Like clockwork, the conservative spin machine is out to make sure we all know that the San Bernardino shooter, Syed Farook, was a terrorist. His wife too.
Based on what we know so far, I don't necessarily disagree with that assessment. Not even a little bit.
Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife are the suspected shooters in Wednesday’s massacre in San Bernardino, Calif.
What is preposterous, though, is the ease in which a Muslim American is labeled a terrorist when good old white Christian mass murderers like Robert Lewis Dear (the Planned Parenthood shooter) and Dylann Roof (the Charleston church shooter) just don't draw the same designation from conservatives.
What it looks like is that conservatives are saying that one must be a Muslim to be a terrorist or that one has to have been radicalized in the Middle East to be a terrorist. Or, to be even more specific, it's as if one cannot, according to the conservative playbook, be both white and a terrorist.
How many reports have you heard about the mental health of Syed Farook? I've watched the news in an endless loop for 24 straight hours on multiple networks and I haven't heard one mention of it. I know when he visited Mecca, when he met and married his foreign wife, I heard all about the possibility that his trip to Saudi Arabia radicalized him, the makes and models of his guns, how many bullets he had in his SUV, but his mental state, and the possibility that he was mentally ill never happened to come up anywhere. Within 24 hours, though, after most white men conduct a mass shooting, they are given psych evaluations from armchair doctors all over the country.
As I look up at the television screen right now, the headline on Fox News reads, "San Bernardino attack raises concerns for more terror." Again, I'm not saying this is wrong, but understand this — when Dylann Roof shot and killed nine men and women at Emanuel AME, every single black church in America was on high alert for weeks. The attack of Dylann Roof on nine unsuspecting folk, which was the deadliest hate crime against African-Americans in our lifetime, raised real concerns for more terror in the black community.
When Robert Lewis Dear shot 11 people and killed three at a Planned Parenthood clinic last week, it raised major concerns for women's health centers all over the nation.
Robert Lewis Dear is suspected of opening fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, killing three and wounding others.
(AP)
Dylann Roof is accused of the June massacre of nine people at a Charleston church, which put black churches on high alert.
(POOL/REUTERS)But, unlike how conservatives responded to the attacks in Paris and the attack in San Bernardino, with both passion and policy proposals, the attacks on a black church and a Planned Parenthood clinic produced no such results — just "thoughts and prayers."
The point is not that Americans should go easy on radical Islam, but that violent white supremacists, fundamental Christians, and radical Muslims should be treated with the same seriousness.
They aren't.
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