one living bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who—what do you know?—is a white American!

I mean let’s break it down.  Tsarnaev is actually from the Caucus region, so he is literally a Caucasian and he is also an American, having gained his citizenship last September 11.  Yes, the same September 11 on which Ambassador Stevens was murdered.  The slaps to this country’s face just keep coming.

And yet, this “white American” is also what Sirota would surely call an “islamist terrorist.”  (I prefer the term “islamofascist” so it is clear that we are not talking about all of Islam.)  The point is that revealing Dzhokhar as the terrorist proved in one fell swoop how bigoted Sirota’s title and subtitle were.  There are indeed white American Islamofascist terrorists.  These are not mutually exclusive terms.

But if you dig into the piece, there is an even deeper bigotry going on here:

Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such [white] privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”

Notice first, how he keeps retreating from his untenable headline.  First, it it “white non-Islamic.”  Then he comes up with the term “developing world terrorism.”  Its like as if, after writing the title he suddenly remembered that American Muslims exist.

And his follow up continues his bigotry.  Look at how he treats what O’Reilly said:

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.

You got that?  In David Sirota’s mind, a “domestic” terrorist is a white one.  Indeed he forgets the possibility of a white Muslim domestic terrorist.  While I don’t believe we have seen it yet, there can be the possibility of a person who happens to be a Muslim, who commits terrorism that is spiritually and factually unconnected with the various Islamofascists who are trying to destroy this great country.

To show you how bigoted all of this really is, let’s imagine a hypothetical.  Imagine you are have been challenged to a game of basketball, 3 on 3.  The other side has chosen its players and you have four possible players to choose from.  And these are your choices.  First up we have David Sirota himself.  Here’s his picture:

david-sirota-douche-avatar

And then just to be random, choice number two is my friend Lee Stranahan:



And then your third option is Kobe Bryant:



And your final option is Shaquille O’Neal:



So you get to choose only two of these guys.  Going just on what you know now—and without the benefit of any tryouts—which do you choose for your basketball team?  (And let’s stipulate you want to win this game.)

Duh, you pick Bryant and O’Neal.

By David Sirota’s logic, however, your decision is racist.  I mean look at that!  You picked the two black people when there were two white people you could have chosen from.  Why not one black dude, one white dude!  Oh my God, that is soooo racist.

Except in fact if you didn’t pick O’Neal and Bryant, it would seem kind of racist.  After all, we know that Bryant and O’Neal are professional basketball players and very good ones at that (okay, O'Neal retired in 2011, but you get the idea).  And I don’t know anything about Stranahan or Sirota’s ball playing skills but even putting aside any anti-white stereotypes...



…you would have to figure that just by the law of averages, they probably aren’t in the same league.  Bryant and O'Neal are the obvious choices.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it was his dream that his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  And as ball players, the content of Bryant and O’Neil’s character is that they are impressive athletes.  And Stranahan and Sirota probably aren’t nearly as impressive.  I doubt they would even be offended by my saying that.

So if you criticize the decision to pick O’Neal and Bryanet over Sirota and Stranahan, as racist, you are refusing to see anything about any of these men except their skin color.

And if you think the only difference between these two men...

Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American

...is their skin color or professed religion, you are seeing nothing but their color and professed religion.

The reality is that we are at war with a group, called al Qaeda.  They claim to be Muslims although many good Muslims I know would claim they are not Muslims at all.  I’ll leave that philosophical question to others, and as noted above, I will fall back on the term “Islamofascists.”  But we are at war with al Qaeda and its members at least claim to be Muslims and they are certainly Islamofascists.  And they have state sponsors all over the world.

For instance, we invaded Afghanistan not simply because the guys who attacked us were Islamofascists.  We invaded because the Taliban government made a deal with al Qaeda, saying that they would offer them safe harbor from which they could attack the U.S. if they did some of their dirty work suppressing the Northern Alliance that was seeking to unseat them.  Indeed, the Taliban specifically bartered over 9-11: that is, they said al Qaeda could do 9-11 without losing their safe harbor, if they also murdered the head of the Northern Alliance.  Al Qaeda did exactly that, hiding a gun in a camera and pretending to be a news crew to do it, if memory serves.  That cleared the way for September 11, 2001.

