Opinion:The most idiotic statements about the Boston Marathon bombing!

Last week’s horrible bombing at the Boston Marathon brought out the best of people and the worst of people. Bostonians were incredible the way they helped the injured, cooperated with the police and united in spirit. The police, FBI and law enforcement were amazing the way they tracked down the two terrorists in just a few days.

On the other side there was much stupidity. While it is very difficult to cover a story like this “on the fly,” some media outlets reported false information. And it wasn’t just CNN who bragged about their exclusive that a suspect was under arrest which turned out to be false, other outlets gave false reports also. On the day of the attack, Fox first reported that there were twelve people dead, which (thankfully) was not true.

The people who really failed us were not the reporters, who were for the most part accurate, but it was some of our politicians and news commentators who twisted the story for their own ends.

Almost immediately after the terrorist attack House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MI) turned the bombing into a political issue and blamed the terrorist attack on the recent sequester budget cuts. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) and former Congressman Barney Frank also made the false statement that cutting budgets led to the attack. Massachusetts Congressman William Keating speculated that the bombing might have been the work of a right wing terrorist protesting the fact that it was Tax Day.

NBC’s Luke Russert, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Peter Bergen, and Mr. Tingles-- MSNBC’s Chris Matthews echoed the right-wing “tax day” theory.

All the above comments were just “also-rans.” The most idiotic thing said about the horrible bombing in Boston was made by David Sirota in an article for the award-winning website Salon. The article was called (I kid you not),”Let’s Hope The Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American.”

It was Mr. Sirota’s contention that when an Islamist conducts an act of terror, people always blame crazy radical Islamists, but when white guys commit an act of terror people always say its a lone wolf.

“This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.”

Apparently Mr. Sirota lives in a cave without access to the rest of the liberal mainstream media. In most cases when a “White Guy” commits a mass shooting, the liberals find a way to blame conservatives. When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, they blamed Sarah Palin’s use of a bull’s-eye on a map of the U.S. The media said the nut job who did that shooting was a right-winger even though all evidence showed that Jared Loughner was a socialist. Michael Page who shot up the Sikh Temple was a Socialist (yes, Nazis are socialists—look it up).

Mass shootings and attacks by Islamists and “White Guys” have been described as lone wolves including Theodore Kaczynski, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet (who shot up the EL Al ticket counter in 2002, or Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar (who drove his Jeep into a crowd of people in North Carolina 2006). Even Nidal Malik Hasan who shot and killed people at Fort Hood was called a lone wolf (although the Obama administration insists on calling that terrorist attack “work-place” violence).

When people (like Hasan) scream Allah Akbar as they commit their act of terror, it is blamed on their radical Islamist ideology because it happens to be the truth. That certainly doesn’t mean ALL Muslims are radical Islamists.

“Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”

We don’t bomb the Vatican because Pope Francis as well as Benedict and John Paul before him are not state sponsors of terrorism.

In a way Mr. Sirota and Salon got their wish. The Tsarnaev brothers who committed the heinous bombing were American “white dudes,” and as far as we know right now, they were lone wolves. Of course they were also Muslim and according to the surviving brother, they committed the crime because of their radical Islamist teachings.

Here’s the real issue with David Sirota and progressives like him---he is a racist. Racism is part of the progressive philosophy that insists on throwing everybody into neat little categories so they can subjugate themselves for the greater good. All women are the same, so are all Jews, Latinos, etc.

When someone is called an illegal immigrant, the progressive will say that is an example of hate against Latinos (even though all illegal immigrants are not Latino-but all illegal immigrants are breaking the law by coming/staying in this country without permission).

Conservative philosophy celebrates the individual as opposed to a group.

When a terrorist is described as a radical Islamist, a progressive cannot segregate that individual from all Muslims, so they believe it is xenophobia. It’s what the ADL did when commenting on Pamela Geller’s invitation to speak in Great Neck, and it was behind David Sirota’s article in Salon.

The truth is, while they were on the loose, most Americans both progressive and conservative didn’t care about their background…they just wanted them captured. Now that one is dead and the other in custody, the authorities need to find out their motivation…not so all Muslims can be blamed, but to help figure out a strategy to prevent future bombings.

The real xenophobes are the progressives whose philosophy, celebrating the collective rather than the individual, blinds them to the difference between a radical Islamist terrorist and all Muslims.

Jeff Dunetz is the Editor/Publisher of the political blog “The Lid” (www.jeffdunetz.com). Jeff contributes to some of the largest political sites on the internet including American Thinker, Big Government, and more.