Mika Brzezinski challenges Rick Santorum on Muslims vs White men with guns
Rick Santorum suggested that Muslims are not doing enough to combat Islamic jihad. He said not all terrorist are Muslims but all Jihadist terrorists are Muslim. He also said that enough Muslims are not doing the job to help eradicate the jihadists among the fold.
Mika Brzezinski slammed Rick Santorum on the spot by pointing out that based on his argument he should be working on white men that are effecting mass killings with guns.
“I will turn the argument around on you,” Mika asked. “Why aren’t you working on white men with guns. I mean come on Rick Santorum. You know better. You are smarter than that. Now telling Muslim Americans they all need to come and talk about the tiny percentage of their community that kinda point frankly … But yet, you look at the data of white men with guns wrecking havoc on this nation, why aren’t white men coming together. Why aren’t you calling them to do that?”
Mika is right. ThinkProgress reported the following.
Though terrorism perpetrated by Muslims receives a disproportionate amount of attention from politicians and reporters, the reality is that right-wing extremists pose a much greater threat to people in the United States than terrorists connected to ISIS or similar organizations. As UNC Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer explained last June in the New York Times, Islam-inspired terror attacks “accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.” Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”
Kurzman and Schanzer’s methodology, moreover, may underestimate the degree to which domestic terrorists in the United States are motivated by right-wing views. As they describe the term in their New York Times piece, the term “right-wing extremist” primarily encompasses anti-government extremists such as members of the sovereign citizenmovement, although it also includes racist right-wing groups such as neo-Nazis. Thus, it is not yet clear whether Dear, who made anti-abortion remarks but also reportedly referenced President Obama, was motivated in part by the kind of anti-government views that are the focus of Kurzman and Schanzer’s inquiry.
It is time that truth prevails. It is time to stop a false narrative from taking hold.
