From Times Square to Jacksonville: When Terrorism Is a Double-Standard

As we all know, the first of this month a crude bomb almost went off
in Times Square. It was an attempted terrorist attack by a less than
competent 30-year-old finance professional, an American citizen of
Pakistani origin who'd recently lost his Connecticut home to
foreclosure and gone radical. The man was caught 56 hours after the
bomb was discovered. The hurricane of media attention lasted about two
weeks. The political consequences of the attack continue, with the
usual other radicals in Congress and their amen rabble on Fox seizing
on the plot to declare America under attack and constitutional
guarantees of due process an even bigger threat to America than
terrorism.

Amazing how easily one-off dimwits with bombs can scare off the
country that likes to think of itself as the strongest on the planet.
That's what happens when the dimwits are Muslim and the targets are
recognizably American. It's a different story when tables are reversed
and Muslims are the target.

Few of you know that 10 days after the attempted terrorist attack in
Times Square, an actual terrorist attack took place in Jacksonville
when a firebomb exploded outside the city's biggest mosque, the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida.
Some 60 worshippers were praying inside when the bomb went off and
started a fire. No one was injured. The bomber is still at large.

The Jacksonville Times-Union did an admirable job of covering the
story and editorializing against whatever anti-Islamic motives are
polluting Northeast Florida. But aside from the Times-Union and a few
broadcast media in the city, that terrorist attack drew almost no
attention from the national media and barely more than passing mention
in state newspapers. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks
every hate crime in the country, has yet to take note of the
Jacksonville attack. The FBI is on the case, but even the $5,000 reward
it put up looks half-hearted compared to the $12,000 the New York City
Police Department put up in the search for the Times Square bomber. The
FBI didn't put up the reward in Jacksonville until four days ago, and
only when the mosque, a church and a national Islamic organization each
put in $5,000 of their own.

Double standards are the collateral damage of that dumb war too many
people continue to imagine as a "war on terror." You can't wage war on
terror. Terror is a tactic. It's nobody's monopoly. On American soil,
the terrorists-from the Oklahoma City bomber to the Fort Hood attacker
to the Times Square bomber to, most likely, the Jacksonville bomber-are
American. There's convenience in creating a false sense of security by
identifying Islam as the evil and Americans as the good guys. But it's
demonstrably not true.

The Jacksonville attack didn't happen in a vacuum. For several weeks in April and May a controversy was contrived out of the Jacksonville City Council's
nomination of Parvez Ahmed to the city's Human Rights Commission. Ahmed
is a Fulbright Scholar and a University of North Florida professor with
decades of public service to his name, as well as a long history of
condemning terrorism, starting with a September 14, 2001 letter in a
Pennsylvania newspaper calling the 9/11 attacks "senseless" and any use
of religious labels to describe terrorists "an affront." But Ahmed is a
Muslim. Turn on the sirens.

"ACT! for America" is a hate group founded by Lebanese Islamophobe Brigitte Gabriel,
who sees a terrorist beneath every turban. It's her way of selling
books and making money. When her act gets cold, she scavenges a cause
and cashes in on the publicity. She found one in Ahmed's nomination.
Her Jacksonville chapter launched a McCarthy-era-like attack on Ahmed,
concocting slanderous allegations about him having ties to terrorist
groups by connecting more dregs than dots. Stupidity loves company.
ACT's slanders found support on the Jacksonville city council,
particularly City Councilman Don Redman, who shamed his city by
demanding that Ahmed publicly "say a prayer to your God." It's only
when the council began worrying that an image of intolerance might hurt
business in Jacksonville that it approved the Ahmed nomination on a
still-shameful 13-6 vote. One of those votes belonged to Glorious
Johnson, who feared that Ahmed's nomination was dividing the city and
causing others to refer to it, in her words, as "this hick town." Her
vote was among the reasons why.

Less than two weeks later, Ahmed's mosque was firebombed. If the
message wasn't directed exclusively at Ahmed, it certainly was at the
region's 15,000 Muslims. This wasn't swastikas on a wall. It wasn't
insults cowardly spat out of a speeding car. It was a firebomb. It was
an act of terror against Muslims in Jacksonville. It's no different
than if your local church or Times Square had been firebombed. But of
course it's been different. When the target happens to be Muslim,
whether it's Jacksonville or anywhere else in the world, the attack is
beneath concern, because the last thing anyone wants to admit is that
hate and terror have their American franchises in spades.