Benoit, Cho and anti-Muslim hysteria
June 27, 2007 at 9:39 am by Andisheh Nouraee in NewsAccording to Fayette County authorities, pro wrestler Chris Benoit placed Bibles next to his wife and child after he murdered them last weekend.
Will American journalists and bloggers use the placement of the Bibles to speculate about Benoit’s motives and whip up anti-Christian hysteria?
Of course not.
Only morons and anti-religious bigots would use the mere presence of Bibles to link an apparent murder-suicide to religion or global religious extremism.
Contrast the news coverage of and blogging about the Benoit family deaths with the Virginia Tech shooting.
After reports surfaced that Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho had the phrase “Ismail Ax” written on his arm when he was found dead by police, right-wing talking heads and assorted cyberbigots immediately tried to connect the massacre to Islam. According to their idiot logic, “Ismail” is the Arabic spelling of Ishmael, therefore Cho was a Muslim extremist (examples: 1, 2, 3).
Among the speculators was Washington Post conservative columnist and Fox News talk-show staple Charles Krauthammer. “I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick,” said Krauthammer on Fox.
Nevermind that Cho was raised a churchgoing Christian or that he’d suffered from mental illness. And nevermind that “Ismail” isn’t the Arabic spelling of anything (Arabic doesn’t use the Roman alphabet) or that he actually wrote “Ismael” instead of “Ismail” on the video package he mailed to NBC News.
When you’re a bigot, you see what you want to see. Imagine what these idiots would be saying if copies of the Quran were found in Benoit’s home.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
The local media is definitely using religion as a focal point in the Benoit case. Today, 11 Alive interviewed Lex Luger, a former wrestler, about Benoit. According to 11 Alive, Luger said that steriods could have played a role, and drugs and alcohol “wreaked havoc in his own life” until he converted to Christianity. It is unclear what importance this detail has since he as quoted as saying “the two had not seen each other in some time.” While this probably won’t be used to “whip up anti-Christian hysteria,” it is interesting to see the local media focus on this detail of the case.
June 28th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
The placement of Bibles next to the Benoit victims is curious, but not very sensational or surprising.
History (recent and ancient) is rife with delusional folk who committed atrocities in God’s name. This history is filled also with hundreds of saints, recognized or not. Between the two extremes, you’ve got the millions who’ve just lived their own kind of faith at neither extreme. And so, we’ve seen enough of this diverse history to accept that the actions of an individual do not necessarily represent the sentiment of the collective, at least where Christianity is concerned.
Unfortunately, Islam remains an incredibly foreign concept to the population at large. Most folks have heard little but bad press about the religion, or they’ve watched the actions of extremists with alarm and worry. They haven’t any exposure to positives about the religion. So this ignorance is what leads people to jump to the most horrific and irrational conclusions possible at the least sign of evidence (such as Cho’s “Ismail Ax”), because they simply do not know better.