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[ by Charles Cameron — “Orlando Thoughts Towards a Better Taxonomy of Mass Violence” and “White Hate but Islamic Terror?” ]
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Recommended readings:

Two pieces from the Lawfare blog offer us plenty to chew on regarding our categorization of violent acts, triggered by Orlando and Charleston, Thomas Mair and Dylann Roof.

Benjamin Wittes, Orlando Thoughts Towards a Better Taxonomy of Mass Violence:

I have been struck, however, by the range of people who have seen confirmation of their particular worldviews in this horrific event, some plausibly in my view, some not:

To the LGBT community, understandably enough, it’s about violence against gays.

For many Latinos, a salient fact is that the victims were overwhelmingly Latino, many of them Puerto Rican.

To those who believe our society is too heavily armed, this latest mass shooting proves they were right about gun availability.

For those who believe our society is insufficiently armed, this latest mass shooting proves they were right about more good guys needing guns.

For those who are anxious about foreign terrorism, the shooter’s claimed allegiance to ISIS places this on the long list of attacks and attempted attacks by ISIS and Al Qaeda and those they inspire.

To the Trumpists and others who don’t like Muslims, it’s all about Islam more generally.

To those who have a problem with immigration, well, the shooter is the child of immigrants from Afghanistan.

Apparently it’s also about the surveillance debate.

I even saw one tweet—the logic of which I admit I could not follow—blaming the incident on white supremacy.

I’m pretty sure that the shooter’s aim was not to validate anyone’s preexisting political stance.

and:

To be sure, sometimes legal path dependencies do arise out of our categories. Most importantly, the criminal laws on material support for terrorist groups don’t apply to domestic terrorist organizations, only designated foreign terrorist organizations. And the law presumptively treats as terrorism those crimes committed with bombs, but does not do the same with crimes committed by domestic individuals or groups with guns. (For an excellent explication of these points, see this piece by Jane Chong.)

But the more important impact of our taxonomical confusion, in my view, is intellectual, not legal: We just don’t know what to call an incident of (a) mass murder (b) by means of a gun (c) in which motive is unclear or mixed but involves clear elements of (d) bigotry, (e) mental illness, and (f) expressions of affiliation with a foreign terrorist group. And because we don’t know how to describe it, we also don’t know what aspects of it to prioritize in responding and preventing future such events.

One interesting question is why we care? It’s a crime; it’s a tragedy; it’s big. Why do we fight over what to call it?

There’s more, naturally, and I recommend the whole piece.

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Wittes also links specifically to another, earlier Lawfare post..

Jane Chong, White Hate but Islamic Terror? Charleston, Hate Crimes and Terrorism Per Quod:

Netizens have taken particular interest in contrasting the immediate reaction to Charleston with the immediate reaction to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Presumably these two attacks have emerged as fertile subjects for comparison partly because of the early dearth of evidence that either alleged perpetrator had official ties to or an operational role in a designated terrorist organization.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is among those who have been singled out for his disparate treatment of Charleston and Boston. Commenting on what the Charleston shooting might signify for his home state, Senator Graham described Roof as “one of these wacked out kids” and stated, “I don’t think it’s anything broader than that.”

This presents a sharp contrast with the views Graham espoused back in 2013 on the appropriate treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: “This man, in my view, should be designated as a potential enemy combatant and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of, and that evidence cannot be used against him in trial. That evidence is used to protect us as a nation.”

Judd Legum of Think Progress cited the Senator’s statements as a glaring example of our collective insistence on seeing violence motivated by Islamic extremism as a systemic threat while minimizing right-wing supremacist violence as the work of individual madmen. As Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer noted in a New York Times op-ed the day before the Charleston attack, such bias is particularly indefensible given the data: Attacks carried out by Muslim Americans account for 50 fatalities in the thirteen and a half years since 9/11, while plots by right-wing extremists have resulted in 254 fatalities between 9/11 and 2012.

The conflation of terrorism with Islamic extremism is an undeniable error. But distinguishing Boston and Charleston need not unequivocally boil down to bias of this particular kind.

Chong continues:

Consider President Obama’s reactions shortly after each attack—reactions that, if read in isolation, might seem to reflect this bias. On April 16, 2013, the day after the Boston bombings, President Obama delivered a speech in which he stated the following:

[G]iven what we now know about what took place, the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism. Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror. What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack, or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual. That’s what we don’t yet know.

Now contrast this with President Obama’s speech last Thursday, one day after the attacks in Charleston, which nowhere made mention of terrorism:

The FBI is now on the scene with local police, and more of the Bureau’s best are on the way to join them. The Attorney General has announced plans for the FBI to open a hate crime investigation. We understand that the suspect is in custody. And I’ll let the best of law enforcement do its work to make sure that justice is served.

Superficially speaking, there are at least two ways to read the administration’s initial decision to investigate one attack as a terrorist act and the other as a hate crime. A critic might contend that President Obama, like Senator Graham, appears to have untenably reserved the terrorist designation for Muslim extremists. Alternatively, we could take President Obama’s words at face value and recognize the weapon of choice as a critical factor in how a massacre tends to be classified when facts remain sparse and the evidence is still forthcoming. Those words again: “Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror.”

