Groups are not blamed for crimes of members who share their identity
Evidence
Can we reverse the angle? How many Americans were ready to “isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly” the murders for which George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were responsible—and how exactly do you “isolate” the elected officials of a democracy? No Muslims elected the mass murderers in Mumbai to any office. They were part of a criminal gang in whose creation US foreign policy, Saudi money, and Pakistani intelligence are all deeply implicated. But Bush and company were elected, and they are responsible for infinitely more murders in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many Jews worldwide “took to the streets” to protest the Zionist armed robbery of another people’s homeland, or Baruch Goldstein’s lethal rampage in Hebron against people praying in a mosque, or the starvation of 1.5 million human beings in Gaza, or the theft of Palestinian lands in broad daylight by murderous settlers who shoot to kill any Palestinian who dares to raise a voice, or the deliberate deaths of Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli army sharpshooters? Did Christians around the globe “take to the streets” in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people? Did they “take to the streets” in 2007, when mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho murdered 33 students on the campus of Virginia Tech—one for every year of Jesus Christ’s life? — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 47
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The rhetorical reversal — holding every faith community to the standard Muslims are held to — exposes that collective-guilt is selectively applied, a structural asymmetry rather than a principle. This is a paradigm-shifting frame worth sitting with.
- SHARE: Send to a friend who writes about media bias or identity politics — the McVeigh/Cho/Jesus-years detail is a strikingly pointed rhetorical move.
- XREF: connects to: Those who identify with the whole as its defenders cannot be guilty — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 357; Perpetrator-group members can benefit from crimes without committing them — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 2066