1115.org

Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit “fame”) has written another piece of outrageously offensive crap. Outrageous and offensive as much for the total lack of consequences for him, as for the content.

Here’s what he said about Iran. (Do me a favor and just take my word for it; or check out a fuller quote here. But whatever else you do, don’t go clicking on his site, and increase his traffic.)

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. (…)

We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc. … And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003.

As Kevin Drum has pointed out:

After all, killing civilian scientists and civilian leaders, even if you do it quietly, is unquestionably terrorism. That’s certainly what we’d consider it if Hezbollah fighters tried to kill cabinet undersecretaries and planted bombs at the homes of Los Alamos engineers.

But Kevin focuses on pointing out the logical inconsistency in Reynolds’ writing, or the logical inconsistency we would be practicing if Reynolds’ prescription were followed: “if you’re going to claim that terrorism is a barbaric tactic that has to be stamped out, you can hardly endorse its use by the United States”.

However, the questions arising from Reynolds’ post are much more troubling than that, in my mind.

Reynolds has just publicly incited his readers to acts of terrorism. If a Muslim blogger did that at an Islamic hate-spewing website, it would have immediate repercussions.

At the very least, he would immediately be adopted by the NSA’s surveillance program, with all his communications — phone, email, mail — being monitored round the clock. There would be a presumption that if this man is saying such things publicly on his website, he could well be advocating much more heinous stuff in his private correspondence. He could well be involved in actual plots to commit terrorist acts (or quasi-plots of the kind that the Bush regime has trumpeted as major anti-terrorism victories in the last year or so, the kind that result in well-publicized arrests, and press conferences by strutting public officials, the kind that President Bush goes on to boast about at his press conferences).

That’s at the very least. It’s hardly improbable that a Muslim blogger would not be monitored, but simply picked up and made to quietly disappear into the anti-terror detention machinery. Maybe we’d ship him off to Guantanamo Bay, and subject him to alternative interrogation techniques ourselves. Maybe we’d park him in a secret CIA prison instead, and subject him to more charming interrogative practices. Or maybe we’d just turn him over to Syria or Egypt (or, what the heck, Iran), where they don’t use alternative interrogation techniques, they just call a spade a spade.

But I’ll bet half my retirement savings that none of those things will happen to Reynolds. Because we have a totally different standard for white Christian Bush-fans who incite others to acts of terrorism than we do for brown Muslim Bush-antifans who do the same thing.