{"id":29736,"date":"2015-01-20T03:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T08:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29736"},"modified":"2015-01-18T11:40:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-18T16:40:37","slug":"victimology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/20\/victimology\/","title":{"rendered":"Victimology"},"content":{"rendered":"

In last week’s Goldberg File<\/em>, Jonah Goldberg<\/a> explained why the media as a whole are much more concerned about an anti-Muslim backlash than they are about any terror attack:<\/p>\n

Dear Reader (including my Twitter followers who are just scanning this for the hidden glottal stops),<\/p>\n

So Charlie Hebdo<\/em> is selling like hot cakes, giving new meaning to the Profit Mohammed. And, just as I suspected, the images are pissing off lots of Muslims who aren\u2019t terrorists. And, again just as I suspected, the New York Times et al<\/em>. can\u2019t help but make that the real story. No doubt millions of people hashtagging \u201cJe Suis Charlie\u201d were sincere \u2014 or thought they were \u2014 but the real reason that slogan spread into nearly every ideological quarter is that sympathizing, empathizing, and leeching off the moral status of victims is the only thing that unites Western societies these days. Celebrating winners is divisive. How long did it take for the Sharptonians to leap on the Oscar nominations?<\/p>\n

What is remarkable is how short the half-life of solidarity for Charlie Hebdo<\/em> was. The moment it dawned on people that there must be consequences to the Hebdo<\/em> attack, not just group hugs and hashtags, the divisions, gripes, and handwring re-emerged.<\/p>\n

Simply put, victimology is the language and currency of our politics. Fighting for victims is a calling and minting new victims and grievances is a trillion-dollar industry. Heroism, fidelity, courage, duty, temperance: Their stock value may be volatile but the long-term trends have been bad for a while. But guilt and resentment are the gold and silver of our realm, a perfect hedge against the civilizational recession.<\/p>\n

And so before the street-sweepers even put a dent in the discarded \u201cJe Suis Charlie\u201d signs, the media was already on the prowl for signs of Western overreaction. The New York Times<\/em> editors warned<\/a> that \u201cperhaps the greatest danger in the wake of the attacks\u201d was a backlash against Muslim immigrants.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, I don\u2019t want an anti-Muslim backlash, but in all of this talk of Islamophobia, it seems the most acute and relevant phobia is the fear our elites have of their own people. The rabble can\u2019t be trusted to keep things in perspective. While the story was still unfolding in Paris, Steven Erlanger, the New York Times<\/em>\u2019s London bureau chief, was invited on Shep Smith\u2019s show for a \u201cphoner.\u201d Erlanger couldn\u2019t resist starting the interview<\/a> by warning Fox about how \u201ccareful\u201d it needs to be covering the story. The Eloi must be ever vigilant not to arouse the Morlocks, don\u2019t you know. It was this sentiment that no doubt motivated the Times<\/em> to edit its own reporting on the attack, removing any reference to the fact that one of the Charlie Hebdo<\/em> attackers spared a woman\u2019s life \u2014 and advised her she needed to convert to Islam<\/em><\/a>. You can almost hear the editors saying, \u201cLook, if we leave that in, the little people might get the impression this had something to do with Islam. We know it does, but we can handle that truth. The flyover people might miss the nuances.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the way, how much have you heard about the anti-Muslim backlash over the last decade and a half? Well, here\u2019s a fun fact. In every year since 9\/11 the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the U.S. has dwarfed anti-Muslim hate crimes.<\/p>\n

In 2001 \u2014 you know, the year when the World Trade Center was knocked down by Islamist terrorists \u2014 there were still twice<\/em> as many anti-Jewish incidents as there were anti-Muslim ones reported to the FBI. By 2002, things got back to \u201cnormal\u201d and anti-Jewish outstripped anti-Muslim hate crimes by roughly a factor of five<\/em> \u2013 and it\u2019s stayed that way ever since. In 2013, nearly 60 percent of anti-religious hate crimes were against Jews. Just over 14 percent were against Muslims. Now, I\u2019m not saying America is anti-Semitic, far from it. It\u2019s easily the most philo-Semitic country in the world, save for Israel (and if you spent time listening to Israelis criticize themselves, you\u2019d consider that a debatable proposition). But when was the last time you heard a reporter from the New York Times<\/em> fret over the need to be careful lest we encourage an anti-Semitic backlash?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In last week’s Goldberg File, Jonah Goldberg explained why the media as a whole are much more concerned about an anti-Muslim backlash than they are about any terror attack: Dear Reader (including my Twitter followers who are just scanning this for the hidden glottal stops), So Charlie Hebdo is selling like hot cakes, giving new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,11],"tags":[304,47,257],"class_list":["post-29736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion","tag-antisemitism","tag-islam","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7JC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29737,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29736\/revisions\/29737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}