And so our inquiry evolves. Is Dylann Roof being widely portrayed as a hater and not a terrorist because, based on the available evidence, he is a white supremacist and not a Muslim extremist? Or is it because his weapon of choice was a gun and not a bomb?

Again, I’d encourage you to read the whole piece.

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As an addendum, if you want some thoughtful consideration of Thomas Mair, the (alleged) killer of the British MP Jo Cox, you way want to read Barth’s Notes on the topic:

Richard Bartholomew, Some Notes on Claims about Thomas Mair

[ by Charles Cameron — immigration, Brexit, and the killing of MP Jo Cox ]
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Two parties that don’t like immigration, and say so with similar propaganda images — but when the two images are juxtaposed, does the similarity between their two curving lines of unwanted immigrants, East German Jews in the aftermath of the first World War, largely Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants into Europe in the wake of the wars of our own time, make for fair comparison — or distorted propaganda?

The curves are indeed similar but that’s a graphical similarity, and there’s similarity in the dislike of immigrants too, in the meanings given to the two curves — but is the implicit comparison of Farrage with Hitler a fair one, or excessive?

How do we read juxtapositions of this sort? How do we critique them? Is interpretation at the mercy of the “eye of the beholder”? What can this specific example teach us about DoubleQuotes in general, and their potential for use in revelation and / or deception?

Source:

The Independent, People are calling out Ukip’s new anti-EU poster for resembling ‘outright Nazi propaganda’

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With the Brexit referendum about a week away, and with the widely admired British Labour MP Jo Cox murdered today by a killer with Neo-Nazi affiliation, the UK has its own terrorism, fury, divisions and grief to come to grips with.

Source:

The Telegraph, My fearless friend Jo Cox, a five-foot bundle of Yorkshire grit

[ by Charles Cameron — a little light-hearted lévi-straussian mythologic ]
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Here’s an irresistible example of what I call DoubleQuotes-style thinking:

The details are very well thought out, too — the flowers in Midas‘ hand are still gold, since he’s touched them, but they’re not turned to stone by Medusa‘s gaze since they’re of the vegetable kingdom — whereas the bird in her cage, being of the animal kingdom, looks distinctly gray as though it has been turned to stone.

I’m not sure that the boxed comment “a very brief affair” is right, though — as my son Emlyn‘s commented, It’s a love at first sight that lasts for ever!

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The other mythological DoubleQuote or conceptual symmetry I very much admire is the one whereby Narcissus, the epitome of visual reflection, is paired with Echo, avatar of reflection’s aural equivalent.

[ by Charles Cameron — in homage to Admiral Lord Nelson turning a blind eye ]
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Foolish persons, having no understanding of Britain’s long and cherished history of naval warfare, nor of the contemporary relevance of the Monty Python mode of doing battle, have had the temerity to mock today’s splendid outings or innings on the Thames:

Foolish persons may be satisfied with the visual splendor depicted in the upper panel, but Zenpundit‘s core strategic following will also appreciate the order of battle below.

Sources:

Evening Standard, Thames flotilla ‘battle’

Pádraig Belton, #Flotilla order of battle…

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In game theoretic terms, as between Nigel Farrage of UKIP and Brussels bureaucracy, I perceive my British fellows to be facing a lose-lose choice.

Here by way of a suitable corrective is the first suite of Handel’s Water Music:

[ by Charles Cameron — a reminder from 2014 — for those who preach love, for those who preach mercy ]
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Dominique Ndahimana, Perpetrator (left); Cansilde Munganyinka, Survivor

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Dominique Ndahimana:

The day I thought of asking pardon, I felt unburdened and relieved. I had lost my humanity because of the crime I committed, but now I am like any human being.

Cansilde Munganyinka:

After I was chased from my village and Dominique and others looted it, I became homeless and insane. Later, when he asked my pardon, I said: ‘I have nothing to feed my children. Are you going to help raise my children? Are you going to build a house for them?’ The next week, Dominique came with some survivors and former prisoners who perpetrated genocide. There were more than 50 of them, and they built my family a house. Ever since then, I have started to feel better. I was like a dry stick; now I feel peaceful in my heart, and I share this peace with my neighbors.

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Another perpetrator / survivor pair:

François Ntambara

Because of the genocide perpetrated in 1994, I participated in the killing of the son of this woman. We are now members of the same group of unity and reconciliation. We share in everything; if she needs some water to drink, I fetch some for her. There is no suspicion between us, whether under sunlight or during the night. I used to have nightmares recalling the sad events I have been through, but now I can sleep peacefully. And when we are together, we are like brother and sister, no suspicion between us.

Epiphanie Mukamusoni:

He killed my child, then he came to ask me pardon. I immediately granted it to him because he did not do it by himself — he was haunted by the devil. I was pleased by the way he testified to the crime instead of keeping it in hiding, because it hurts if someone keeps hiding a crime he committed against you. Before, when I had not yet granted him pardon, he could not come close to me. I treated him like my enemy. But now, I would rather treat him like my own child.

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Source:

Pieter Hugo, Portraits of Reconciliation: 20 years after the genocide in Rwanda

photos by Susan Dominus