“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Ta-Nehesi Coates: Take Down the Confederate Flag-Now
Last night, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston church, sat for an hour, and then killed nine people. Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol-the Confederate flag. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolina’s attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. This notion is belied by any serious interrogation of the Civil War and the primary documents of its instigators. Yet the Confederate battle flag-the flag of Dylann Roof-still flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.
The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree-the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this act-it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…
This moral truth-“that the negro is not equal to the white man”-is exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demanded-with human sacrifice.
Glenn Greenwald: Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings “Terrorism” Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term
In February 2010, a man named Joseph Stack deliberately flew his small airplane into the side of a building that housed a regional IRS office in Austin, Texas, just as 200 agency employees were starting their workday. Along with himself, Stack killed an IRS manager and injured 13 others. [..]
The attack had all of the elements of iconic terrorism, a model for how it’s most commonly understood: down to flying a plane into the side of a building. But Stack was white and non-Muslim. As a result, not only was the word “terrorism” not applied to Stack, but it was explicitly declared inapplicable by media outlets and government officials alike. [..]
By very stark contrast, consider the October 2014, shooting in Ottawa by a single individual, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, at the Canadian Parliament building. As soon as it was known that the shooter was a convert to Islam, the incident was instantly and universally declared to be “terrorism.” Less than 24 hours afterward, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared it a terror attack and even demanded new “counter-terrorism” powers in its name (which he has now obtained). To bolster the label, the government claimed Zehaf-Bibeau was on his way to Syria to fight with jihadists, and the media trumpeted this “fact.”By very stark contrast, consider the October 2014, shooting in Ottawa by a single individual, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, at the Canadian Parliament building. As soon as it was known that the shooter was a convert to Islam, the incident was instantly and universally declared to be “terrorism.” Less than 24 hours afterward, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared it a terror attack and even demanded new “counter-terrorism” powers in its name (which he has now obtained). To bolster the label, the government claimed Zehaf-Bibeau was on his way to Syria to fight with jihadists, and the media trumpeted this “fact.”
Maybe it was white rage that provoked a young man to kill nine innocent worshipers as they prayed. Maybe it was mental illness or some other twisted motivation. The one thing about which there can be no debate is that he had a gun.
The gun is what ties the unspeakable atrocity in Charleston, S.C., to the long and apparently never-ending list of mass shootings in this country. We know them by their place names-Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Navy Yard. They rivet the nation’s attention for days or weeks-then they fade, and we do nothing. Perhaps this time will be different. I want to be hopeful, but I’m not optimistic. [..]
What we can do, if we have the will, is make it harder for those who want to kill innocents to obtain firearms. After 20 young children were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Congress took up two modest pieces of legislation: a ban on military-style assault weapons, which no hunter needs; and a requirement for universal background checks before buying guns. Both had overwhelming public support. Neither became law.
Can this time be different? Only if we hold Congress, Obama and the presidential candidates of both parties accountable. Only if we remember Mother Emanuel.
Isaiah Poole: Not Colorblind, Just Plain Blind, To The Roots Of Racist Terror
It was not a matter of if, but from where, some disgusting and barbaric reaction would come to Wednesday night’s terror attack at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. in which nine people died. Not surprisingly, Fox News was among the first out of the gate.
The “No More Mister Nice Blog” captured a segment Fox and Friends aired this morning in which the shooting was branded as an “attack on faith.”
“It didn’t matter that, by the time of the broadcast, the police chief of Charleston had already declared the shooting a hate crime, or that a reporter had interviewed a survivor who said that the shooter had told victims, ‘You rape our women and are taking over our country and you have to go,'” the blog author wrote. “The prime directive on Fox & Friends was not to report the truth – it was to establish a counternarrative that shifts blame away from Fox’s ideological allies and toward Fox’s ideological enemies.”
If some of the other writing of the right – and there was actually remarkably little from the right-wing media that I saw as of mid-afternoon Thursday – was less hell-bent on driving a narrative counter to the plain facts of the case that a white supremacist went into a historically African-American church known for its civil rights advocacy and for that reason killed nine people, it was certainly notable that the coverage steered clear from any notion of a connection between the incident and America’s continuing legacy of racism and violence.
Andrew J. Bacevich: Washington in Wonderland: Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole (Again)
There is a peculiar form of insanity in which a veneer of rationality distracts attention from the madness lurking just beneath the surface. When Alice dove down her rabbit hole to enter a place where smirking cats offered directions, ill-mannered caterpillars dispensed advice, and Mock Turtles constituted the principal ingredient in Mock Turtle soup, she experienced something of the sort.
Yet, as the old adage goes, truth can be even stranger than fiction. For a real-life illustration of this phenomenon, one need look no further than Washington and its approach to national security policy. Viewed up close, it all seems to hang together. Peer out of the rabbit hole and the sheer lunacy quickly becomes apparent.
Consider this recent headline: “U.S. to Ship 2,000 Anti-Tank Missiles To Iraq To Help Fight ISIS.” The accompanying article describes a Pentagon initiative to reinforce Iraq’s battered army with a rush order of AT-4s. A souped-up version of the old bazooka, the AT-4 is designed to punch holes through armored vehicles.
Taken on its own terms, the decision makes considerable sense. Iraqi forces need something to counter a ]fearsome new tactic http://www.theguardian.com/wor… of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS): suicide bombers mounted in heavily armored wheeled vehicles. Improved antitank capabilities certainly could help Iraqi troops take out such bombers before they reach their intended targets. The logic is airtight. The sooner these weapons get into the hands of Iraqi personnel, the better for them-and so the better for us.
As it turns out, however, the vehicle of choice for ISIS suicide bombers these days is the up-armored Humvee. In June 2014, when the Iraqi Army abandoned the country’s second largest city, Mosul, ISIS acquired 2,300 made-in-the-U.S.A. Humvees. Since then, it’s captured even more of them.
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