Of Homegrown Terrorists and Holiday Splodidopes

“Somali-Born Teenager Held in Oregon Bomb Sting,” the New York Times reports:

Federal agents in a sting operation arrested a Somali-born teenager just as he tried blowing up a van he believed was loaded with explosives at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, authorities said.

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Kathy Shaidle quips, “The only shocking thing about this story is that Portland still has a Christmas tree lighting,” but also equally shocking is that journalists are still allowed to use the words “Christmas tree lighting ceremony” without ironic scare quotes in the New York Times these days. Or did that happen to slip by Pinch’s layers and layers of fact-checkers and politically correct central scrutinizers?

Speaking of which, ever wonder how the word “Islamophobia” was coined? At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski, writing from Turkey explains all, but not before noting, “The phrase ‘some of my best friends are Muslims’ is more than a cliche in my case; most of my best friends are Muslims, all of my neighbors are Muslims, and the way I live my life would make no sense at all if I had a phobia:”

Really imagine that scene: a bunch of Islamists admiring how astutely the queers–people who in their ideal world would be served with the lash or hanged–had portrayed their critics as mentally disturbed. Brilliant. Let’s take a leaf from them and then kill them. The association of anti-Islamism–the noblest form of liberal anti-totalitarianism–with gay-bashing rednecks in the grip of a psychosexual panic was not just one of those linguistic accidents of history, in other words. These guys were sitting there in Virginia and really thinking about the best way to exploit the weaknesses of the Western psyche. They came up with this word–and admit it, it’s clever; I challenge you to find a better one if you want to yank the West’s chain–and they marketed it with  petrodollars, and now it truly does drive public discourse and policy the world over.

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Meanwhile, Washington Post-owned Slate tut-tuts “sad-sack homegrown terrorists,” causing Sonny Bunch to respond, “So I take it we shouldn’t be worried about the sad sack Christmas Tree bomber, either?”

Oh, and speaking of homegrown terrorists:

But the 38-year-old professor has been through this before. Last year, he woke up to an orange flash and a car alarm. He ran outside to find his car had been blown up….

Molotov-cocktail-like devices have been left near [other] researchers’ homes and under their cars, and in one case, a professor’s window was smashed and a garden hose inserted to flood her home….

Jentsch uses vervet monkeys in his research on methamphetamine addiction and tobacco dependence in teens, along with cognitive disabilities affecting schizophrenia patients…. Some of Jentsch’s work has included administering methamphetamine to monkeys and then withdrawing the drug, a project that includes killing about half a dozen of the primates each year for postmortems….

Lately, the researcher said, activists have been referring to him as David “Tiller” Jentsch, a reference to abortion doctor George Tiller, who was shot and killed last year in Kansas by a pro-life activist.

“They’re hoping I would be the first Tiller of the animal rights community,” he said. “My worry is some unstable person will hear these messages enough times and they’ll take it as a signal.” …

“They’re used to scaring people and getting their way,” Jentsch said. “It’s just not going to happen in this case.”

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As the Professor writes, “Animal ‘rights’ activists are just anti-human. If only this got one tenth the publicity that a bogus charge of racism aimed at Tea Partiers gets as a matter of course.”

Update: “The TSA may be a useless invasive bureaucracy that has never caught a single terrorist, but the FBI knows what it’s doing,” Michael Totten writes, noting that the incident in Portland that the FBI averted was within walking distance of his house.

Related: The CAIR Bears.

Update: A Broad Strata of Society.

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