On August 23, a reporter for Ohio State University’s campus newspaper interviewed a fellow student named Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a soft-spoken Muslim who expressed his concerns over the media’s portrayal of his coreligionists and his fear that he might be attacked by bigots. Just over three months later, Artan—a devotee of Islamic State and al-Qaeda—went on a murderous attack, wounding ten students and a professor. The interviewer, Kevin Stankiewicz, recently wrote an article in the Washington Post reflecting on Artan’s presumed transformation from “thoughtful, engaged student” to terrorist. Noting that Stankiewicz doesn’t seem to have entertained the possibility that Artan was simply concealing his views, Sam Schulman connects this lack of imagination with current obsessions over “hate speech”:
On a Facebook page discovered by law-enforcement officials, Artan had quite different complaints from the concern about the bigoted thoughts of [other] students. He was enraged at Burma’s oppression of its Muslim minority and connected it to the war on Islamic State conducted by America and its “fellow apostate allies.” . . . He fingers as traitors to Islam several prominent Islamic teachers and imams in Texas. . . . He concludes by swearing on the deity that he is “willing to use a billion infidels in retribution.” . . .
Our reliance upon speech censors to detect and cure evil has disarmed us to such a degree that even a journalist forgets the first tool of his trade: suspicion. It doesn’t occur to Stankiewicz that a man who in November dies as a soldier of IS might in August have concealed his thirst for revenge on America and on Muslim scholars whom he considers heretics. (There is nothing particularly Islamic about deception; any secret agent in Artan’s position would dissemble, whether Nazi, Communist, Irish nationalist, or French résistant.)
Stankiewicz is admirably careful about making too strong a case for the theory that hate speech against Artan’s religion caused the “thoughtful, engaged” student to “snap” and become the very different person who tried to kill as many of his fellow students as he could, using the techniques that IS recommends to its admirers in the West. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, is not so reluctant. Commenting on the attack, he told reporters, “If we respond to this situation by casting aspersions on millions of people that adhere to a particular religion or if we increase our suspicion of people who practice a particular religion, we are more likely going to contribute to acts of violence than we are to prevent them.”
If expressing dislike of Islam to Muslims will cause them to become terrorists in the future, then this must be what the White House believes happened to Artan. There is an easy cure in that case: . . . don’t say that a small minority of Muslims are more likely than a small minority of adherents of other faiths to become terrorists. If we watch our tongues, we [also] don’t have to keep watch on radical mosques, which will please the ACLU.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-not-talking-cure/article/2005776