Sunday, July 24, 2011

Norway

Ta-Nehisi Coates relates this: "It's like that moment when you hear about a horrible crime, and they're about to flash the perp's flick across the screen and you think, 'Don't be black Don't be black Don't be black PLEASE!Don't be black!!'"

When I first heard about the tragedy in Norway, the media still didn't have a suspect, and I confess that I found myself thinking, "Don't be Muslim, don't be Muslim, please don't be Muslim."

Well, it turned out that the one perpetrator they have in custody is not Muslim but in fact hates Muslims and opposes immigration and multiculturalism. It's strange, but that ended up providing little solace for me. The fact is: Anders Behring Breivik's actions say no more about fundamentalist Christians than an attack by a Muslim would have said about Islam. As any statistician will tell you, one person is rarely a valid statistical sample. I'm not sure that there is anything we can conclude from this episode except that in a world of seven billion people, some are unstable and, at the wrong moment, will do horrible things.

2 comments:

James R said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
James R said...

Well said. It will be interesting to see how this is treated. Here is Bawer's response.