Racism is found when you hire the less qualified white guy over the more qualified black man (unless there is some other explanatory difference, such as the white dude is the son of the company’s president).  Or if you hire 50 secretaries and they are all white, when there were equally qualified non-white candidates.  Or for that matter, if you hire 50 Asian American secretaries when there were equally qualified non-Asian candidates.  That is when it is time to start suspecting racism is involved (indeed, in the latter two cases, it’s hard to imagine it isn’t).  But when you treat two individuals of different races, religions, etc., differently, when there are other independent factors that adequately explains the difference, then it becomes bigotry to cry bigotry, because it proves you see nothing but those traits.

Indeed let’s look at that picture again, and study it in more detail, because as you would see going back to Sirota’s original editorial, that is what they use to headline the piece:

Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American

The one on the left is Tim McVeigh.  He personally set off a single bomb that killed over one hundred and fifty lives including nineteen children under the age of six.

By comparison, the one on the right is Osama bin Laden, who has never personally bombed or otherwise personally killed anyone to the best of my knowledge.  I don’t say that to excuse or minimize what he did, but to point out that there is a difference, that he was not a "footsoldier" like McVeigh.  Instead, Osama bin Laden was the head of an organization dedicated to terrorism in the name of Islamofascism, which carried out multiple terrorist attacks for which he is rightfully blamed.  He is rightfully held responsible for the deaths over well over three thousand Americans in a string of terror attacks including September 11, the attack on the Cole.  And we are still trying to figure out if the Boston Marathon is part of al Qaeda’s reign of terror.

And this picture holds them up as though we should think they are the same except for color and religion.  But only a true bigot thinks they are the same.  Only a true bigot sees only the slightly darker color of bin Laden’s skin, and their professed religion as the only difference for why the terror carried out by one was treated differently than the terror committed by the other.  It’s like pretending that the CEO of Budwiser is the same as some guy Tennessee making his own beer.  You are missing some really big and highly relevant differences.

It all reminds me of years ago when I watched the very first episode of The Sopranos.  In it, the Tony Soprano’s daughter asked her father whether or not he was in the Mafia.  Of course he was, but he denied it.  And futher, he cynically decried the suggestion that he was in the mafia as the product of stereotyping, and declared that the Mafia was a myth.

There can be no doubt that some Italian Americans have been unfairly stereotyped as being in the Mafia or otherwise criminal.  But at the same time, there was a reason why Al Capone was not treated just like some guy using an illegal still in his backyard at around the same time.  There is and was a real organization called the Mafia, and it was in the business of selling alcohol and harming anyone who got in the way of their profits, including rival Mafia organizations.  And the fact that its members were overwhelmingly Italian was owed to their racism, rather than the racism of people who fought to shut them down like Elliot Ness.

Likewise, David Sirota apologizes for evil by claiming we are unfairly stereotyping Islamofascists as being a more serious threat, even when they belong to an actual terrorist organization that does actually present a much more serious threat.  I suppose next he will claim al Qaeda is a myth, too.  It’s Tony Soprano’s defense to the charge of Mafia inclusion and the only question is whether Sirota is being as dishonest as the fictional gangster.  Or is he stupid enough to actually believe it?

Finally, his ostensible reason for wishing the bombers were white (Christian) Americans is so that no one will commit hate crimes against any other group as a result.  Oh, except Muslims aren’t uniquely subjected for hate crimes.  In fact, it is more dangerous to be a Jew in America than a Muslim.  But why let facts get in the way?

But as is often the case when liberals make false cries of racism or other forms of biogtry, it is in fact the groups he is professing to protect that he would be hurt the most if his reasoning was followed—if we ignored the unique threat al Qaeda poses, as is his ultimate goal.  Al Qaeda has killed many Americans, but non-American Muslims have suffered more murders at the hands of al Qaeda than Americans of any faith have.  They are their primary victims.  Likewise, the “unnecessary” wars he laments brought freedom to fifty million people who were primarily Muslims and largely darker skinned than Tim McVeigh.  But the important thing to Sirota isn’t the Iraqis who were no longer being murdered by their own government, but the lives of “American” soldiers, which Sirota has already indicated means “White Christians” in his mind.  It is a strange concept of help that says we should turn our backs on a people crying out for freedom.  And it is a strange sort of tolerance when we do it because of their religion or the color of their skin.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.

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