Saturday, January 10, 2015

How bigotry distorts our thinking

Nasir Khan, January 10, 2015

If the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (for more on Breivik, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik) were a Muslim, then all Muslims would have been blamed for his crime and the lives of Muslim population of Norway made a living hell. (I live in Norway and I had seen how the Muslim people of Norway, including myself as a humanist and secularist [!], were blamed and treated in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States of America. It was as if Muslims from Norway had attacked the Twin Towers in New York and they suddenly had to face the hatred, revulsion and hostility of so many native Norwegians against them.) 

But Breivik was a white Norwegian, a white supremacist, an anti-Muslim ‘Knights Templar’ and a cold-blooded killer. Therefore no one ascribed his crime to the Norwegian people or to Christianity. That’s how we categorise ‘our terrorists’ and ‘their terrorists’ so differently. Such is the nature of bigotry that rules the passions of many people who have traditional ethno-religious blinkers.

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Muslim shooter = entire religion guilty
Black shooter = entire race guilty
White shooter = mentally troubled lone wolf
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Anders Behring Breivik (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈɑnːəʂ ˈbeːrɪŋ ˈbrɛiviːk];[6] born 13 February 1979) is the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks. On 22 July 2011, he bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people. He then killed 69 more people, mostly teenagers, in a mass shooting at…
en.wikipedia.org

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