Of course, the first thing to say is that the news yesterday about the capture of the sniper and his accomplice was wonderful. My hometown can breathe a sigh of relief. And our hearts go out to the victims, their families and friends and to those many, many others who have been terrified day in day out. But it also seems to me important to ask the hard questions about what this event meant and means. Reading the newspapers in the early hours, I’m a little stunned. I’m aware that we still don’t know much about the precise motives of the sniper killer and his accomplice. But we do know the following: he was a convert to Islam, he changed his name recently, he harbored “strong anti-American feelings and had publicly praised the terrorist attacks of September 11,” he actively supported the Nation of Islam, and the New Jersey plates for the car were bought on the first anniversary of September 11, immediately after which a bomb scare emptied the DMV building. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a striking series of coincidences? To read the papers this morning is like looking at several massive dots with no-one daring to connect them. So allow me. It seems to me that this guy is clearly a disturbed and dangerous person, period. Perhaps he was simply a bad guy and a criminal. But, as I wrote a while back, the attacks were clearly not the usual pattern of a serial killer or a conventional sniper. Here’s what I posited eleven days ago in the Dish –
“[W]hat the D.C. sniper is now doing is terrorism. I don’t mean he’s a member of any specific group necessarily or even a person who might call himself a terrorist. I mean someone – a criminal – whose goal, whose purpose, is purely terror. I can see no other pattern to the shootings.”
So we have a Muslim convert, sympathetic to the murderers of 9/11, terrorizing the nation’s capital, and coming close to shutting its daily life down. I don’t see that it matters whether he was formally a member of al Qaeda or some other group. In fact, it’s more disturbing if he is not.
THE FRUITS OF RACIAL PROFILING: Now imagine the following scenario. A sniper was terrorizing the capital city. Police came across a white guy in a car whom they suspected. They took his name, but they didn’t arrest him, because they were looking for a black man. The guy subsequently went on to kill several more people. Wouldn’t this be the basis for uproar? Wouldn’t the cops involved be fired? Wouldn’t there be a massive investigation into how such racial profiling could have happened? I would think so. But this may have been exactly what happened in this case! According to the Washington Post yesterday, the cops stopped the Chevy Caprice on October 8. Here’s how the Washington Post describes what happened:
The blue Caprice discovered today was believed to have been approached in Baltimore by police who found Muhammad sleeping on Oct. 8, the day after a 13-year-old boy in Bowie was wounded as the eighth victim of the sniper, the sources said. The car was spotted in a parking lot off 28th Street, near the exit ramp to Interstate 83. Muhammad was allowed to go, although his name was put into an information data bank in Baltimore, the sources said. “Everyone was looking for a white car with white people,” said one high-ranking police source. Muhammad and Malvo are black males.
I’m a little suspicious about the wording here: “… was believed to have been approached …” But I see no refutation of this incident in today’s papers. And then there’s the stunning quote: “Everyone was looking for a white car with white people.” Get that? There’s a word for this: racial profiling. It’s wrong in itself but it’s simply astounding that this profiling by the police was also followed by the deaths of several more people. Why isn’t this a scandal? The only reason the cops – not “everyone,” in the weasel words of the “high-ranking police source” – were looking for a white guy was allegedly because only white guys are serial killers or snipers. First off, this is no excuse for racial profiling. Second, we already knew that this was not a typical serial killer or sniper. Thirdly, in the words of the New York Times,
According to a database compiled by James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and one of the most widely quoted profilers, 55 percent of sniper killers are white.
In other words, the whole notion of racial profiling in this case was hooey in the first place. Even if he had been a typical sniper killer, there was close to a 50 percent chance of his being non-white. And yet the cops let a man go because of his race.
THE P.C. MEDIA: So the question becomes: why aren’t these obvious questions being raised in the major papers this morning? Part of it is legitimate caution in speculating about things we don’t know fully yet. That’s completely defensible. Part of it may be waiting for the shock to wear off. But, as I’ve shown, everything I’ve written here is from the papers themselves. So they’re not disguising or concealing any facts. I think the first reason for the reticence is an understandable reluctance to draw the link between domestic extreme Islam and terrorism. But this possibility is real; we’ve seen American citizens acting as foot-soldiers for al Qaeda; and we’ve seen them act as sympathizers. It may be grim to contemplate it, but these are times to look reality in the face. And I think the second reason for the reticence is that there’s a double-standard in which racial profiling against whites is fine, but racial profiling against blacks is wrong. In my view, any kind of racial profiling is always wrong. And if the cops had not been making reverse racist assumptions in this case, there’s a chance a few more people would be alive today. That alone should be enough for the people responsible for this profiling to be investigated. But somehow, I think they’ll get away with barely any criticism at all. Relief will dispel responsibility. It shouldn’t.
The Dish 