Quote:
Originally Posted by Stealhead
How so exactly? Everything he stated is a fact and he never implied anything else beyond that.
|
He's right in a way, but only in a manner in which if I had said it would have lead to instant claims of PC.
Unfortunately in an incident like this it's human nature to be distrustful of something that isn't the same as us, I mean you're far more likely to be killed by a white guy driving a truck but no-one ever really thinks about it, a Muslim shoots up a Marine recruitment center and people get spooky around Islam.
It's not just an Islamophobia thing, if you had been in the UK around the 1960s-1980s, you'd have met people who would have expressed a not dissimilar sentiment about the Irish.
I remember when I took my first trip to London after 7/7, I was on the tube and there were people on there who were of darker skin than I (admittedly with my nerd-complexion that's not difficult) and they were carrying rucksacks...and you can be damn right that I was concerned. For all I knew they were probably Sikhs or even atheists, but because they were foreign looking and had rucksacks, little alarm bells went off in my mind. Of course, none of them exploded and aside from the usual delays there were no interruptions to my journey around the capital during that visit and the visits since.
In my opinion where it becomes real Islamophobia is when you encourage someone to take action against a person because of their religion. Torplexed stopped short of that, and did no more than what the speakers in your public transportation hub tell you on a regular basis, 'remain vigilent'.
Of course, unfortunately in this war, vigilence is a double-edged sword, many radicals who have since fled to Syria were only radicalised when someone thought they looked suspicious and called the police on them.
To come back to the gunman who took part in this attack, 'My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?', was the message written in his school yearbook. What are we to take from that?
Let me end this ramble in a thread that I was going to stay out of...but, like Corleone 'they pulled me back in', let me end it by stating that I don't believe for a moment that Torplexed is an Islamophobe, in fact there's probably only a couple of posters on this forum who I would say truly are, and I'm not going to start pointing fingers. He's just like the rest of us, still trying to make sense of what the world has become.
Finally, and most importantly, Semper Fi to the fallen, may they rest in peace.