Bill Maher: Maverick Fail

(warning: long and rambly. summary: people have too narrow a definition of terrorism, and American conservatives exploit Jews.)

Picked up Bill Maher's When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden: What the Government SHOULD Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism in the bookstore the other day and flipped through it. Now, Mr. Maher prides himself on his political incorrectness - I mean, he hosted a show called Politically Incorrect - so even with almost no knowledge of him I wasn't surprised to find that he supports racial profiling in airports. Since all the attacks against the United States have been made or attempted by Muslims, says Mr. Maher, it makes sense to search only Muslims, sensitivity be damned! It's the only real way to protect America, and besides, he's tired of having to take his shoes off.

Except it's really not that easy. The only way to narrow your desired targets into the category of, not only Muslims, but people who are visibly "Muslim" - that is, Arab- or South Asian-looking - is to willfully ignore terrorism that doesn't fit your chosen definition of terrorism.

The OED defines "terrorism" as "the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims"; the US legal code as "premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents"; the UN as "any action...intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act." Nothing in there about Islam or brown people. Yet so many people have associated terrorism with Arab or South Asian Muslims that that's become a part of their definition. "terrorism: when brown-skinned Muslims blow things up." It's a No True Scotsman fallacy - since only brown-skinned Muslims commit terrorism, it's not terrorism if the perp isn't a brown-skinned Muslim.

This chance find comes at a particularly interesting time given the recently foiled attempt to bomb synagogues and military planes. Follow that link. Look at the terrorists. They're black. They have "American" names. How far is Mr. Maher willing to take that political incorrectness?

Unless, of course, blowing up synagogues isn't terrorism. After all, Mr. Maher, in the same book, uses an image of Jesus and Muhammad in a boxing ring to represent the "clash of civilizations." Where does terrorism against Jews fit in?

Mr. Maher likes to paint himself as a maverick, but he's falling right into the conservative definition of terrorism - not only that it's only terrorism when it's done by brown Muslims, but it's only terrorism when it's done to Real Americans™.¹ That's why the Knoxville Unitarian Church shooting, the Dayton mosque chemical attack, abortion clinic bombings, and white supremacist plots don't get called terrorism. This attempt is being more widely branded as terrorism, but would it have been, if the terrorists had been white or Christian? Are Jews only provisionally Real Americans™, to be accorded victim status when we share an enemy (Muslim PoC, at the moment) with white, conservative Christians?²

American conservatives like to go on about the country's "Judeo-Christian heritage," which is a nice way to try to look inclusive while campaigning to put Jesus (whom Jews don't worship, remember?) on public buildings. Yet as late as 1944 one quarter of the American population believed Jews were a "menace," and you just try suggesting that major Jewish holidays get the federal treatment the way Christmas and Easter do.

In the same vein, they take Israel as their cause célèbre not out of a hatred for the killing of innocents (witness their cheering of Operation Cast Lead) or a sympathy for Jews, but usually either out of a rightist-Christian belief that they've got to help bring about the Apocalypse, or because Israel represents "Western" ("Judeo-Christian") values in a sea of brown Muslim countries.

Bill Maher hasn't made any public statements about the bomb plot. Maybe he really does think it's terrorism, and I'm wildly extrapolating. Maybe I'm using his earlier comments as a jumping-off point for my own thoughts. But if he does classify this attempted bombing by black Americans as terrorism, that only makes it necessary to repeat my question:

Mr. Maher, how far are you willing to take that political incorrectness?

James Cromitie. David Williams. Onta Williams. Richard Reid. John Walker Lindh. José Padilla. (To say nothing of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski, etc.) None of them Arab or South Asian. None of them with Muslim-sounding names. Yet all were terrorists or attempted terrorists.

Wouldn't it make more sense just to search everybody?

Oh wait, that would mean Bill Maher would have to get searched.


1. And, when in Israel, to Real Israelis™ - so illegal settlers attacking left-wing activists, Israeli soldiers trying to close settlements, or Arabs is by definition not terrorism.
2. Likewise, a soldier or a left-wing Israeli killed by a Palestinian is, of course, suddenly a Real Israeli™.

Edit: And look at that. The shooter at the Holocaust Museum hated Christians.

Edit 2: CaitieCat at Shakesville posted on a similar topic, making the excellent point that there have been far more rightist terror incidents planned or perpetrated in the U.S. than Islamic terror incidents. This leads me to two reflections:
1. Conservatives focus on the number of people killed rather than the number of incidents, and (because?) this makes it seem as if rightist terror is less of a threat.
2. Much in the same way that stories with POC protagonists are "about race" or rape is a "women's issue," a lot of these incidents fly under the radar (and are dealt with by regular law enforcement rather than DHS or anything like that) because their perpetrators are white and Christian. Because they are members of the majority, they have the privilege of not being defined by their race or religion, meaning both that their entire race/religion (unlike Islam) is not tarred with the brush of their crime, and that they are less likely to be called terrorists to begin with, since another part of that definition of "terrorism" is "violence in the service of an ideology" and ideologies are for brown people.