US Responsible for Atrocity

The Deadly Long Bow

It's clear.  There is no doubt about it.  At least if you are equipped with one of the very long bows that the useful idiots in the media all seem to possess.  The United States is responsible--to some degree--for Breivik's murderous rampage in Norway.  It is high time that the US scrapped its founding documents. 

OK, so the very long extended bow of the media did not quite stretch this far--but it needs to, to maintain a shred of credibility.  Over the weekend, the logic of the media in the US ran like this:


Murderer Breivik is Islamophobic.  Numerous websites in the US are Islamophobic.  Breivik quotes from those websites.  Therefore, those websites are implicated in his actions and share his guilt.  Such illogic was proudly on display in the New York Times. 

Very long bows have an unfortunate tendency to prove too much--leaving an argument exposed as fallacious at best, infantile at worst.  And so it has transpired.  It turns out that Breivik, in his magnum opus of a Manifesto (mis)quotes from a wide range of sources.  Included are: "Churchill, Gandhi, Orwell, Jefferson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, not to mention the U.S. Declaration of Independence," as Mark Steyn so rudely points out. 

To employ the glittering logic of the New York Times, one must take a dim view, not only of these equally culpable historical mentors of the Norwegian murderer, but of all and any who likewise cite these sources.  They, too, must be guilty of Islamophobic behaviour.  Who would have thought it?  The US Declaration of Independence is an incipiently Islamophobic document, implicated in the guilt and evil actions of a Norwegian mass murderer.  The Founding Fathers should have shown more restraint, employing their rhetoric with greater sensitivity and care.  Since they didn't, we need to act more prudently, and withdraw the Declaration, banishing its publication and use.  Better to be safe than skewered by a long bow. 

But, as Steyn goes on to argue, one has to be slightly suspicious over the anti-islamic ramblings of Breivik.  His actions bear no resemblance to his self-proclaimed ideology.  There is a cacophonous disconnect. 

This man Breivik may think he’s making history and bestriding the geopolitical currents and the clash of civilizations, but in the end he went and shot up his neighbors. Why let his self-aggrandizing bury the reality?

He called for jihad against Islam, and killed non-islamic teenagers, his neighbours.  Go figure.  It would appear that the New York Times is not the only one with a very long bow.   By the standards of both the Times and Breivik, maybe we should draw our own long bow and commence arguing that the Times and Breivik are kissing cousins, cut from the same illogical cloth.